The Third Place

There’s a commercial on at the moment advertising a coffee machine. Not that it’s called a coffee machine. No no. This is a “hot beverage system” and appears to be styled on the inside of an Audi TT. Although it could be said that the inside of an Audi TT already looks like an expensive coffee machine. Whatever the case, the machine is being sold on the strength that the group of twenty-something women featured in the commercial will no longer have to make the laborious trek to Antonio’s coffee bar and suffer his suggestive inanities as they can now get proper coffee in their own homes! Hooray for progress!

Now, where am I going to start with this? I’ll set aside the fact that the commercial is a product of the Soho advertising machine, a place alive with coffee bars which I’m willing to bet are stuffed to the gunwales with “creative” [sic] media types. I'll also leave the unsustainable packaging aside. No, the thing that riles me most is that this is another example of big business trying to muscle in on our Third Places.

We all need a Third Place. A place like the mythical Antonio's that isn’t work and isn’t home. A place where we have a set of social contacts who are more than strangers but not quite friends. A place where we can just be ourselves – read a book, drink a coffee, chat, play chess, watch people or what ever.

The recipe for successful Third Places continually evades replication by multinationals. Third Places grow organically where people need them. Cafés and pubs, garden centres and community centres, parks and allotments. They defy multinational copycats largely because their profits and turnover are too low or non-existent. They simply don’t make enough money. Many third places are cafés, but the cafés owned by multinationals are rarely third places, no matter how much they wish they were or tell us they are.

Despite aggressive marketing and land-grab tactics, the greatest threat to third places comes not from the chains of pseudo-cafés but from our own homes. They’re more comfortable and, if you have enough mains sockets in your living room, entertaining than they have ever been before. There was an advertising campaign a few years ago for a video game console with the hook line “welcome to the Third Place”. It’s a moot point whether many of the target market understood what the Third Place was, but the message was familiar enough. Why get rained on, mugged or have a pint of Irish cider (with ice) spilled down your back when you can get movies on demand, get better views at the football match, race cars and shoot aliens, have dinner delivered and make a hot beverage at the flick of a stylishly curved aluminium switch?

Two words: cabin fever. We all need to go out. Spending too much time indoors can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and a disconnection from society. Home cinemas and coffee machines give a glossy veneer to the experience but they are little compensation for a loss of real contact with people and with the natural world. The non-profit that I work for, the Sensory Trust, spends a considerable amount of effort making it possible for people who have difficulty going out to do so. And while we’re doing this multinationals are spending the equivalent of decades (perhaps centuries) of Sensory Trust budget advertising products that will keep more of us stuck in our homes for longer.

The fact is that we rarely go to Antonio’s coffee bar just for the coffee. In fact there are third places where the awfulness of the coffee is something that unites everyone who goes there. We go to see other people, to step out of our home or work lives and remember who we are when we’re just being ourselves.

The television commercial tells us not only that we should buy the hot beverage system but that we should rejoice that Antonio’s will be empty and be forced to close, presumably so that it can be replaced by a multinational franchise who is also a client of the advertising company. Then of course we can look forward to spending more time in our homes, watching television commercials… It's not only Antonio that suffers: public space budgets are the first in the firing line when no one goes to the park.

With any luck this won’t be yet another kick in the teeth for Third Places. The hot beverage system will join the toastie maker on eBay before the year is out. Hopefully Antonio will still be there when it does.

See also:

• Celebrating the 3rd Place by Ray Oldenburg
• The Church of Life After Shopping
• Starbucks Investor Relations

The Astronaut's Guide to Interpretation

How do you feel about water? There was a time not so long ago when water was just something that came out of our taps, that we were more or less grateful for depending on our mindfulness of people for whom clean water is a rarity. Water was something we drank because we were thirsty. We boiled vegetables in it, made soup and tea, and sometimes used it to wash the car, the floor and the dog.

H₂O hasn’t changed, but our perceptions of it have. Water is now something that is privately owned, talked about in headlines either because there’s not enough of it, or too much of it, or it’s in the wrong place such as your living room in Gloucestershire. Despite its best attempts, petrol is still cheaper than water on UK forecourts. We pay a premium for water that comes with a message on the bottle. This is not just water, this is water with marketing: it’ll make us perform like top athletes, or even a volcano. Stand back!

It’s nonsense of course, and most of us know it’s nonsense, yet we are so used to everything being packaged, rebranded and marketed to us that we take the marketing of water in our collective stride. Since the 1940’s industry has changed from manufacturing articles that fulfilled genuine needs to creating, then catering for, an expanding range of confected wants. These wants are created by a marketing industry specifically designed to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have. A satisfied customer, contrary to popular myth, is no use at all to the capitalist system. Western countries now spend trillions of dollars a year delivering increasingly sophisticated and pervasive messages through channels that invade every aspect of our waking lives.

“The average American adult is exposed to over 600 advertising messages in a single 24-hour period.” -- Managing Business to Business Marketing Communications, De Bonis and Peterson.”

Perhaps we have become inured to marketing messages. We no longer think about them, but are we resistant to them, or do we simply absorb them without thinking in the doctor’s surgery, the bus stop, our kitchen... everywhere?

It seems almost as though any item, water for example, no longer has a value unless it is marketed at us. The innate meaning of things has been subverted by marketing hype which has no other meaning than to make you want them. Water which, if you live in a fortunate part of the world falls freely from the sky, which once meant life, growth, survival, now means, amongst other things, health (drink two litres per day!), status (“The official water of Wimbledon”) or nothing at all (“Gives you Volcanicity!”). With this white noise of pseudo-meaning obfuscating the real meaning of something as fundamental as water, it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps this happens with other things that we might have expected to be free of marketing messages. If something doesn’t have a label that tells us it’ll make us healthier, sexier or free then it seems we are thought to be unable to judge its value for ourselves.

That’s where interpretation comes in. Interpretation is the natural and heritage world’s marketing hype. It seems we cannot be trusted to appreciate a woodland, a meadow or a piece of coastline on our own terms. We must be told why it matters, we must have the “brand relevance” forced down our throats for fear that we might miss the significance of what we are experiencing. To walk through a flower-filled meadow on a sunny early summer day means nothing unless you are aware that three hundred years ago women from the village used to bleach linen here and it is now home to a rare form of slime mould. And of course you should also know who owns, manages and protects it.

Fifty years ago it might have been enough to fall in love with a place because of the light through the trees, the sound of the river, or the laugh of the person you were with. Nowadays your stroll needs “added value” to compete in an aggressive marketplace desperate to sell you experiences.

The motivations of much interpretation are worthy. We can all benefit from a bit of extra connection with our environment and our history. Often, however, the proliferation of interpretation panels sets up a barrier to any real connection. In the same way as many gallery goers spend more time reading the labels than looking at the Monets, interpretation sets up a layer of experience between us and the direct experience of the environment. As soon as it’s interpreted, it’s packaged.

Interpretation hopes to explain the meaning of a place, but this meaning is someone else’s no matter how artfully constructed. Is laughing with your lover in a sunny field full of poppies wrong? Chances are it will feel, if not wrong then inappropriate, if you come to an interpretation panel that tells you of the bloody carnage that once occurred where you now stand. Your personal story has no chance against a pitched battle. The more interpretation that is present, the less space we have to imbue a place with our own meanings as individuals and as communities. New meanings, personal meanings, meanings relevant to now and to the future. And if we are prevented from creating our own meanings, we will never feel ownership of a place. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe an interpretation panel in a meadow is like the US flag on the moon, it’s more about who owns it than anything else.