Third Places, the workplace, Facebook, and Starbucks

May 19th, 2009 by

Catherine Bergart gets the value of value of third places.  In an excellent piece written for the New York Times titled “Losing the Income, and the Camaraderie“, Bergart walks the reader through the tribulations of losing her job at a place she considered her third place.  (Read more about third places here.)

While losing her source of income was traumatic, she considers the loss of the camaraderie at her former third place as the real tragedy of her job loss.  Try as she might, Facebook and Starbucks, couldn’t provide the “social nourishment” she craves.

Bergart writes about third places from the perspective of an individual, while much of our writing about third places (at ReImagine Rural) has focused on its community development implications.  What I find relevant to rural communities, however, is that she discerns the weakness of pseudo-third places like Facebook and Starbucks.    Neither offers the richness of the social interaction between people of disparate backgrounds that that a true third place delivers.

And that’s why I’m both excited and skeptical about social media at the same time.  While I firmly believe rural communities need to develop a social media strategy to connect to people — especially to those people whose lives have taken them outside of the community – I’m not convinced that it can generate the deep relationships that will move our rural communities towards the transformation they need.   

But maybe that’s ok.  We probably shouldn’t think of Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook as the end-all tool.  Like physical third places, they are probably just one piece of the complex puzzle to creating vibrant rural communities.

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