the non-places of social media

One of the many insidious effects of technological advancement is that more of our places are becoming non-places.

A “place,” according to the French anthropologist Marc Augé, is a space with symbolic importance. It builds your identity, defines your relations with other people, and contains a sense of history within it. Some examples are your home, your school, and your local dive bar. These all have different rules about who you can be and how you can interact with others.

A “non-place” is a transactional space that only exists for efficiency. You are not supposed to express your identity or interact with others in an elevator, airport, or hotel hallway. These are locations of transience, loneliness, and anonymity. There are no meetings or common references in a non-place.

Places change over time, while non-places are liminal. Even if you don’t agree with a change, you find it meaningful. The more graffiti that gets added to my dive bar bathroom, the more special it feels, because I have lived through a part of its story. The airport, meanwhile, has no story. Reality is suspended, and I am disconnected from my surroundings.

Many people have noted the decline of “third places” in our society. This is connected to technological advancement: as we attempt to make our lives easier, we design places for as little friction as possible, but these become “non-places,” because real places are defined by their friction.

The fast food restaurant, for example, used to be a destination. People were once excited to go to McDonald’s. It had giant swooping arches, bright colors, and a ball pit. Now it is a gray rectangle with screens at the front to place your order. I wouldn’t ever go to McDonald’s to meet a friend, and I don’t feel any sense of community or history there. It is a non-place meant for you to get in and out as quickly as possible.

Recent pictures I took at Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and Popeyes. They’re the exact same soulless corporate interior design in different fonts.

This creeping loss of place-ness also extends to our media consumption. Before the invention of the telegraph, you would get your news from the town crier, or by gathering in the agorai of Ancient Greek city-states. Dissemination of information was deeply tied to community and physical space.

Once it became more efficient to transmit ideas, we developed newspapers, and our shared spatiality instead became fragmented. You would read the news on the park bench or the breakfast table. These places are already more liminal and private than a location specifically designated for collective news consumption. Along with the TV, which restricted information to the confines of your home, the “places” of news began to shift closer to “non-places.”

Phones were the final nail in the coffin, completely severing news from any physical location. You could still share a moment with someone while reading the paper on a park bench or watching CNN from your couch. Now we learn things about the world in a deeply individualized way, untethered from our surrounding geography.

Paradoxically, however, the further we abstracted from real places, the more we began to cast our feeling of place onto the medium itself. A newspaper literally takes up space in a way that a town crier’s announcements do not. A phone screen opens up entire worlds within it, purporting to show us the same kind of discourse that we lost in real life. It is the “digital town square,” a place where it appears like conversations are happening because of the comments section—but you don’t really know anyone in the comments section. It is the hotel hallway equivalent of news: you still accomplish something functional, yet you are doing it void of identity, communal experience, or history.

In a previous substack post, I started to build up an idea of how our phones inherently contain a sense of place. The “home screen,” for example, creates an illusion of domesticity, as a private and personalized refuge where you can “choose your wallpaper” and “lock” your screen like a front door. Through design metaphors like this, each part of our phones simulates a place, triggering our natural human reflex toward spaces without actually providing the material benefits of those spaces.

Even within a single app, you usually confront different “locations” that harbor unique realms of imagination. When I open Instagram, I am also immediately sent to their “home page.” This feels like the most comforting part of the app because it has content uniquely curated for me, just like a real home is uniquely my own. It is indoors while the “explore” page is outdoors. To venture beyond “home” is to adventurously foray into a more uncertain world; the “home page” therefore takes on a sense of tranquility and coziness (but also privacy—showing someone your social media feed is like showing them the inside of your house).

All the while, your subconscious projects a feeling of place, even though you are in a non-place. A real “place” has static elements that are gradually shaped by environmental changes, but Instagram posts are ephemerally encountered in a liminal stream. There is no bathroom graffiti. The user interface is the closest thing to a constant, but it is shaped by app updates rather than real history.

Perhaps “likes” and “comments” give a post a semblance of shared reference, hinting at our coexistence in this “place” with other people who have left their marks over time. Yet these are weird alienated references that can’t parallel the emotion of seeing all your fellow citizens gather in the agora. It is a simulacrum of place masquerading as the real thing.

The internet will never replicate the immersive richness of a real, physical environment, but it’s still possible to have more authentic “places” online. I’ve been in a Discord server with some friends for over five years, and I feel a deep sense of community and history to each conversation channel. Discord is a bounded space where I have repeated encounters with the same people, which makes it feel more “place-like” than the continuous stream I encounter on social media.

I’m also thinking back to how the original websites were literally called “sites” because they were meant to be destinations. If you contrast the early idiosyncratic Y2K-era websites with today, it’s like McDonald’s before and after they embraced gray rectangle architecture.

The culprit is the same one that gave us elevators and airports: a desire for efficiency. The more we streamline our lives, the more our places turn into meaningless non-places—merely meant for you to pass through rather than connecting with yourself and others.

If anything, social media is even less of a place than the airport or elevator. We are completely anchorless while scrolling, with nothing to do except cast our desire for space onto the user interface. Perhaps there is a better future for the internet where that desire isn’t stifled, and we can actually experience the history and community we crave. In the meantime, the best we can do is interrogate our place-making instincts: be aware when we’re being exploited, and cultivate real “places” where we can.