The Missing 3rd Place

2010 July 17
by david

Being part of a community is basic to our nature. At AOL we used to call online communities the “third place” after home and work. Those of us who don’t go to church lack that third place and I know I for one crave it. (Starbucks calls itself a third place but I don’t buy it. It’s not a community, it’s a bunch of solitary people on laptops listening to iPods.)

I grew up in Canada and our family didn’t have a TV until I was 7 or 8. The good news was I read voraciously (I really did). Even after we got a TV, we didn’t watch it much—at least not in those days. I remember feeling left out when my friends joked about the characters on a show they’d watched the night before. Although we had access to American TV stations back then most people watched CBC, the state-run broadcast network, so Canadian culture was even more homogeneous than American culture.

When I moved to the US, I had the same feeling, except more so. People at work talked about current and past shows I’d never heard of. There was a whole lexicon of quotes and characters from TV shows and movies that went over my head. And I wasn’t much better with sports. “What is the AFC?” “The Final Four?”

I’ve slowly managed to catch up on all this and feel less culturally disadvantaged than I used to. Of course I still have big gaps and my wife often looks at me in disbelief. “You don’t know who Ashton Kutcher is?” Just kidding.

But I’m not alone any more. It’s widely documented how fragmented our consumption of media has become. Cable started it but the Internet has changed everything. We share very few experiences as a country—cultural or otherwise. Election night ’08 and 9/11 are recent exceptions. We live in our own little bubbles, contently consuming what suits our preferences or mood, selecting from a dazzling array of choices. It’s all good, right? Personally I enjoy having so much to choose from but the downside is that we’ve lost the shared experiences that used to bond people together. You listen to smooth jazz, I listen to oldies. You go see “Inception,” I’ve barely heard of it.

I was inspired to write about this by hearing David Plouffe speak earlier this week. He described how much harder it is to communicate with voters these days. You can’t simply advertise on the evening news the way you used to. He told us that, together, the four broadcast networks averaged 18.9 million viewers last week. Cumulatively. That’s an incredibly low percentage of the total population (6%) and and even lower percentage of households, assuming that there was more than one viewer per household. Barack Obama’s campaign has 12 million email addresses in their database. Obama’s Facebook page has almost 11 million fans. So what do you do: advertise on prime time TV or do an email blast? Pretty obvious.

By contrast, take this from the NY Times. “Broadcast television, for decades an oligarchy of three networks, was once the locus for most of the nation’s shared cultural moments — almost 83 percent of households in the United States watched Elvis Presley’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in September 1956.” Given that there were still plenty of households without a TV, that must mean almost every TV in the country was tuned to the same channel. Imagine the water cooler conversations the next day! Shared experiences created a sense of community that we’ve lost along with the quiet streets and neighborhoods where we played and rode our bikes as kids.

Have we lost something? Yes. Have we gained something? Yes, again. Either way, there’s no turning back.

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