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What Kind of Place is the Internet? · Never Post

0:25
Georgia Hampton: Did you have a computer room in your house?
0:28
Katherine Dee: Yes. The one I remember most fondly was I think
0:34
it was intended to be a sunroom. And there is a floor to ceiling
0:37
mirrors. And then in the center was a desktop computer, tile
0:45
floor. The walls were like a terracotta color.
0:49
You know, there's really, like, nothing in this room but the
0:51
computer and then, like, piles of paper and,
0:54
Georgia Hampton: and, like, books and stuff. That's
0:58
Catherine D. She's an Internet culture writer who's written for
1:01
GQ, The New York Times, and The Spectator to name a few. She's
1:05
also written a lot about the placeness of the Internet, and
1:09
I've been really interested in that. How the Internet exists as
1:13
a place we go to.
1:16
And I figured there's no better place to start than here in the
1:20
computer room. The computer room is almost a misleading name
1:24
because the space itself was kind of this hodgepodge of a few
1:28
rooms baked into one, part office, part storage, part
1:32
closet.
1:33
Katherine Dee: And it was like repurposed office usually.
1:38
People would keep, like, weird ephemera there, stuff they were
1:41
embarrassed of. So I'm thinking here more like action figures or
1:45
like anime VHS, you know, like books that you don't want people
1:50
to know you're like, any sort of manner of, like, toilet book.
1:53
Right? Like, a book that you would ordinarily place on your
1:55
toilet, things we used to do before the smartphone, might be
1:59
in the computer room.
2:02
Georgia Hampton: The computer room in my house was a converted
2:04
laundry room. It had a desk with a swivel chair, a long counter
2:09
against the wall, and this huge slop sink that we never used for
2:13
anything. It's also where my family would store stuff like
2:17
winter coats and sleeping bags. Every flat surface was covered
2:21
in papers and boxes of safety pins and multiple rolls of
2:25
Scotch tape. Every drawer was a junk drawer.
2:29
And it's also where the computer lived. This huge hulking mass of
2:34
gray plastic that had to exist in this one specific place
2:39
indefinitely. In order for the computer to be used at all, it
2:44
had to be plugged into an outlet, specifically into a
2:49
phone jack. There were wires to contend with, to shove down the
2:54
space between the desk and the wall or bundle up behind the
2:58
monitor itself. And you didn't always get to choose where the
3:02
computer was.
3:04
If the one available phone jack was in the dining room, well,
3:08
that's where the computer had to be. But the ideal, at least in
3:12
my home, was to put the computer and its many unseemly wires into
3:17
its own room. A room that was out of the way, out of sight,
3:23
and already full of other things that didn't have anywhere else
3:27
to go. This all meant that if I wanted to go online, I had to
3:32
visit the one designated place in the house where I could do
3:36
that. Fast forward twenty five years.
3:40
I'm online all the time, everywhere. At some point, I
3:48
logged on and never really logged off
3:52
Katherine Dee: ever again. There's a sense of you're always
3:57
sort of tapped in. You're always sort of ambiently online now.
4:01
Georgia Hampton: I can tap into the Internet anytime on any
4:05
number of devices, but especially on my phone. And I
4:09
cross over onto the Internet in a way that almost feels
4:13
narcoleptic, a change of consciousness that I don't
4:16
always do on purpose. When I used the computer room at my
4:21
house, I'd lose time, like big chunks of it. But I always did
4:27
it in the same place. Now the ambient nature of my time online
4:32
blurs the difference between when I'm online and when I'm
4:36
not.
4:37
But I do still feel like I'm going somewhere. So where am I
4:44
going? What kind of place is that? When I first started
4:51
researching this topic, a deceptively simple answer jumped
4:55
out at me. Maybe the Internet is a third place.
4:59
I'm sure you've heard some variation of this concept coined
5:02
by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, The Great Good
5:07
Place. But as a refresher, a third place is somewhere that
5:11
isn't your home and isn't work, but is quite literally a secret
5:15
third thing. And its function is predominantly one of community
5:20
building. Third places are spots like your local bar or your
5:24
local coffee shop. They can be other institutions like churches
5:28
or meeting spaces.
5:29
They might involve some kind of commerce. But crucially, that's
5:33
not the only thing you can do there. And it's not necessarily
5:36
why you'd go there in the first place. The true benefit of a
5:40
third place is in the socialization it provides. It's
5:44
the kind of spot where you'd meet strangers, neighbors,
5:47
people in your vicinity who might be completely different
5:50
from you and who you could interact with for the sake of
5:54
creating person to person bonds.
5:57
And Oldenburg had specific criteria for what qualities a
6:00
third place had to have in order to be the real deal. It had to
6:05
be accessible, inspire conversation, have a community
6:09
of dedicated regulars, and serve as a kind of the home away from
6:14
home.
6:17
Charles Soukop: And so it's often referred to as the cheers
6:19
phenomenon. Right? A place where everybody knows your name
6:22
because you walk in and you immediately feel that sense of
6:25
familiarity.
6:26
Georgia Hampton: That's Charles Sokup. He's a professor of
6:29
communication and journalism at the University of Northern
6:31
Colorado. Charles has written a lot about third places, and he
6:36
explained to me that Ray Oldenburg created this concept
6:39
of the third place out of a concern that these spaces were
6:42
disappearing.
6:43
Charles Soukop: What happened, especially as suburbanization
6:46
occurred, is that we developed these long interstate highways,
6:51
freeways, etcetera. People drove from home to work, and they
6:56
didn't spend a lot of time outside of home and work most
6:58
importantly. But then when they did, it was going to a fast food
7:02
restaurant. It was going to places like Applebee's or TGI
7:05
Fridays.
7:06
Georgia Hampton: But none of these things really fit the bill
7:09
of a third place.
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Charles Soukop: These are places that are designed first and
7:12
foremost to get people in and out very quickly because they're
7:14
about productivity and they're about making as much money as
7:17
possible, and they're not designed architecturally for
7:21
people to interact with each other. Right? You're there to
7:23
sit in your own little booth, and you're not there to talk to
7:26
anybody else. And that's what people do in those spaces.
7:28
Georgia Hampton: With little in the way of physical third places
7:31
available to people searching for community, there was a big
7:34
space left open. And I could see how the development of the
7:38
Internet might provide a virtual third place. In 2006, Charles
7:44
wrote one of the earliest studies about how the concept of
7:47
third places could apply to the social Internet. In the study,
7:51
Charles commented on how certain places online, like forums and
7:55
chat rooms, could offer a space for community that carries some
8:00
qualities of a third place, but also a lot of differences.
8:05
There's the fact that the Internet, at least in 2006,
8:09
wasn't all that accessible.
8:10
You had to own a computer or have access to an Internet cafe
8:15
and be able to pay to use it. Chat rooms weren't usually
8:18
local. They couldn't really replace the coffee shop down the
8:22
street. They were more like clubs for people who all like
8:25
the same stuff. And if that club was welcoming, then great.
8:29
But that wasn't always the case. Like, if you just started
8:34
getting into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it might be hard to fit
8:37
in when you join a forum full of a bunch of people who have
8:40
already watched the show multiple times. And in those
8:43
cases, there is no cheers effect. No one knows your name,
8:48
and often they were Internet doesn't fit neatly into
8:53
Oldenburg's Great Good Place. But Charles wrote that virtual
8:58
third places do exist and have their own qualities.
9:02
Quote, virtual third places should be designed to fit into
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the participants' mundane and ordinary lived experiences. The
9:11
virtual third place should feel like a place for the here and
9:14
now, a place that is integrated seamlessly into the existing
9:17
textures and details of our lived communal experiences.
9:22
Twenty years has passed since that study was first published,
9:26
and a lot of what Charles wrote about has come to fruition. We
9:30
do integrate our use of the Internet into our daily lives.
9:33
The Internet does feel like a place full of, as he wrote,
9:37
localized informal interactions.
9:39
But do all of these factors a third place make? Well, I just
9:46
flat out asked him the question. Is the Internet a third place?
9:57
Charles Soukop: Maybe. Sometimes. Not usually. That
10:05
Georgia Hampton: has everything to do with the emergence and
10:09
dominance of large scale social media platforms in the last
10:12
twenty years. Third places are small. Platforms, not so much.
10:23
Charles Soukop: You're in a cafe. There's, like, 25, thirty,
10:26
forty people there, that kind of thing. That's sort of an ideal
10:28
number, think, for that sort of interaction. Obviously, when
10:31
you're into thousands or millions of people, you can't
10:35
have those sorts of interactions. It's it's not the
10:37
sort of experience.
10:38
It's a totally different phenomenon. It's a it's about
10:41
attention, and it's about all kinds of other things rather
10:44
than about actually understanding one another,
10:46
experiencing just informal connection with others.
10:51
Georgia Hampton: But scale is only part of the issue here. The
10:55
most stark limitation to any social platform's ability to be
10:59
a true third place lies in the way we are encouraged to use
11:03
them. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter may present themselves
11:08
as catalysts for social interaction in theory, but
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things shake out very differently in practice.
11:15
Charles Soukop: There's not a lot of profit and people just
11:17
hanging around building community. Right? You can't sell
11:20
stuff in that context particularly well. You can sell
11:23
the idea of that, but you don't like the practice of it because
11:26
it it part of it, it just gives too much autonomy to those
11:29
individuals. Right?
11:30
They can create their own space for their own purposes, which
11:34
might have nothing to do with what your goals are as a
11:36
company. So why would you give them that independence? There's
11:42
something so unpredictable about community building. It can
11:46
become almost anything, and they want predictability. They wanna
11:49
keep people in a very pattern set of behaviors and habits, and
11:53
they don't want people to have that independent, unpredictable
11:57
kind of, you know, encounter with others.
12:08
Georgia Hampton: Community building is only useful to a
12:11
corporation like Meta insofar as you do it while staying on the
12:14
app. And what tool keeps us scrolling and engaging with any
12:18
given platform for hours and hours? Say it with me, If the
12:24
the Internet is a place, then the algorithm is a room. Your
12:29
room, decorated with all the stuff you like, or at least what
12:34
it thinks you like. Maybe you can hear voices through the
12:38
walls, but you can't leave the room that was made for you.
12:43
There isn't even a door. And under these conditions, it's
12:47
extremely hard to cultivate the dynamic persistent kind of
12:51
community that is essential to third places. So instead of
12:56
serving as a third place, the Internet becomes the not work,
13:01
not home space where increasingly, it feels like all
13:04
you're supposed to do is spend money. We're back at the mall
13:07
again, moving from store to store, or as the case may be,
13:11
from IG ad to IG ad. In a place like this, you might interact
13:16
with a salesperson or someone else who's in line to buy
13:19
something, but the goal is always consumption in the most
13:24
efficient way possible.
13:27
So what kind of place is that? The non place.
13:35
Charles Soukop: These are spaces that don't have any sort of
13:38
context or history to them. They have no sense of uniqueness, so
13:43
they're very standardized and formulaic. So things that are
13:47
franchises are the clearest example of that. But anything
13:50
that lacks it in, in particular, the one that always comes up in
13:54
their research is the airport as the, like, the archetypal
13:57
nonplace.
13:59
Georgia Hampton: A Starbucks in Denver looks virtually identical
14:02
to a Starbucks in Dubai. The menu is basically the same. The
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physical space of a Starbucks, wherever it is, is only useful
14:10
in its ability to make it possible for me to get a caramel
14:14
frappuccino with three pumps of vanilla. And I know that it will
14:17
always taste exactly the same. The aprons will still be the
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same shade of Kelly green.
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The familiar benevolent smile of the brand's dual tailed mermaid
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will gaze down upon me in every time zone. Whatever country I'm
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in ceases to matter the second I step through the tinted glass
14:34
door because now I'm in the sovereign territory of
14:38
Starbucks, a nation all its own.
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Charles Soukop: And that is very disorienting. It can be and you
14:45
can kinda lose sense of what the expectations and norms are for
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spaces like that. So I think that's why people act kinda
14:51
weird in airports because they don't really know what you're
14:53
supposed to be doing. It doesn't have any connection.
15:00
Georgia Hampton: Tucked away in a hotel room of a large scale
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chain, I become the hedonistic god of my own lawless land. I
15:09
watch TV shows I would never consider watching in my normal
15:13
life. I bury myself under a pile of white terry cloth robes. I
15:19
leave my open suitcase spatchcocked on the floor,
15:22
barely containing the mountain of clothing I rifle through and
15:26
never fold. It's only when I have to check out that the spell
15:30
is broken and I become myself again.
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Charles Soukop: I would say most of the social media platforms,
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you could probably make a pretty good case for being a non place,
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particularly because of the way that they lack history and
15:45
location and context. If you were to, like, put a target on
15:51
the Internet, it would look like Facebook. Does that make sense
15:54
for it? You know what I mean? It's like, it just feels
15:58
monochromatic and uniform, and there's something kind of boring
16:03
about how everything is in its unique place.
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Georgia Hampton: But I don't think it's just that it's
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boring. It's also uncanny in its frictionlessness. I used to know
16:14
exactly where the Internet was. It was in the computer room. The
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name itself was so place y, the room where the computer lived.
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And now the computer is in every place. It's everywhere. All
16:31
Internet enabled devices joined together and made a new kind of
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place that exists like a veil on top of the whole world. And at
16:41
first, maybe it seemed possible for that kind of tandem space to
16:46
feel just as place like as the computer room did. But with the
16:50
emergence of platforms, with the ubiquity of Internet access,
16:54
with a million shifts and changes over the years, that
16:57
feeling started to slip away.
16:59
The boundaries of the place that held the Internet started to
17:03
blur. Now I don't go to the Internet in the way I go to a
17:09
chain restaurant like Olive Garden. It's more like I can
17:12
blink and suddenly already be inside an Olive Garden whenever
17:16
I want. Like, the Olive Garden is grafted over my life where I
17:21
can tap into the Olive Garden state of consciousness with a
17:24
single swipe of my finger. We're obsessed that you're so
17:29
obsessed.
17:30
So Olive Garden's fan favorites are back. When we come back, I'm
17:35
gonna bring back Catherine D to discuss a more metaphysical look
17:41
at the placeness of the Internet. Catherine D. And I
18:01
talked a lot about the hypnotic nature of logging on. The
18:05
computer room and the computer that dwelled inside it served as
18:08
a portal to the Internet.
18:11
All I had to do was turn it on, log in, and let myself be taken
18:15
away. And being taken away is really how it felt. Sure. My
18:20
physical self was glued to the swivel chair sitting with my
18:23
legs all pretzel together. But my emotional self had crossed a
18:28
threshold into this other intangible place where Myspace
18:32
existed, an AOL Instant Messenger, where the giant
18:37
omelet in Neopets existed.
18:39
Katherine Dee: We've all done it. Right? Just totally slipping
18:43
into this other place, this like trance like state. And the
18:46
computer room was like the dedicated space where you would
18:52
slip into this other world. All I I mean, I really did feel like
18:56
I was going somewhere else.
19:00
And I was like blocking out the world around me.
19:03
Georgia Hampton: But it helped that my physical body never
19:06
moved from that swivel chair. It made the hypnotic nature of me
19:10
logging on feel more akin to meditation or falling asleep. An
19:16
experience that felt comfortable in part because I knew exactly
19:19
where I'd be when I decided to return to consciousness. When I
19:23
logged off, I knew exactly where I was because I never left.
19:29
Katherine Dee: Something that was good about a a computer room
19:32
is even though you maybe you would get swept away
19:34
temporarily, something about like logging on and logging off,
19:37
having to, you know, you have to go to the bathroom. So you type
19:40
AFK. Things like that are I mean, keep us keep us connected
19:46
to the physical world. There's a physical reminder. Now, you
19:49
know, like, theoretically, like, you you know, you take your
19:52
phone into the bathroom or eating dinner.
19:55
Right? Like, there's no there's no break.
19:57
Georgia Hampton: With the ability to pass through portal
20:00
of the internet whenever we want, we fade in and out of that
20:04
trance like state as we please. Or even without realizing it. I
20:10
have certainly been guilty of absentmindedly opening Instagram
20:13
when I didn't even notice I was doing it. And by the time I
20:17
recognize what I did, I've already started scrolling. In a
20:21
New York Times opinion piece from October, Katherine wrote
20:25
about how the internet as it exists now, ubiquitous,
20:28
hypnotic, and enticing, is something called an other world.
20:36
Katherine Dee: An other world, the way I use it at least, is a
20:40
world that exists simultaneous to our own and that you you go
20:45
you go into it. It's like layered over the physical world,
20:50
but it's a it's a separate space.
20:54
Georgia Hampton: Historically, entering an other world could
20:57
involve finding some kind of portal or path that would take
21:00
you there. Like the River Styx, which led your soul to the
21:04
underworld of Greek mythology. And that passage across the
21:07
water served as a kind of existential transition into the
21:12
world you were about to enter. Crossing the River Styx would
21:16
erase your memories that you accumulated in the world of the
21:20
living. Passage into an other world could be a physical
21:24
endeavor, but it didn't have to be.
21:27
Traveling to the fairy land of Celtic lore was something you
21:30
could do spiritually while leaving your body behind. The
21:34
idiom of being quote unquote away with the fairies comes from
21:38
this idea that your mind is in this other place. So like with
21:43
with the internet, I mean,
21:44
Katherine Dee: I think it's it's such a close analogy because
21:49
you're staring into the screen, you know, you're staring into
21:53
the the black mirror, you're scrying, right? And your
21:58
internal self is gone, is not here. And but your physical self
22:02
remains. And so it's like you're away with the fairies or astral
22:06
projecting or you're having an out of body experience.
22:10
Georgia Hampton: It's entering a plane of existence that has a
22:13
very different structure and an entirely different mode of
22:16
operating. And just like a non place, the rules aren't always
22:22
clear.
22:23
Katherine Dee: You know, I think people wonder a lot, like, why
22:26
do we behave differently online? Why are the social rules
22:29
different on the Internet than they are in the physical world?
22:33
And the answer, I think, is really simple. We don't have our
22:36
physical bodies. So, of course, the rules are going to be
22:41
different because not having the body changes things, not having
22:46
the physical body.
22:49
Georgia Hampton: Dis Disembodiment is a defining
22:51
quality of the Internet as a place. Our disconnection to our
22:55
bodies is a huge reason why the space of the Internet feels odd
22:59
and ill defined. In the context of a non place, this physical
23:04
abstraction is a tool that keeps us consuming. In other worlds,
23:09
it's just another quality that needs to be handled with care so
23:12
that we don't get lost.
23:25
Katherine Dee: With fairy mythology, there's a lot about,
23:28
you know, accidentally binding yourself to fairyland and not
23:33
realizing it. And I think that happens a lot online because you
23:36
get lost in the in the moment, or you don't feel the
23:39
consequences, or the consequences sort of like arrive
23:43
differently on the internet as they will in the physical world.
23:46
Some people say, you know, say to imagine a a red string tied
23:51
to your wrist. The theosophists in particular spoke about a
23:54
silver cord that connects your physical body to your etheric
23:58
body, to the body that is out in the astral plane. So you don't
24:02
get lost.
24:02
So it doesn't get disconnected. I think a lot of people get lost
24:06
because they don't they don't reground.
24:08
Georgia Hampton: The computer room represented an
24:11
architectural, emotional, and technological anchor and
24:15
permitted transition to the internet. It was the circle of
24:19
mushrooms in the grass, the fairy ring. And traveling into
24:23
another world is the work of intention, of seeking out the
24:27
doorway and deciding to open it. But so much of how we use the
24:31
Internet now is without intention entirely. We cross
24:36
that threshold countless times every day, sometimes without
24:39
consciously realizing what we're doing as we're doing it.
24:43
The threshold blurs into nothing. We never leave. We
24:48
never arrive. Non places are abstracted. They're
24:54
architectural gestures that are defined by transition and only
25:00
transition.
25:01
They have no specificity, no grounding, no conclusion to
25:05
offer us. We can scroll forever without fear that we will reach
25:10
the end. It's the infinite moving sidewalk. And I wonder
25:19
what that state of constant transition means about where the
25:23
Internet is. If the Internet is anywhere I am, does that make
25:28
the Internet a place or infinite places?
25:33
Katherine Dee: I think it's one big other world that we can't we
25:38
can't see it. There's no map to it. And it I mean, it it it
25:43
holds it holds the full the full range of expression. It's not an
25:49
evil place. Evil exists there.
25:52
It's not a place that you should never travel to, but you should
25:54
travel to you should travel to it with awareness.
25:57
Georgia Hampton: This idea feels really, really comforting to me
26:01
because I want the Internet to still feel like a single
26:05
recognizable place I go to, spend time in, and leave. I kind
26:12
of still need the computer room to exist, even if it's just in
26:15
my mind. But why? Why do I need that?
26:20
Katherine Dee: I think it's just the way we we process as humans,
26:24
we process reality. Like, how could you not be in a place? You
26:28
know, if you're spending so much time there, there's so much,
26:30
like, spiritual and, you know, paranormal, like, stories that
26:35
come out of these things. Right? Like, spiritualism was, you
26:38
know, partially created because of the telegraph.
26:41
There's this idea of this is something beyond the veil. How
26:45
could information be moving across the ocean? How are we
26:50
talking to people that are far away? And so we imagine that
26:53
there's something there, like we're we're going somewhere.
26:58
Just thinking of it, literally, I think kind of breaks our
27:01
brains a little bit.
27:03
So we create this we create the story around it. Like, it must
27:06
be the spirit world. Right? There must be it's a nonmaterial
27:09
world. It's not just technology to it.
27:12
It's a the technology is allowing us to act to to pierce
27:16
the thing we cannot see.
27:35
Georgia Hampton: Thank you so much to Charles Sokop and
27:38
Katherine Dee for taking me in and through and out of the place
27:42
of the Internet. Charles told me that for the most part, you can
27:46
find him in obscure journals, so it's best to Google him. And
27:49
that's Charles, s o u k o p. Katherine Dee can be found at
27:56
default.blog, where you can read about other worlds and the
28:00
Internet and so much more. To find me or any of us on
28:05
Neverpost, you already know where to go.
28:08
Every possible way of reaching us is down in the show notes.
28:32
Mike Rugnetta: Post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia
28:35
Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name.
28:38
Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer
28:41
is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host, that's me, is Mike
28:45
Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and
28:54
Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.