Future Perspectives on Social Audio
When I look back at my calendar for January 2021, I can see that a new set of audiobased events began to emerge in my daily schedule. Events like “The very first New World Same Humans club!” and “Kuki AI interviewed live on Clubhouse” making me skip dinner with the family and get up at 2:00 am, because I simply couldn’t miss it: a medium that provided a direct link to experts and knowledgeable people from around the world, created valuable new professional relations, and gave me a sense of empowerment, of helping to change the world, conversation by conversation. That feeling was amazing.
Why, might you ask? Well, if you haven’t heard of it yet, Clubhouse is a fast-growing audio-based social network owned by Silicon Valley-based Alpha Exploration Co. It’s based on the idea of combining radio and podcasting with interaction, so that the user can participate in ‘rooms’ and join ‘clubs’. In contrast to other social media platforms, the user is at the centre of Clubhouse. It’s live, participatory, informal, with unfiltered conversations in which everyone can (in principle) participate.
But alas, it wasn’t long before I became aware of the downsides of this invitation only social audio app that had taken the world by storm. As Elizabeth M. Renieris, Founding Director of the Technology Ethics Lab at the University of Notre Dame puts it, Clubhouse is built on a “combination of engineered hype, artificial scarcity and exclusivity, and the fear of missing out, with little regard for privacy, security or accessibility”. Because the fact is that it represents an accelerating tendency which is still moving fast and breaking things on the way — not learning from the past and making the same mistakes that we have seen over the past 10–15 years on other social media platforms. As a reporter from the New York Times wrote:
“Clubhouse [is] speed-running the platform lifecycle”, and some experts have already predicted its imminent demise, even though it has just been valued at USD 4 billion.
What could have been a democratising digital meetingplace may end up suffering the same fate as other social media, with extremism, polarisation and hate speech — not to mention the uncertainties associated with giving Clubhouse access to your phonebook, audio files being recorded (but not encrypted), the use of invasive tracking tools and the fact that — according to researchers from Stanford Internet Observatory — rooms are being ‘scraped’ and monitored, and this data is transmitted in plain text to servers in China, making the information potentially accessible to the Chinese government.
Nevertheless, I believe that we have merely seen the beginning of a new era of social audio that gives hope for the empowerment of the digital public sphere — emphasizing the need for interaction with each other in a more human, immediate and intimate way, and hopefully listening to what we each have to say: a feature that has been lacking in social media and throughout the lockdowns of COVID-19. The pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of our society, but it has also highlighted the need to create a new framework for dialogue in a digital world. The longing for human conversations and more ‘real’ encounters has exploded during the pandemic.
In my opinion, we have an urgent need for new digital spaces to interact in a responsible way to support the digital democratic conversation. The democratisation of moderation that is happening on Clubhouse has its benefits in a society as polarised as the one in which we now live. In an audio-based dialogue there seems to be more space for “moderate” views. The human aspect is in the centre, with strangers from diverse backgrounds in conversation, which is one of the cornerstones of civil dialogue and democracy. This ensures that all voices can (potentially) be heard.
This is our opportunity to demand more, and to demand better. To start demanding and creating more responsible social media based on such values as diversity, privacy and better moderation and curation. And frankly, I don’t care what happens to Clubhouse; what matters is how we can use this new focus on audio social interaction in a way which hopefully will create, as the reporter from New York Times concluded in his article:
“A more thoughtful, less outrage-driven alternative to the social networks that we’ve been typing into for the last decade and a half.”
This article was first published in Scenario Magazine issue 61 (July 2021) by Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. Read more here: www.cifs.dk.
