Purpose, the magic circle and the art of gathering online
Remember when the internet used to be a place you would go? The first time I felt like I was really hanging out online, was the late night sessions on MSN messenger as a teenager. I was active online before that, seeking out forums and message boards to learn about things I was interested in, creating my own Geocities sites, and uploading little animations that I made in Macromedia Flash. I even found some online collaborators to help me with the trickier parts of action script. But it wasn’t until installing MSN messenger that I really felt like ‘online’ was a place you could be.
Up until that point, the main way to communicate with friends when we weren’t at school was to call on the landline. Organising anything in groups became a series of, “Okay, I’ll check with X and call you back.” And you generally had to have a reason to call. The barrier to entry was high, you couldn’t just call the girl you had a crush on and start talking. That changed when MSN came into our lives.
The word went around school quickly and it soon became a nightly ritual. After dinner and homework, when the parents were starting to get ready for bed, you would fire up MSN and hear that familiar startup chime, fizzy and satisfying, like opening a cold can of soda. And you would chat with — whoever else was there. It was a digital meeting place. The rules were different from face-to-face or on the phone, you could hold multiple conversations about vastly different subjects at once. You could stop and think, really craft your witty yet meticulously casual reply. You could talk to one person and while simultaneously deconstructing and analysing the meaning of that conversation with someone else.
For an introverted kid with a tendency to greatly overthink things, it was a godsend. My social circles widened, I formed new bonds with people I would have had little reason to talk to IRL and these relationships grew outside MSN chat. I started getting invited to parties and having deeper embodied conversations with people who up until that point had just been acquaintances.
Unlike the social media and smartphones of today, MSN felt like a place that you visited. “See you on MSN” became a thing you might say, in the same way you might say, “See you at the mall.” This location was firmly tied to the personal computer, which may, for instance, be in the family study. It was so tied to a location that one would have to type BRB (be right back) if you ducked away from the computer for even a moment. It was a gathering place, a place where you would go to hang out, and perhaps more importantly, a place that you would leave and go back to the real world.
With Facebook and smartphones, the relationship changed. You no longer came and went, you were always online. No need to BRB since you were always just there, never stepping away. ‘Online’ became the default state, it was not uncommon to hold a conversation with one person in real life, while also carrying on several conversations online or via text message, your attention split.
In her book Reclaiming Conversation, Shelly Turkle explains that having a phone on the table while talking inhibits our ability to have deep conversation, even if the phone is off or on silent. We exist in two worlds now, simultaneously, trying and failing to split our attention across both.
It’s tiring, and distracting, and it has become the new normal. We let these technologies into our lives years ago, most of us when they were still tied to heavy computers, firmly tethered to the power socket. With the shift to mobile, these platforms mutated. What once was a place to gather and talk with friends, was now a constant stream of information optimised for time on site, leaving you spending more and more time mindlessly scrolling. It didn’t happen all at once, and like lobsters in a pot, we didn’t realise the water around us was slowly getting warmer.
Social isolation and depression are on the rise, research warns that we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. A popular opinion is that our increasing technology consumption may be to blame. Browsing the technology section of the Amazon bookstore (as I often do) reveals a trend of self-help books that show you how to disconnect from technology in order to reconnect with each other.
But the jury is still out. The research in this area is sparse and often mistakes correlation for causation. Technology use is going up, social isolation and depression are going up, but the later is not necessarily caused by the former. And all screen time is not created equal.
During my career researching and designing digital tools and services, I have heard first hand the positive effects that online connection can bring. Be it, women who have miscarried and need to talk with others with shared experience, people with autism connecting with those who share their unique communication style, or international students seeking support and guidance in navigating a new and foreign city. I have heard again and again the huge positive impact connecting online can have.
Thinking of these moments and my own experiences growing up as a shy creative kid in a small town, where I often found refuge online, I’m hesitant to suggest total disconnection. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need not cut out technology altogether, instead, we should be more thoughtful in the way that we let technology into our lives. What do the examples of positive online connection have in common? What was it about them that allowed real emotional connection rather than a watered down version of human interaction?
Perhaps it is a shared purpose.
In her book, The Art of Gathering Priya Parker talks about how defining the purpose the most important step in planning events, meetings or gatherings. When you have defined your purpose you let that inform who to invite and the format it should take. It seems obvious, but so much of the time, we don’t define our purpose when we meet. And while this advice was intended for face-to-face gathering, I feel that it is equally crucial in designing digital gathering.
We need to define the purpose of our digital meeting places, create rules and boundaries, decide who should be invited and what form it should take to best deliver on that purpose. ‘Online’ can be a place where we can go and meet, like the days of MSN messenger, rather than a place where we live. Meeting a friend for a coffee at a busy cafe is fine, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
This shift towards smaller more focused groups is reflected in the way my own digital habits have evolved over the past few years. A few months back I deleted my long stagnant Facebook account, I use twitter rarely, and when I do it is more as a news aggregator than a social network. My social activity online has splintered into a number of smaller platforms, each with a unique purpose. I use slack for communicating with work colleagues, WhatsApp is used exclusively to chat with overseas family, I’ve kept Facebook messenger to organise face-to-face catch ups friends, I keep in touch with ex-colleagues on Discord, and organise my involvement with activist groups on Signal. I like keeping these contexts separate, deliberate and with clear purpose.
This shift is happening in big tech too. Mark Zuckerberg believes the future of Facebook is in smaller private groups. The move positions Facebook not as town square but as a living room. But perhaps we should pause before following Mark’s lead. If we are more purposeful and deliberate about how and why we gather online, we realise that we don’t need to be beholden to any one network.
The network effect that made Facebook such a monopolistic juggernaut loses its power if we don’t need all of our connections in the same place. If we look at our online gathering through the lens of purpose we realise that our values may not align to that of the tech giants. The behaviour that is being optimised for may be in direct conflict with our purpose.
Interestingly the MSN messenger of today’s kids is not Facebook, Instagram or even Snapchat. It’s Fortnite. This impossibly popular game confuses the hell out of older gamers. What is it about Fortnite that has turned it into such a cultural phenomenon with younger audiences? It's free, it’s colourful, it’s full of memeable dance moves, it’s available on every platform. But that’s not the appeal. Its appeal is as a place to hang out. A place to meet friends. A place with a purpose, and clearly defined rules. A place to play, but also a place to connect. Is there something we can learn from Fortnite’s success?
The magic circle is a game design term that refers to the space that is created when playing a game. A boundary, inside of which different rules apply, the rules of the game world. It’s a helpful concept to consider when designing spaces for gathering. What is the world that we want to create when we meet online, what are the rules, what are the boundaries, who can play? When we gather online with purpose it is us who defines the magic circle, not the platform, not big tech, us. We draw the lines, we make the rules, we decide when we enter the magic circle and when we leave.
I’m not saying that these online gathering places should replace physical ones, they should complement and augment them. Ignoring the power of online connection is not the way forward.
I feel we are at a turning point, there is a hunger to redefine our relationship with technology and take back some control. And perhaps, taking the time to define the purpose of our online gathering and putting boundaries in place will help. Creating our own magic circles. Playing by our own rules. Building places for gathering that are fit for purpose. These may take the form of new networks built on the values of participants or a ‘hacking’ today’s platforms to work better for us. Either way, it starts with defining our intention; what is the purpose of our gathering, and what place best fits that purpose?
