🆕 Never Post! What Kind of Place is the Internet?

Pals! A new Never Post for you, it's here! In this episode, producer Georgia Hampton looks to writer and blogger Katherine Dee and academic Charles Soukop to help her figure out how to visualize the internet. As in, what kind of a place is it, if it’s even a space at all...

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Find Charles Soukop:

• Charles’s 2006 study on virtual third places

Find Katherine Dee:

• default.blog
• NYT: The phone as a portal to the Otherworld

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Did you have a computer room in your house?

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,

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.

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.

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

ever again. There's a sense of you're always sort of tapped in. You're always sort of ambiently online now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But none of these things really fit the bill of a third place.

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.

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?

Maybe. Sometimes. Not usually. That

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.