Harish Alagappa

Category: social media

  • From Third Place to Good Place

    From Third Place to Good Place

    The Third Place is a concept popularized by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the late 1980s1. In simple terms, it’s the idea that as humans we spend most of our time and energy in two places – our homes (first place) and our work or school or university (second place). I know that some people might list work as their first place, but they’re a minority of either very lucky and contented people or very sad and hyper-motivated slaves.

    For us normies, meanwhile, the third place is somewhere we can gather and socialize in an informal context. An example that should hopefully resonate with most of you would be our neighbourhoods when we were kids. We would return home (first place) from our school (second place) and head out to our third place where we would either play sports or just hang around and get up to no good with our friends.

    The typical characteristics of a third place include that it’s a neutral ground that’s easily accessible, low profile, playful, and comfortable. This has a levelling effect on the interactions that happen at a third place. No one person has a claim over it, many people can access it on their own schedule, there’s no need for pretension, and it creates a relaxed and friendly environment where we feel free enough to be our true selves.

    Of course I'd use Le Grande Jatte. My third place that triggered this whole thought is a quiz club.

    The Rise and Fall of The Universal Third Place

    I was an internet optimist in my youth, way back in the halcyon days of Web 2.0 and early social media. The original purpose of social media was that it was a universal third place. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Then a motley crew of corporations, politicians, and previously fringe hate groups discovered that social media could be weaponized to create the late-capitalist fascist hellscape it is today.

    Since by then social media (and the internet) had already become our universal third place, we were now bound to it. It was like someone had poisoned the village well and we had no choice but to keep drinking from it. And thus, we too were poisoned. People who tend to be easily manipulated, such as sheltered young people and the elderly, found themselves fully ingesting the poison until it ran through every vein in their body. Others, and I count myself in this group, found themselves feeling constantly sickened by what they had no choice but to consume. Others were inspired to create their own poison and add that to the well too.

    So why don’t we just stop? Why can’t we just quit social media or the internet in general? Because Pandora’s Box cannot be closed again. It is still our third place. It is still the most easily accessible, relatively egalitarian, neutral ground where people from around the world can meet, interact, and socialize. And every human being needs a third place. Even the most introverted loner needs somewhere they can go, virtually or IRL, to have some level of social stimulation.

    Not a fan of most 2010s US comedies (like The Office), but The Good Place is an amazing show that's honestly very under-rated

    A New Hope: Go Touch Grass

    But the last year or so has shown me that while social media cannot be returned back into the fiery chasm from whence it came, it can be relegated to a lower rung of social spaces. I would like to propose that we turn social media from a universal third place into a universal fourth place. But I don’t need to propose it, because that’s what’s already happening.

    The simple retort, “Go touch grass” is evidence that our new Gen Z overlords – who I honestly relate to more than my own millennial coevals – are aware that social media is not a substitute for real social interaction.

    So, if social media or the internet or television has been your third place throughout the last decade or even your whole life, here is what I do actually propose. Find a new third place. Relegate the world of the internet to fourth and find a real-life place that you can go to and be yourself while interacting with real human beings and not the caricatures we pretend to be on these godforsaken platforms.

    The world is out there, not here on whatever screen you’re reading this on.

    My trip to Echoes of Earth last year was one of the best of my life. Have some exciting ideas of where to go this year, if things work out.

    1. To be honest, I don’t know anything about Ray Oldenburg’s life and work beyond my understanding of Third Places. If it turns out that he’s been completely discredited or was a racist abuser or something like that, I’m really sorry, I had no idea. ↩︎
  • Zen And The Art of Influencer Marketing

    Zen And The Art of Influencer Marketing

    The world of the 1990s and 2000s seemed to hold immense promise for humanity. The Cold War was over, and technology was bridging barriers, allowing people from opposite ends of the Earth to communicate with one another – offering hope for a more united and compassionate world.

    Well, good news! That promise is all but lost.

    The technology that was meant to unite people from opposite ends of the world has now been turned into a tool to divide people living in the same home. The Cold War was replaced by a Culture War. And perhaps the worst development of all, con artists, grifters, psychopaths, the vapidly vain and the downright inhumane are now heralded as heroes. Meanwhile, social media influencers brag about their material possessions and use that justify their awful behaviour, beliefs, and parasitic existence.

    Fake Plastic Men

    Inhumanity, a complete lack of empathy, naked greed, and bloodlust is supposedly an Alpha/Sigma/Omega/Epsilon mindset. Even though we have stories from thousands of years ago about people searching for the secret to eternal youth and how it made fools of them all, billionaires flaunt their multi-million-dollar anti-ageing procedures, while includes literally taking the blood of young people for themselves.

    The fact that these purveyors of ‘masculine’ influencer content are usually revealed to be frauds, con artists, grifters, literal human traffickers, or children of wealth trying to pass off their nepotism as “self-made” riches does nothing.

    Impressionable idiots are intoxicated by imposter influencers’ inane, immature, and impossible ideals, invariably immersing every iota of their individuality into an intricate, imaginary world of instant gratification and irrational beliefs.

    You have “alpha male” influencers who rail against gender affirming care for trans people on podcasts where they the hawk “nutritional supplement” pills to boost your testosterone. Displaying a staggering lack of self-awareness at best or malicious hypocrisy at worst, these middle-aged uncles take PEDs to maintain their physique, undergo surgeries to look younger and more masculine, and surgically enhance their hairline, jawline, and other body parts to then attack young trans folk for getting gender-affirming surgeries or even taking hormone blockers. THIS is what self-proclaimed alpha men or giga-chads turn out to be:

    We’ve Been Over This Before

    I never thought I would be the one to tell people to hark back to the past, but we’ve been over this before everyone. The ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Phoenicians, Indians, Greeks, Palestinians, Judeans, Chinese, Japanese and every other culture have age-old stories about the transient nature of material wealth and how hoarding money, or gold or resources makes you pretty a terrible human being.

    The Epic of Gilgamesh starts off with the eponymous king abusing his wealth and power in much the same way modern billionaires do, before he is changing his ways and becoming a good guy. Later in the epic, Gilgamesh goes on a quest to become immortal and ultimately learns that it’s impossible, accepting that death comes for us all, even kings.

    Money and looks aren’t everything. Your beautiful bodies will be a stinking rotting corpse one day – there’s no escaping this. Your massive bank account, your lavish mansions and apartments, your Bugatti, none of them will buy you immortality. You may have amassed a cult following among young boys who are extremely familiar with computers but complete idiots when it comes to anything else – but they will die too, and their children will follow a different cult.

    The world was not built by men of iron, who treated everyone around them like dirt and trampled, lied, stole, cheated, raped, and pillaged their way to your idiotic idea of greatness. That’s a version of history created by the people who would simp for these horrible men to feel strong by association. These poor souls existed in the past and exist in the present, simp-ing for men who claim to be the big strong alpha man, but whose bluster hides an obviously and massively fragile ego. Both the leader and the simp are merely sad men trying to live up to impossible standards of masculinity that were thrust upon them without their knowledge. Whose fear of change and an egalitarian world leads them to dive deeper and deeper into justifying horrible behaviour.

    There are eight billion human beings on this planet. None of them is illegal and all of them deserve the same opportunities and resources for life and happiness that around 50,000 people on Earth are all hoarding for themselves while radicalizing impressionable idiots to be their simps – servants, foot-soldiers and grunts who will lick their masters’ boots and die for them even though they get nothing in return in some horrible twenty-first reboot of feudalism.

    It’s just frustrating to see history repeating itself, only worse.

  • Social Media for Writers: The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play

    Social Media for Writers: The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play

    Can we finally, as a society, collectively admit that social media is no longer a force for good in the world?

    I’d also say it’s debatable if it was ever a force for good in the first place, but that’s a different topic.

    Social media in 2020 is the world’s largest soapbox for once-fringe morons to very effectively spread fascist and hateful agendas using disinformation and a time-tested technique of hacking the human brain’s propensity to over-engage with and widely share any content that sparks outrage.

    This has turned vast swathes of generally decent (if somewhat ignorant) people into vectors of ideological disease.

    And if the pandemic has taught us anything, you can counter the spread of disease with social (media) isolation.

    This is part of the reason why I deleted my Facebook account, stopped using Reddit, severely limited my activity on the last 2 stragglers in my social media portfolio — Instagram and LinkedIn — and most notably, deleted all of my tweets save for my prescient-yet-obvious first contribution to Twitter back in the innocent and halcyon days of 2008:

    Twitter = Orwell’s ‘1984’ by choice rather than force

    — Chaosverse (@chaosverse). May 19, 2008

    This has had a substantially positive impact on my mental health and sanity, while my reasons for renunciation are reinforced whenever I do end up briefly visiting social platforms for work.

    As someone in content and marketing, I have to visit Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as part of my job. Whenever I do, I try and ensure that I make a quick ingress, finish the mission asap and leave immediately.

    But, like a fly in a spiderweb, I sometimes find myself ensnared by the platform. On these occasions, I end up reading a few posts (and occasionally comments, ugh!) or catching a glimpse of the day’s top trending content and hashtags.

    And that never fails to absolutely ruin my mood.

    I would really like it if I went the rest of my (hopefully long) life without ever laying my eyes on the problematic, programmatic, pabulum prose of Twitter or any social media site (but especially Twitter) ever again. I would love it if 2020 was the last year I was ever on social media at all. But that’s not an option anymore.

    A social media presence has gone from the alternative to the mainstream to being sort of, compulsory. There’s a widespread idea that you cannot achieve any kind of engagement with a wider audience without farming attention on social media. That is not just repugnant, it’s frightening.

    I would rather not turn myself into some Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump clone to further my ideas, but it feels like most of us are being incentivized to do exactly that.

    Personally, I hope we can normalize (and dare I say, encourage?) not having a social media presence. Even for writers and content marketing professionals. Call it a social media absence.

    But we’re not there yet. And that means, for now at least, I need to slowly re-emerge from the sanity of my sans social safe space and re-enter the fray.

    So, like-share-subscribe?

    Originally shared on LinkedIn

  • I Was Called Out in a Book by a “Fake” Author

    I Was Called Out in a Book by a “Fake” Author

    I’ve been reading The Listening Society, a book on the political ideology of metamodernism written under the nom de plume Hanzi Freinacht.

    I don’t know much about the real authors behind the book (and its sequel, Nordic Ideology, which I plan to read soon) but I find myself drawn to the ideas presented in it for two reasons.

    First, I’m generally fascinated by post-postmodern ideas and personally feel the way forward is some amalgamation of incredulity towards meta-narratives (Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism) and something like David Foster Wallace’s New Sincerity.

    And Reason B. I’ve never seen a book describe me so well as these two paragraphs.

    BTW, the “triple H” people described here are “Hackers, Hipsters, and Hippies” and have nothing to do (afaik) with WWE’s Hunter Hearst Helmsley, a.k.a The Game.