What I've Learned in 2022: End-of-the-Year Muse-Up

On Third Places and "prosocial media."

Dec 30, 2022

At the top of this year, I stopped using my personal social media accounts and decide to focus nearly all my creative energy on two things: music and writing. I had been feeling stuck creatively, and I found that the social platforms that had once energized me as an artist were no longer fun or stimulating. I wasn’t entirely certain that abandoning my social media accounts would be a solution to the kind of online cultural malaise that I was feeling, only that there was something missing from the experience of engaging on these large social platforms that I couldn’t quite define.

It was only after writing my third letter in this series — an ode to the theme song of the ‘80s sitcom, Cheers — that I learned that there was a name for what I was seeking online: a third place. Quite simply, third places are public places that allow for relaxed socializing — think a neighborhood bar, or a bustling coffeeshop full of regulars. Back in the heyday of Cheers, the author Ray Oldenburg wrote the definitive book on the matter, The Great Good Place, which articulated exactly why these third places — not the first, which is home; or the second, which is work — remain so necessary in our lives. In the influential 1989 book, Oldenburg argues that a balanced mix of all three places is necessary for our mental and physical well-being, and also highlights the role that third places have played in shaping intellectual and philosophical movements throughout history; for example, the cafes in London during the Age of Enlightenment.

Certainly, the widespread isolation that so many feel today is at least somewhat due to the paucity of such physical places in the modern world. While untold billions of dollars of investment capital has gone into building data-harvesting online spaces in recent years, relatively little has gone into expanding such seemingly prosaic spaces as public libraries and community centers. For many, the best hope to fill that third place void is venture online and exchange that bit of data for a simulacrum of community. It’s not ideal perhaps, but it’s better than nothing, and at least has the advantage of allowing easy communication over extreme distances.

If a third place functions as a relaxed space to build trust, openness and social cohesion, a town square is exactly the opposite: a tense sphere of conflict, performance, and tribalism. Unfortunately, the largest and most influential social media platforms remain steadfast in their quixotic quest to replicate the town square in digital form, and I don’t see them abandoning this aspiration anytime soon. So, it’s up to us — as the prosocial denizens of the online world — to build the kind of prosocial media that we wish to inhabit. We can choose to think local by sorting ourselves into smaller, niche online communities, rather than attempt to converse with the entire world all at once. There is no reason that our own individual experiences on social media have to be riddled with conflict, performance, and tribalism, either; we can simply choose not to engage in such spaces that reward antisocial behavior.

As John Lennon wrote, “War is over (if you want it).”

Speaking personally, after writing thousands of words on the subject and reading countless more, my one-sentence takeaway for 2022 would be this: The foundation for meaningful discussion comes from the third place, and not the town square.

A well-functioning discussion forum requires a common purpose to take shape, an insistence on intellectual honesty to ensure good faith, and enforceable boundaries to remain in adherence to founding principles. Trust, openness and social cohesion.

Ignore these requirements and it won’t take much for a formerly productive forum or discussion group to go off the rails. When discussions go off the rails, tribalism takes the wheel. That’s how we get dysfunction. That’s how we get weights in fish.

Satisfy these requirements, however, and there’s no limit to what can be accomplished when decent, thoughtful people get together with a shared goal. That’s how we build a brighter future for the people around us and change our world — one conversation at a time.

While the largest mass media social media platforms generally fail to meet these necessary requirements, the smaller ones — Substack, Discord, Patreon, etc. — are much more optimized for these rewarding types of forums / virtual third places. In the year that I’ve written here on Substack, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from hundreds — if not thousands — of interesting people, with interesting things to say. Beyond the therapeutic and thought-organizing benefits of writing these letters themselves, the insightful responses that I have received have helped me to think through various subjects with a bit more nuance and clarity. Although I’ve been somewhat inconsistent in publishing these letters as of late (blame my other gig), the fact that my mailing list here has grown to nearly 10,000 readers has provided a nice affirmation that at least some of these letters have hit their mark and found a decent, thoughtful audience of their own.

I think (hope?) that the next wave of online trends will be typified by a lot less playing the fame lottery and a lot more productive discussions in small groups built around niche interests. Just as Substack exists as a kind of modern update to the popular newsletter trend of the 17th and 18th centuries, a collection of smaller, focused, properly moderated internet communities would be something of a reboot of the mid-1990s Weird Internet Era. Some of these communities will no doubt be hosted on large, existing platforms like Facebook, which offers users a decent enough set of privacy controls and moderation tools, should they wish to utilize them. Others will no doubt build their homes on brand new platforms that have yet to be imagined. In such a localized, prosocial environment, the most egregious instances of antisocial media — TikTok comes to mind here — might struggle to perform, as creative burnout and incessant negativity drives top content creators to abandon these most addictive of social apps. The fame lottery of the algorithmically-driven social apps may remain a selling point for some, but if said “fame” fails to reliably translate into real-world success or happiness, many less will opt to buy in.

While I certainly plan on continuing work on my own tiny, prosocial corner of the internet in 2023, spending this past year reading and writing about this still-nascent communication medium has given me a much broader perspective on how every new piece of technology comes to shape our society. It has also, in all honestly, caused me to grow a bit bored of the subject — which I take as a good sign! There are so many things to talk about in this great, wild world that we inhabit, and I’ve already spilled enough pixelated ink detailing how social media has made everything a bit dumber. A New Year’s Resolution, perhaps? Time will tell...

For right now, I want to thank everyone that has taken the time to read my letters, and especially those that have written me back, to share their own thoughts. Your words have energized me in the same way that any great conversation does, and the book / subject recommendations you have sent my way have sent me down a whole lot of fascinating rabbit holes and encouraged me to read more — A LOT more — just to keep up. So, thank you for the great conversations, and here’s to a fun and stimulating 2023!

As an end-of-the-year wrap up, here’s a few “Senior Superlatives,” among some of the pieces I released this year:

Musings From The Middle

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