Clubhouse: for when you miss bumping into (or actively avoiding) people
So I got on Clubhouse two weeks ago and within the first hour of being “online,” I spotted the tell-tale green circle next to my friend Julia’s name, and we started our own audio chat room. It was...exciting? We had basically...bumped into each other? out in the wild? After we spent a few minutes shouting at each other on speakerphone about how to use this dang thing, there was a pause and then Julia whispered, “So……...is this basically a conference call?”
And we had a nice laugh over that because it pretty much was, except without all the annoying trappings of our current Zoom reality: it felt spontaneous, low-commitment, and blessedly did not involve turning any kind of camera on. I think I was tweezing my brows as we chatted (sorry J).
The spontaneity, I think, was key: I know I’m not alone in getting to the point, pandemically, where the mental load of scheduling phone calls and Google Hangouts in advance can take on the same connotations as scheduling/preparing/anticipating a work meeting, no matter how much I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing someone. (I swear guys!)
There’s the Zoom fatigue, AKA the exhaustion of continually grimacing into a wall of pixels for hours, of course. But there’s also the unnaturalness of now having to slot all your human contact into 45-minute Gcal time windows, too. Amanda Mull talked about this in the context of how the pandemic has erased entire categories of friendship, and I think it’s also what undergirds the novelty of Clubhouse.
Because of course Julia and I could have scheduled a phone call, or I could have literally walked 30 minutes over to her neighborhood. I even could have cold-called her (why am I using sales terms to describe friendship……to be examined in another rambling essay TK), but the millennial in me is still hard-wired to think that move is saved for emergencies. Plus it was late!
In the following weeks, I found myself checking Clubhouse out of habit, curious to see who else was online. I quickly “ran into” some Twitter pals and then spotted some old co-workers chatting and “joined in”; the week after, I had an 8-minute catch-up with a friend in Korea and a 1-hour hang with cross-country newsletter pals (hi Jessie hi Terry) that reminded me of those fun “getting to know you” happy hours we used to do when mutual friends got introduced to each other after work. It was easily the most socializing I’d done all winter.
Anyway, if you want a really deep-level analysis of how Clubhouse is the anti-Twitter, Will Oremus predictably has the goods, especially on how the hierarchical nature of the platform (which, to be clear, comes with its own problems) solves the issue of context collapse we get with Twitter (a phenomenon known as Get Me Off This Hellsite) and returns a sense of smallness to our social networks.
But if you just want the tl;dr (TOO LATE lol) assessment of Clubhouse, it’s this: don’t get too caught up in the weird Linkedin bro energy vibing in most of the “club rooms” — most of them are either too chaotic or too boring or too white dudely. Think of it more like a 2021 version of AIM, except you’re not in seventh grade and also there isn’t a place to post passive aggressive lyrics to (I mean there’s a bio page if you REALLY want). The overall appeal of Clubhouse is probably very COVID-specific, but who am I to get optimistic about how little time I’m gonna spend lurking on social media on a weekend night when this is all “over”?
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