According to estimates from Lifeway Research, approximately 3,000 Protestant churches were started in the United States (U.S.) in 2019, but 4,500 Protestant churches closed that same year. In 2023, according to Cable News Network (CNN), multiple retail stores such as Party City, Bed Bath & Beyond and Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy.
Public spaces such as churches and retail stores have been facing decreasing attendance for years. These spaces are sometimes referred to as third places.
Sociologist Ray Oldenberg’s 1989 novel, “The Great Good Place” coined the term third place. Oldenberg describes third places as locations that encourage social interaction separate from the people one works and lives with.
Because third places rely on social interaction, they are becoming less successful as a result of a lack of attendance. According to Capital One Shopping, an average of 1,170 shopping malls closed every year between 2017 and 2022, with an 8.7% vacancy rate at the end of 2022.
With the shutdown of these spaces, many people turn to social media as a third place and in turn end up developing a false understanding of relationships, which can be detrimental to the ways in which people interact with each other.
With the pandemic and prevalence of social media, some teenagers find it normal to seek out relationships online. Director of Counseling Services Amina Samake said, “A lot of people use social media as a safe space, and from there, they start finding different avenues and ways to discover new interests.”
According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2022, 33% of U.S. teenagers from ages 13 to 17 feel more connected to their friends’ lives from using social media. Additionally, 29% of teenagers feel that social media enables them to show their creative interests and abilities.
Nonetheless, utilizing social media as a replacement for face-to-face social interaction often results in a warped sense of communication with others.
“I think that our generation does not know anything other than social media being the norm,” said Blue Kennedy ‘25. “It weakens any relationship if it is predominantly online because it’s different than hanging out with someone in person.”
Kennedy noted an experience where they saw a person they were talking to online at the beginning of freshman year for the first time in person. “When I saw them at a volleyball game, we barely recognized each other and didn’t talk at all,” they said.
Although social media interactions can build connections, those relationships usually distract people from face-to-face communication, and they differ from the relationships traditionally developed in third places.
Social media can form a culture of guilt and anxiety that is not nearly as prevalent in third places. “I see students come [into my office] incredibly uncomfortable with talking to people or worried about something they said. When we are in community with people, we start to move through some of that [discomfort] and build up resilience and capacity,” said Samake. “Social media doesn’t allow us to do that.”
Many sociologists who specialize in home and work dynamics debate whether or not social media counts as a third place. According to the Journal of Service Research, “Online service communities are traditionally designed as support services rather than to function as online third places.”
However, in an interview with The Urban Legend, Dylan Nguyen, a predoctoral fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University, shared the various ways social media intersects with third places.
“Thinking about social media as a third place is a little bit different because then you have to think about what online communities you are a part of and the algorithms that shuffle you into that sub community,” said Nguyen. “Social media has changed the game when it comes to third places.”
To combat feelings of isolation and discomfort leftover from a lack of social interaction due to the pandemic, some people at Urban have started to prioritize third places again.
“My most prominent third place is theater,” said Kennedy. “Because we spend so much time together in-person during the rehearsals, it gives us more of an incentive to hang out on the weekends and outside of social media.”
“I go to a dance studio for Afro-Brazilian dance every week and I’ve been dancing with them since 2013,” said Samake. “At first, I was fearful of not fitting in or not being good enough, but now it feels like a no-brainer. It nourishes my spirit.”
