My Clubhouse club of 4,300 people who don’t talk
Or, why the social internet has become our best third place option during the pandemic
It started as an odd experiment early in the days of Clubhouse, which in pandemic time means August, when the app was still in Testflight mode. My friend Jennifer 8. Lee set up a room called “Silent Meditation,” set her mic to mute, and people piled in. In an app designed explicitly around talking, no one talked.
Because there’s no video on Clubhouse, it’s unclear who was actually meditating. But maybe that’s not the point. The point was that we were together.
Back in September, I shared a few thoughts on Clubhouse, landing on the point that the app fills in the gap of weak ties that physical social life once allowed for. In the context of social distancing, in other words, people are generally prioritizing two things: (1) close friends and family and (2) work.
What’s gone away is the third option, also known as the third place: casual friends, parties, networking events, conferences and all the umpteen other forms of sociality that are neither home nor work yet play an important role in our lives.
As urban planning writers Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz wrote recently, third places are essential for community…
