Do you keep refreshing social media at the expense of your bedtime? Oldenburg has an explanation for that: “Third place conversation is typically engrossing. Consciousness of conditions and time often slip away amid its lively flow.” What about when a random person goes viral or a celebrity replies to an unsuspecting fan? Third places are a leveler: “the charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what counts.” Why do games like FarmVille and Pokémon Go periodically sweep social media? In a previous decade, games like gin rummy and pool, which are conducive to lively conversation, were characteristic of third places. Oldenburg also points out how third places have been essential to forming the kinds of large, loose-knit social groups that are the core of new social movements, such as the agora in ancient Greek democracy, taverns around the American Revolution, and coffeeshops during the Age of Enlightenment, which parallels how Twitter was used for the Arab Spring or the Black Lives Matter protests. You can’t fit enough dissenters in your living room to make a revolution out of close ties alone: you need the larger, looser network of a third place.
Third places have been hacked into existence from the very early stages of using computers to talk with each other. Pretty much as soon as email became possible—long before the internet as we know it—people started sending messages to multiple people at once. Particular people became known for coordinating lists of email addresses of people interested in particular topics, so if you heard about a list that you wanted to join, you’d send that person an email and they’d add you. Popular email lists that have been documented from ARPANET were called human-nets (the human side of the network), sf-lovers (science fiction fans), network-hackers, and wine-tasters. But adding people manually to email lists got tedious, and the military, understandably, wasn’t particularly keen on letting random civilians join their network just so they could talk about wine. So later technology such as Usenet (1980), Listserv (1986), and public chatrooms would let you join as a normal person, browse topics, and add yourself to those that interested you, such as alt.folklore.computers, alt.usage.english, or alt.tv.x-files on Usenet, LINGUIST List (a listserv I’m still on), and #ham-radio or #StarTrek in chatrooms.
Topic-based posting to internet strangers has remained around, in various formats. Blogs are themed around a particular person’s life or a more specific topic like cooking, travel, or careers, and sometimes develop community between strangers in the comments section. Multiplayer online games often include a chat function that lets you talk with strangers, or let you import your friends from an existing social network. Reddit, the most popular general-interest forum of the 2010s, has subdivisions for everything from random thoughts that occur to you in the shower to getting famous people to come and answer questions for an hour or two. Other forums are devoted to one topic in particular, whether that’s parenting, beer, videogames, knitting, anime, or sharing pictures of cats with writing on top. You’ve probably read some blog posts and forum posts, when searching for a recipe that fits the ingredients in your fridge or trying to figure out what the error message on your phone means. But how many of us continually maintain a blog ourselves, or are active posters on a forum? Estimates are low: 5 to 8 percent of internet users might be bloggers, and 1 to 10 percent might regularly participate in forums and other online communities. Dropping by a blog or a forum post because it showed up in your search results doesn’t make you a regular.
Topic-based internet communities are third places in the way that you can join a pottery class or drop by a networking meetup as a third place. The first few times you show up, you don’t know anyone, and you’re ostensibly there for the content. But if you keep going back, you start recognizing people, people start recognizing you, and you may gravitate towards some more than others, chat about your lives rather than just the official topic, or make plans to hang out outside the community. The first people to socialize over computer networks were united by their dissatisfaction with the offline social options available to them. They were willing to take the chance that people online might be more congenial, whether they were united by a shared interest in computers in general or a more niche interest (technologist Jess Kimball Leslie describes finding an internet home in the mid-1990s in the Official Bette Midler Online Internet Fan Club). But both online and off, topic-based communities tend to draw people who want to expand their existing friendship circles: there’s a reason why joining a club is classic advice for people moving to a new city. It’s hard to articulate the third-placean appeal of topic-based internet communities for those who’ve never been in one. At least with a pottery class or networking event, you can say you’re there to make a vase or collect some business cards: tangible outcomes even if you’re also searching for intangible community. But for their online versions, the pretexts wear thinner: Why spend so much time talking to strangers about The X-Files or wine tasting when you could be actually watching the show or drinking the wine? The social benefits are invisible to people who don’t need them.
That’s why topic-based forums and messageboards were not how the majority of people discovered that the internet could serve as a third place. Instead, most people discovered internet community by person-based platforms, those that allowed us to import our existing friendships online. The group that discovered this was made up of people who already had friends but lacked the autonomy to spend time with them: teenagers. Teens didn’t need a specific topic to find each other: they already knew each other, and just wanted a place to hang out. In Chapter 3, we noted that suburban isolation and anti-loitering laws discouraged teenagers from hanging out in the offline spaces that had once been theirs. For a while, popular teens hung out on landline telephones, and only misfit teens turned to the internet in search of community. But as the internet became mainstream through the mid- and late 1990s, so did hanging out with your friends there.
The initial way of hanging out with your friends online were the aforementioned late-1990s instant messaging programs, like AIM, MSN, and ICQ. They had a crucial feature besides their ability to chat: the status message. The first status messages, also called away messages and status updates, were intended quite literally to indicate what you were doing while you were away from the computer, such as sleeping, eating dinner, in class, or working. Remembering to accurately update your status quickly became tedious—what if you said you were out at a movie and then you went to bed without turning the computer back on? But status messages were compelling for a different reason: they provided a built-in reason to logon, just to see what your friends had posted, even if you didn’t have a specific conversation topic in mind. These IM status messages acquired a sense of aesthetic, containing quotes, song lyrics, ~*~sparkle punctuation~*~, sTudLy cApS, and passive-aggressive notes, sometimes all in one. As The New York Times put it in a tweet about AIM closing down for good in 2017, “~* iT’s ThE eNd Of An ErA *~.”
Status messages made chat more serendipitous, more of a third place: a way of showing up at the school dance to see what everyone was wearing, or leaving your door open to the hallway. They were the precursor to the posts that make social media even more compelling to check: both the tweet and the Facebook post were originally conceived as status updates. It was this overlap between the online and offline third places that eventually got even adults who were already satisfied with their friend networks onto social media—that wave of “my parents got Facebook” that we talked about in Chapter 3.
Oldenburg, writing in the 1980s and 90s, would probably not have agreed with me that the internet could provide a third place, even though he was writing during a period when pretty much every internet community was a third-placean gathering of strangers. He wasn’t a fan of technology, criticizing how the television had started occupying the hours that people used to spend hanging out in casual groups of regulars. He especially criticized how suburbs were being built without main streets and town squares and local watering holes to serve as third places.
It’s often observed that social media is taking on the functions of a hangout place for teenagers. Studies note that post-internet teens aren’t drinking as much or having as much sex, because their hangouts happen in virtual space rather than in cars or on street corners. But perhaps it’s more that teens across the generations have never stopped prioritizing hanging out with friends, and in truth, all ages are equally in need of the camaraderie of third places.
Oldenburg might be pleased about one thing: the hours that people now spend on social media are often time that would otherwise be spent on television consumption, which he considered an inferior replacement for third places. And the connections forged in online third places might be helping counteract the suburban isolation which he so hated. Moreover, third places, including social media, foster the kinds of repeated, unplanned interactions that sociologists have identified as crucial for the formation of deeper relationships. Casual, third-place acquaintances sometimes become first-place people you’d invite into your home, or second-place people you might end up working with. In fact, we can recast chat and email conversations through the lens of places. While chatrooms of the 1990s were a third place, the one-on-one or small-group chat of the 2010s is more like a first place, people you make a point of talking with, in private. Email listservs were also a third place, but the email inbox has become more of a second place, used for work and official communications. We no longer aimlessly hang out in our email inboxes or chat platforms. The internet platforms that you open up for no particular reason, hoping someone interesting will be around, are the ones with posts. Posting into the ether is like sticking your head out into the hallway to see who you might run into. Many of your Facebook friends, Twitter people, or Instagram folks remain surface-level acquaintances, but adding someone on social media is a way of adding them to the hallway you stroll down, a way of saying, “I might like to have more unplanned interactions with you, and we can see where things go from there.”
There’s an important difference between physical and virtual third places, however. My local pub or barbershop or park is in principle open to anyone, but in practice circumscribed by both geography and custom: only so many people live nearby or can fit inside, and it’s quite clear that I belong neither among the clientele of a barbershop nor (anymore) among the teenagers hanging out in the park. The only things limiting the third places of the internet are customs, and those customs are still evolving. Sometimes, the unbounded geography of the internet is amazing: I can carry friends in my pocket everywhere I go, and there’s someone around at every time of the day or night. Airports are no longer impersonal, insomnia is no longer isolating, and the most mundane grocery run can be livened up by a quick exchange with a pocket friend.
Other times, the lack of physical cues is more complicated. I can see the dozen or so people who are sitting around a table or lounging with me in a hallway, but the potential audience for a given post ranges from “zero” to “every single one of the billions of people on the internet,” and I can’t necessarily tell which one it’s going to be until after I’ve posted it. If I tell a joke at a pub or a coffeeshop, it may fall flat, but at least I know whether I’m being ignored. If I post a clever quip or share an adorable video of frolicking baby animals, I can’t tell whether I’ve caused a hundred people to gasp at their screens or whether no one’s seen it at all. That is, unless I can garner a couple likes or comments. Consciously or not, a lot of our social media posts are optimized around getting some kind of interaction: we may fuss over the precise wording for maximum humor, run a draft post by a friend, message specific people to get them to comment, plan the posting time for the most interactions, or simply like others’ posts for moral support, so our friends know they aren’t shouting into the void.
I did a small-scale analysis of Facebook statuses in early 2009, looking at the ten most recent posts of friends from just before they volunteered for the study. I’d hoped to trace the decline of statuses that began with “is,” but I ended up finding clearer patterns in what made for a socially successful post. I found that the statuses that got the most likes and comments weren’t necessarily the ones that were universally applicable or made the most sense in isolation: say, a simple announcement of a new phone number, which is relevant to all your friends. Instead, popular posts tended to strike a balance between somewhat obscure but not too cryptic—in-jokes and references that appealed strongly to a distinct subset of people. One of my most popular posts at the time was in a language that only a handful of my Facebook friends even understood—my friends who were taking the same language class. But every single one of them commented on the post, many of them several times. BuzzFeed, a few years later, accomplished this on a larger scale, writing highly shareable articles about things particular groups of people understand if they were born in a particular decade or are from a particular place. Memes, which we’ll examine closely in the next chapter, capitalize on this tendency because getting the meme automatically makes you part of an in-group.
Trying to prevent certain people from seeing or understanding your posts gets more complicated. Sure, you could just remain completely private by never making an account or posting anything, but that’s like saying you could avoid contagious disease by never touching a human, or avoid getting hit by a falling piano by simply never leaving the house. Most of us find that it’s worth trading away some privacy for the sake of having a life. Instead of embracing hermithood, we seek a balance: one study found that people differentiated between the kind of information that they’d share in a post versus in a chat message, rating information about their hobbies or favorite TV shows as less intimate and therefore more likely to be shared in a post than their fears, concerns, and personal feelings, which they preferred to share in a private message, if at all. In other areas people disagreed, such as about the privacy of political or religious opinions and life events like births or marriages, which probably explains why it sometimes feels like others are oversharing or overly reticent.
A law paper by Woodrow Hartzog and Frederic D. Stutzman notes that a lot of online information isn’t so much completely private but rather obscure, hard enough to access that most people won’t bother trying. They describe four factors that can lead to obscurity online: first, whether your post can be found in search or whether a would-be finder needs to click through an obscure trail of links to find it; second, whether your post is restricted to certain people (such as by friendship status or a password); third, whether you’re identifiable by name, pseudonym, or not at all; and fourth, how clearly understandable the post is, even if someone comes across it who shouldn’t. After all, it doesn’t matter so much if a post is technically completely public. If no one knows it’s there, that you wrote it, or what it means, it’s still effectively private through its obscurity.
In the offline world, a lot of information is technically public but practically obscure, including the messages that we post in spaces where people may pass by, such as graffiti, bulletin boards, and signs on telephone poles advertising yard sales or lost cats. In Montreal, the French-dominant but highly bilingual city where I live, I’ve always wanted to do a linguistic geography of LOST CAT signs. Unlike posters advertising a concert or a tutoring service, which might justifiably target a particular linguistic demographic, if your cat wanders off, you want to maximize the odds that someone will find it and know how to bring it home. Even if you’re not bilingual yourself, you might decide it’s worth getting a friend to translate your sign for you. Among the bilingual neighborhoods, I wonder, which ones put French first and which English? Where might people include a third language or only bother with one? By tagging a map of the city’s telephone poles with the languages of their LOST CAT signs, you could arrive at a map of what languages people believe their neighbors speak: a folk linguistic cartography of the city.
But while my hypothetical LOST CAT sign is public in some ways, it’s obscure in others. Access-wise, it’s obscure: I can r
easonably expect that it’ll be seen by the people on my block, not that it will be reproduced on national television, result in me getting contacted by hundreds of trolls pretending to have found my cat, or end up in a searchable database of LOST CAT signs so that decades hence I’ll still be getting served ads for multinational cat-finding services.* But content-wise, a LOST CAT sign must be clear: it must describe the cat in a recognizable way for strangers, rather than as a fuzzy floofball; it must provide accurate contact information, so that anyone who finds my cat can get ahold of me; and it must be in the language or languages that I think my neighbors speak.
With many social media posts, the opposite is true—they’re not restricted by location, so people do want to make the message only comprehensible to insiders. Privacy through obscurity is a versatile tool for many social situations. A study of Estonian teens observed the teens doing things like posting song lyrics, quotes, or in-jokes that only made sense to their crush, in the hope that they’d see it and want to respond—which several teens said had worked. A study of queer youth on Facebook found that one way of navigating how out to be on a platform that contained both family members and potential members of a fellow queer community was to post queer pop culture references that would be easily interpretable by peers and go over the heads of their non-intended audience. Technologist danah boyd observed coded messages in more negative contexts, too: for example, when a teen wanted to indicate bad news of a breakup to friends without worrying her mother, she posted a quote from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” a Monty Python song that looks happy but is deeply ironic in context, knowing that she’d recently seen the film with her friends but that her mother wasn’t familiar with it.
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