I attended the Media 09' conference last Friday and was pleasantly surprised at the high caliber of speakers & the content of their presentations.
One such speaker was Will Price from WidgetBox who introduced to me the concept of 'The 3rd Place' which i found fascinating & simple = fascinatingly simple.
Meet Ray (Oldenburg). Ray is an urban sociologist from Florida.He wrote a book called 'The Great Good Place' in which he talks about 'The 3rd Place'.
Ray believes that humans are essentially social creatures & that to meet our basic social needs we need to exist in 3 different environments.
1). Home
2). Work
3). The 3rd Place
'The 3rd Place', whilst sounding like a Sci-Fi channel show, actually refers to a an informal but public gathering place.
He argues that bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other "third places" (in contrast to the first and second places of home and work), are central to local democracy and community vitality.
However, modern life and our increasingly busy day-to-day schedules force us to exist predominately within our 1st (home) and 2nd (work) environments whilst decreasing the time spent, or in some cases omitting, the 3rd place from our routines.
Now in case you think i've switched fields from advertising to psychology over night, fear not, there is a link!
The rise of social networks and the velocity of their growth can be entirely linked to the decrease of our exposure to 3rd places in the real world due to our busy lifestyles.
Therefore social networks can also be described as a 'virtual 3rd place'.
Social networks & digital communities are filling a visceral need within our society they are virtual villages, pubs, cafes & general gathering places where we can satisfy one of our instinctive social needs to meet with others in an informal, familar & highly accessible way.
Cue 'Cheers' intro....
Sounds cheesy but it's actually very accurate.
People are now reaggregating in these virtual 3rd places such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Niche online communities etc etc....
So it shows you that the stories may change with new technologies but the human stories and context/content remain the same.
2 Responses to "The 3rd Place" (Leave A Comment)
February 17, 2009 at 4:01 AM
While third places may be filling people’s need to socialize, I don’t think it’s what Oldenburg had in mind. Although he wrote The Great Good Place largely before the advent of the Internet, he saw “networking” as a negative.
After all, networks (especially social networks) enable people to escape their neighborhood and mingle with people of similar interests, backgrounds, and values. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it means we may not have to deal with the annoying “Cliff” who inhabits our community. And learning to live with Cliff is important to the social fabric of a community.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to social networking; they provide many positive aspects that third places can’t. And the more we’re able to build the features of third places into our social networks, the better society will be.
February 17, 2009 at 2:15 PM
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your feedback.
I agree that social networking basically allows us to surround ourselves with people of similar interests which in turn allows us a type of escapism from our day-to-day real life communities which might not be to our liking.
However social fabric doesn't have to be about learning to deal with difficult individuals and conflict which we can do perfectly well in the work environment.
In Oldenburgs words "The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape."
Social networks arguably meet the criteria of a 3rd place exactly.
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