Third Places + Social Media
"Many have raised concerns that this new freedom [of the Internet] will fray social ties and fragment social relations… The other view, popular among the digerati, was that “virtual communities” would come to represent a new form of human communal existence, providing new scope for building a shared experience of human interaction. Within a few short years, however, empirical research suggested that while neither view had it completely right, it was the dystopian view that got it especially wrong."
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
"Space, whatever its purpose, can come to mean place, whether for individuals or for small or large groups… What you as an architect can design are the conditions that make space fit to be read as place; that is, by supplying just those dimensions or rather the articulation and ‘cover’ that in a certain situation bring about the right sense of appropriateness and recognition."
Herman Hertzberger, Articulations
The built environment and the social interaction it hosts are inextricable. As Amos Rapoport writes, “the built environment can be seen as a setting for human activities. Such settings may be inhibiting or facilitating and a particular setting may be facilitating to the extent of acting as a catalyst… [P]eople act appropriately in different settings because they make congruent their behavior with the norms for behavior appropriate for the setting as defined by the culture.”[1] While cultural norms determine how people behave in different kinds of spaces, however, other practices shape those spaces themselves. Rapoport continues “the environment is, then, closely linked to culture and a number of aspects of man—environment interaction and design can be seen in terms of congruence, whereby people try to match their characteristics, values, expectations and norms, behaviors and so on to physical environments—through design or migration.”[2]
The act of being in public is fundamentally participatory. By simply being present, a person transforms a space and alters its meaning. As Herman Hertzberger writes, the “thing that turns space into place is the infill given it by its occupants/users.”[3] As digital networks augment traditional social networks and begin to inform people’s decisions about where to be and what to do when they’re there, online structuring of social participation becomes a critical component of environmental design.
Where the previous chapter examined forms of network infrastructure in the landscape and touched on some of their implicit impacts on social behavior, this chapter takes the opposite approach. By examining how online activities are augmenting and changing traditional social networks, it is possible to see how computer mediated communication (CMC) can create frameworks for participation in social activity and how that activity can make and change places.
Three critical axioms underlie this chapter’s assessments of how digital networks affect the way that social networks are expressed in the urban landscape. The first axiom is that although information networks have restructured society’s connection to place, the character of places continues to play an important social role. Where theorists like Melvin Webber (The Post-City Age, 1968) once feared that telecommunications and high-speed air travel would “unhitch[] the social processes of urbanization from the locationally fixed city and region,”[4] observers have seen ubiquitous computer and digital networks cause the opposite effect. Indeed, as Joel Kotkin argued in 2000, in The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape, “place—geography—matters now more than ever before. If people, companies, or industries can truly live anywhere, or at least choose from a multiplicity of places, the question of where to locate becomes increasingly contingent on the peculiar attributes of any given location.”[5]
The second axiom this chapter depends upon is the assertion that computer mediated communication exists only in relation to pre-existing social structures and practices. “What is common to [computer mediated communication],” argues Castells, “is that, according to the few studies on the matter, it does not substitute for other means of communication nor does it create new networks: it reinforces the preexisting social patterns. It adds to telephone and transportation communication, it expands the reach of social networks, and makes it possible for them to interact more actively and in chosen time patterns.”[6] Thus despite the many attributes of computer mediated communication technologies that are unfamiliar and new, the practices of Internet and cell phone use are still inherently grounded in traditional social norms.
The third axiom is that computer mediated communication (CMC) changes the “rules” that govern how people use space in order to reshape the landscape. This final point is perhaps best illustrated by so-called “Flash Mobs,” groups of people coordinated by CMC that perform unusual activities in public places. In their rapid congregation and focused activities, they often upset social “norms of behavior” that Rapoport says govern the relations between humans and their environment. Flash mobs are just one example of new practices enabled by digital communications creating new ways to use space and create places.
Third Places and Media
One important kind of social space is the “Third Place”, described by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place as somewhere “That host[s] the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”[7] These places, neither home (first places) nor work (second places), are essential centers for conversation, relaxation, and amusement. In the tradition of Jane Jacobs, Oldenburg decries the work of “American planners and developers [that] have shown a great disdain for those earlier arrangements in which there was a life beyond home and work.”[8] In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg cites English pubs and French cafés as models for ideal third places where strangers can meet on equal footing and regulars can count on seeing a familiar face.
Writing in 1989, Oldenburg did not foresee the Internet in The Great Good Place--television was the primary form of mass media. In Oldenburg’s view, the television did little to foster the creation of third places or even emulate any of their attributes. “For all the hold television takes of specific groups and individuals,” observed Oldenburg, “it never gives them any attention.”[9] In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam adds that “electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment was available primarily in public settings, like the baseball park, the dance hall, the movie theater, and the amusement park… At an accelerating pace throughout the century, the electronic transmission of news and entertainment changed virtually all features of American life.”[10]
Oldenburg and Putnam’s concepts about third places have become increasingly relevant as the Internet has added as a new dimension to mass media. As Joel Kotkin points out in The New Geography, “The onrush of the digital economy has done much to repeal the geography of place, yet it has not altered the fundamental characteristics that make places work. In an age when technology allows for greater attachments to disembodied affinity groups, a sense of voluntary commitment to a geographically defined area—derived from the pulpit or from a neighborhood or civic group—increasingly plays a crucial role.”[11] In other words, digital networks can help create “virtual communities” that have some attributes of third places, or help transform non-social spaces into effective third places.
That telecommunications change how people use space is now well documented. At the global and regional scale, digital networks and computer mediated communications have restructured the physical and social form of global business and managerial structures. Geographers and sociologists likewise have noted the impact of continually evolving communication and transportation networks in compressing time and space. As Doreen Massey states in Space, Place, and Gender, “Time-space compression refers to movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this.”[12]
Yet for all of the significance of CMC, it has not replaced the nuance and complexity of face-to-face interaction. Organizational theorists point out that “[r]elative to electronically mediated exchange, the structure of face-to-face interaction offers an unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning… The cycle of interruption, feedback, and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous… When interaction takes place in a group setting, the number of ‘conversations’ that can be going on simultaneously when the interactants are face-to-face is ever harder to replicated in other media.”[13] Thus online social interaction in virtual places is neither a replacement for physically meeting someone somewhere nor is it simply an alternative device to the TV to consume mass media. Although participation in online communities has elements of both activities, the synthesis is something new.
Civic Participation and Media Participation
Although online activity can support virtual communities and serve as partial stand-ins for some attributes of meeting places, using computer mediated communication and digital media does not represent participation in exact sense of “civic participation”. Instead, the participation has to do with how the media is consumed—how the user gets involved in the comprehension of the message.
Television, for Marshall McLuhan, is a “cool” medium—one in which user participation is high. “With TV,” argues McLuhan, “the viewer is the screen… The TV image is not a still shot. It is not photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger.”[14] In McLuhan’s terms, the “TV image requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile...”[15]
[1] Amos Rapoport. Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design. 1st ed. (Oxford ; New York: Pergamon Press, 1977). 2-3.
[2] Rapoport, 4.
[3] Herman Hertzberger. Articulations. (Munich London: Prestel, 2002). 33.
[4] Melvin Webber. “The Post-City Age.” Deadalus, 1968. From LeGates, Richard T. and Frederic Stout. The City Reader, 4th Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 474.
[5] Kotkin, Joel. The New Geography : How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape. 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2000), 6.
[6] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 363.
[7] Ray Oldenburg. The Great Good Place : Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and how they Get You through the Day. [2nd ] ed. (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1997), 16.
[8] Oldenburg, 18.
[9] Oldenburg, 70.
[10] Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 217.
[11] Joel Kotkin. The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape. 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2000), 168.
[12] Doreen Massey. Space, Place and Gender. (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 147. For more on digital network’s impacts on the structure of cities at a regional scale, also see Global Networks, Linked Cities edited by Saskia Sassen.
[13] Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles. “Face-to-Face: Making Network Organizations Work.” In Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form, and Action. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press), c1992, cited in Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 175-176.
[14] Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man. [1st ] ed. (New York,: McGraw-Hill, [1964]). 313.
[15] McLuhan, 314.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
"Space, whatever its purpose, can come to mean place, whether for individuals or for small or large groups… What you as an architect can design are the conditions that make space fit to be read as place; that is, by supplying just those dimensions or rather the articulation and ‘cover’ that in a certain situation bring about the right sense of appropriateness and recognition."
Herman Hertzberger, Articulations
The built environment and the social interaction it hosts are inextricable. As Amos Rapoport writes, “the built environment can be seen as a setting for human activities. Such settings may be inhibiting or facilitating and a particular setting may be facilitating to the extent of acting as a catalyst… [P]eople act appropriately in different settings because they make congruent their behavior with the norms for behavior appropriate for the setting as defined by the culture.”[1] While cultural norms determine how people behave in different kinds of spaces, however, other practices shape those spaces themselves. Rapoport continues “the environment is, then, closely linked to culture and a number of aspects of man—environment interaction and design can be seen in terms of congruence, whereby people try to match their characteristics, values, expectations and norms, behaviors and so on to physical environments—through design or migration.”[2]
The act of being in public is fundamentally participatory. By simply being present, a person transforms a space and alters its meaning. As Herman Hertzberger writes, the “thing that turns space into place is the infill given it by its occupants/users.”[3] As digital networks augment traditional social networks and begin to inform people’s decisions about where to be and what to do when they’re there, online structuring of social participation becomes a critical component of environmental design.
Where the previous chapter examined forms of network infrastructure in the landscape and touched on some of their implicit impacts on social behavior, this chapter takes the opposite approach. By examining how online activities are augmenting and changing traditional social networks, it is possible to see how computer mediated communication (CMC) can create frameworks for participation in social activity and how that activity can make and change places.
Three critical axioms underlie this chapter’s assessments of how digital networks affect the way that social networks are expressed in the urban landscape. The first axiom is that although information networks have restructured society’s connection to place, the character of places continues to play an important social role. Where theorists like Melvin Webber (The Post-City Age, 1968) once feared that telecommunications and high-speed air travel would “unhitch[] the social processes of urbanization from the locationally fixed city and region,”[4] observers have seen ubiquitous computer and digital networks cause the opposite effect. Indeed, as Joel Kotkin argued in 2000, in The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape, “place—geography—matters now more than ever before. If people, companies, or industries can truly live anywhere, or at least choose from a multiplicity of places, the question of where to locate becomes increasingly contingent on the peculiar attributes of any given location.”[5]
The second axiom this chapter depends upon is the assertion that computer mediated communication exists only in relation to pre-existing social structures and practices. “What is common to [computer mediated communication],” argues Castells, “is that, according to the few studies on the matter, it does not substitute for other means of communication nor does it create new networks: it reinforces the preexisting social patterns. It adds to telephone and transportation communication, it expands the reach of social networks, and makes it possible for them to interact more actively and in chosen time patterns.”[6] Thus despite the many attributes of computer mediated communication technologies that are unfamiliar and new, the practices of Internet and cell phone use are still inherently grounded in traditional social norms.
The third axiom is that computer mediated communication (CMC) changes the “rules” that govern how people use space in order to reshape the landscape. This final point is perhaps best illustrated by so-called “Flash Mobs,” groups of people coordinated by CMC that perform unusual activities in public places. In their rapid congregation and focused activities, they often upset social “norms of behavior” that Rapoport says govern the relations between humans and their environment. Flash mobs are just one example of new practices enabled by digital communications creating new ways to use space and create places.
Third Places and Media
One important kind of social space is the “Third Place”, described by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place as somewhere “That host[s] the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”[7] These places, neither home (first places) nor work (second places), are essential centers for conversation, relaxation, and amusement. In the tradition of Jane Jacobs, Oldenburg decries the work of “American planners and developers [that] have shown a great disdain for those earlier arrangements in which there was a life beyond home and work.”[8] In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg cites English pubs and French cafés as models for ideal third places where strangers can meet on equal footing and regulars can count on seeing a familiar face.
Writing in 1989, Oldenburg did not foresee the Internet in The Great Good Place--television was the primary form of mass media. In Oldenburg’s view, the television did little to foster the creation of third places or even emulate any of their attributes. “For all the hold television takes of specific groups and individuals,” observed Oldenburg, “it never gives them any attention.”[9] In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam adds that “electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment was available primarily in public settings, like the baseball park, the dance hall, the movie theater, and the amusement park… At an accelerating pace throughout the century, the electronic transmission of news and entertainment changed virtually all features of American life.”[10]
Oldenburg and Putnam’s concepts about third places have become increasingly relevant as the Internet has added as a new dimension to mass media. As Joel Kotkin points out in The New Geography, “The onrush of the digital economy has done much to repeal the geography of place, yet it has not altered the fundamental characteristics that make places work. In an age when technology allows for greater attachments to disembodied affinity groups, a sense of voluntary commitment to a geographically defined area—derived from the pulpit or from a neighborhood or civic group—increasingly plays a crucial role.”[11] In other words, digital networks can help create “virtual communities” that have some attributes of third places, or help transform non-social spaces into effective third places.
That telecommunications change how people use space is now well documented. At the global and regional scale, digital networks and computer mediated communications have restructured the physical and social form of global business and managerial structures. Geographers and sociologists likewise have noted the impact of continually evolving communication and transportation networks in compressing time and space. As Doreen Massey states in Space, Place, and Gender, “Time-space compression refers to movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this.”[12]
Yet for all of the significance of CMC, it has not replaced the nuance and complexity of face-to-face interaction. Organizational theorists point out that “[r]elative to electronically mediated exchange, the structure of face-to-face interaction offers an unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning… The cycle of interruption, feedback, and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous… When interaction takes place in a group setting, the number of ‘conversations’ that can be going on simultaneously when the interactants are face-to-face is ever harder to replicated in other media.”[13] Thus online social interaction in virtual places is neither a replacement for physically meeting someone somewhere nor is it simply an alternative device to the TV to consume mass media. Although participation in online communities has elements of both activities, the synthesis is something new.
Civic Participation and Media Participation
Although online activity can support virtual communities and serve as partial stand-ins for some attributes of meeting places, using computer mediated communication and digital media does not represent participation in exact sense of “civic participation”. Instead, the participation has to do with how the media is consumed—how the user gets involved in the comprehension of the message.
Television, for Marshall McLuhan, is a “cool” medium—one in which user participation is high. “With TV,” argues McLuhan, “the viewer is the screen… The TV image is not a still shot. It is not photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger.”[14] In McLuhan’s terms, the “TV image requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile...”[15]
[1] Amos Rapoport. Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design. 1st ed. (Oxford ; New York: Pergamon Press, 1977). 2-3.
[2] Rapoport, 4.
[3] Herman Hertzberger. Articulations. (Munich London: Prestel, 2002). 33.
[4] Melvin Webber. “The Post-City Age.” Deadalus, 1968. From LeGates, Richard T. and Frederic Stout. The City Reader, 4th Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 474.
[5] Kotkin, Joel. The New Geography : How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape. 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2000), 6.
[6] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 363.
[7] Ray Oldenburg. The Great Good Place : Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and how they Get You through the Day. [2nd ] ed. (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1997), 16.
[8] Oldenburg, 18.
[9] Oldenburg, 70.
[10] Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 217.
[11] Joel Kotkin. The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape. 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2000), 168.
[12] Doreen Massey. Space, Place and Gender. (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 147. For more on digital network’s impacts on the structure of cities at a regional scale, also see Global Networks, Linked Cities edited by Saskia Sassen.
[13] Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles. “Face-to-Face: Making Network Organizations Work.” In Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form, and Action. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press), c1992, cited in Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 175-176.
[14] Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man. [1st ] ed. (New York,: McGraw-Hill, [1964]). 313.
[15] McLuhan, 314.
The concept of closure in media is expressed very clearly by Scott McCloud in his astoundingly clever and engaging book Understanding Comics. Closure, explained by McCloud in the context of comics, is what happens between the panels. In the example above, the accomplice is you: the reader. For the reader never sees the axe wielder strike his victim—it is your participation in the comic that fills the space between panels with that event.
In this comic the reader must “close” the space between the panels. In doing so, the reader participates in the story of the murder depicted.
McCloud also explores the power of closure and the ability for icons to serve as representations of ideas, people, and ourselves in other forms of media like film and TV. Television, McCloud claims, and especially cartoons, demand that viewers actively participate in watching the program. It is this element of participation—the conceptual placement of one’s imagination and identity into the perception of media, that offers the most interest to those investigating how mass media affects how people use space.
Online interactions with other people blend the kind of social participation that takes place in third places with the kind of participation that takes place when watching a TV. In this synthesis, the role of the designer is to set up a framework for participation. While television siphons time and energy from social interaction, the Internet has had a broader and more complex impact on social practices.
Where millions used to watch the same thing separately, there are now structures—frameworks—that allow hundreds or even dozens of geographically distant individuals to participate in meaningful ways with art, music and media. With the emergence of the Internet as a new medium, the relationship between mass media and third places, has changed. Where television once blasted a one-way signal into the home, networked computers now turned every desktop into a potential node for world-wide social interaction.
Looking at virtual communities as digital third places reveals how the participation of watching TV (closing gaps in information with imagination) mixes with the participation of meeting friends and having a conversation. Author Howard Rheingold describes his early forays into the WELL online community (1987) as “the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It’s a place.”[1]
In The Wealth of Networks, legal scholar Yochai Benkler observes two effects of the Internet on social networks: “first, and most robustly, we see a thickening of preexisting relations with friends, family and neighbors, particularly with those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet-mediated environment… Second, we are beginning to see the emergence of greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships.”[2] The social effect of computer mediated communication like e-mail, facebook, and text messaging are thus not manifest in a void, but in relation or response to pre-existing social structures and practices regarding how people communicate and interact in space. As Benkler says, these connections “may not fit the ideal model of ‘virtual communities.’ They certainly do not fit a deep conception of ‘community’ as a person’s primary source of emotional context and support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants.”[3] Thus while some virtual communities enable people to interact in entirely fictional worlds like Sims or Second Life through avatars, the more relevant interaction, from a socio-spatial perspective, are the connections that augment existing social relations between actual people in space. For designers, the question is how to take advantage of this specific communal online activity to inform and implement designs in the physical world.
[1] Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994), 24.
[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 357.
[3] Benkler, 357.
In this comic the reader must “close” the space between the panels. In doing so, the reader participates in the story of the murder depicted.
McCloud also explores the power of closure and the ability for icons to serve as representations of ideas, people, and ourselves in other forms of media like film and TV. Television, McCloud claims, and especially cartoons, demand that viewers actively participate in watching the program. It is this element of participation—the conceptual placement of one’s imagination and identity into the perception of media, that offers the most interest to those investigating how mass media affects how people use space.
Online interactions with other people blend the kind of social participation that takes place in third places with the kind of participation that takes place when watching a TV. In this synthesis, the role of the designer is to set up a framework for participation. While television siphons time and energy from social interaction, the Internet has had a broader and more complex impact on social practices.
Where millions used to watch the same thing separately, there are now structures—frameworks—that allow hundreds or even dozens of geographically distant individuals to participate in meaningful ways with art, music and media. With the emergence of the Internet as a new medium, the relationship between mass media and third places, has changed. Where television once blasted a one-way signal into the home, networked computers now turned every desktop into a potential node for world-wide social interaction.
Looking at virtual communities as digital third places reveals how the participation of watching TV (closing gaps in information with imagination) mixes with the participation of meeting friends and having a conversation. Author Howard Rheingold describes his early forays into the WELL online community (1987) as “the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It’s a place.”[1]
In The Wealth of Networks, legal scholar Yochai Benkler observes two effects of the Internet on social networks: “first, and most robustly, we see a thickening of preexisting relations with friends, family and neighbors, particularly with those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet-mediated environment… Second, we are beginning to see the emergence of greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships.”[2] The social effect of computer mediated communication like e-mail, facebook, and text messaging are thus not manifest in a void, but in relation or response to pre-existing social structures and practices regarding how people communicate and interact in space. As Benkler says, these connections “may not fit the ideal model of ‘virtual communities.’ They certainly do not fit a deep conception of ‘community’ as a person’s primary source of emotional context and support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants.”[3] Thus while some virtual communities enable people to interact in entirely fictional worlds like Sims or Second Life through avatars, the more relevant interaction, from a socio-spatial perspective, are the connections that augment existing social relations between actual people in space. For designers, the question is how to take advantage of this specific communal online activity to inform and implement designs in the physical world.
[1] Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994), 24.
[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 357.
[3] Benkler, 357.