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