In the latest Civic Signals newsletter, Andrew Small picks up on my reference in the previous edition to third places, a term coined by Ray Oldenburg and to some extent popularized by Robert Putnam.

Part of the challenge is that social media doesn’t always have the kind of structure that bars or coffee shops can use to distinguish between those many possible purposes. A place like Twitter hasn’t figured out how to be a truly third space. With work and home becoming one place for so many of us, we could really use somewhere else to go.

The last time I discussed third places was in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and global social distancing measures—a context in which it’s all the more important for there to be virtual analogues to such places.

Twitter, however, while it has its uses not only isn’t such a place (because it’s a space, not a place; it moves too quickly and depends too much on indication rather than interaction) it could only ever facilitate such places were it to drastically overhaul its very premise.