Clubhouse chat beating social media trolls
For better or worse, site offers conversation among the like-minded
I didn’t mean to spend 20 minutes listening to people talk about Sikhism. I’m not even religious. But somehow, that’s just what I did after a notification from Clubhouse popped up on my phone, and I found myself listening to people talk about the religion and how it fit into the modern world.
Clubhouse is the latest evolution of social media. It is part audio chat room, part social radio show and part group phone call. Users can start “rooms” on any topic they like, invite people in and then have audio-only conversations. Participants can, if hosts allow it, raise their hand to chime in, or they can simply listen as they sit around, walk down the street, or do the dishes.
The app is also the latest to follow that familiar trajectory of passing from niche to sud- denly being talked about everywhere. Like many apps of old, its early adoption amongst the tech community meant that there were initially a lot of nerdy topics: bitcoin, venture capital, startups. Now, as users have piled on to the app, you can find discussions on no end of topics: politics, learning languages, meditation, side hustles — basically anything you want.
It is a surprising evolution, in part because Clubhouse is not alone. Twitter debuted a very similar feature called Spaces that lets users form audio chat rooms. Instagram now lets multiple users host live streams. And, inevitably, if something is successful, Facebook will copy it and launch their own.
The shift is intriguing, both because it is something new, but also what it represents. After all, an audio chat is perhaps closer to the internet ideal: social and always potentially interesting, but also ephemeral and casual. It is, in some sense, a reaction to the far more acrimonious, even broken nature of other social media. A casual audio chat? More than anything, it’s a relief.
In fact, part of the popularity of Clubhouse stemmed from just those sorts of complaints about Twitter in particular. The venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz invested in the firm, and its founders and employees also formed part of its early user base. Frustrated with the tech backlash of the past few years, they found the invite-only app a way to limit conversations to friendly, protech, pro-capitalist audiences.
The turn to audio is thus a way to try and revive the intimacy of the early web. But it is also a similar kind of smallness, in that it is formed through artificial limits.
In that sense, it reveals a tension between, on the one hand, the idea of social media as a grand public sphere where ideas are debated and the powerful are held to account, and more the mundane idea that public social media in particular is often miserable and draining. On Twitter in particular, there is a culture that has evolved that is acrimonious and antagonistic, encourages leaping to the least charitable interpretation, usually along tribal lines, and true conversation is not just rare but frequently pointless.
By contrast, Clubhouse is a way to discuss your perspective or engage with the like-minded without the incessant drive-by, scattershot criticism and ridicule one is subject to on other platforms. It is, for the time being, invite only, and also only on Apple phones, which constrains who is there. Talking about everything from cancel culture or trans rights, to the latest Marvel show or Taylor Swift is much easier when you do it among people who are more likely to think like you.
How you feel about that tends to depend on where your sympathies lie. Journalists such as the New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz have criticized the ability to block out certain people from rooms, which then closes off those conversations from public view.
Perhaps the most clear advantage audio has, however, is that it is more easily ephemeral and immediate than text. The tone and cadence of speech so lacking in written statements is still there on Clubhouse and Spaces, and it’s far more easy to have a sympathetic reading of someone’s views when you can hear them said out loud. And while it is of course possible to record conversations, the sheer number and scope of them on Clubhouse makes it far more likely anything said will be heard by listeners and then evaporate into the air like steam.
That feels to me strangely comforting. The rise of audio apps seems precisely a reaction to the fact that the ideal of social media as an open town square comes with profound downsides — and that social media in its current form often feels, quite simply, broken. The constant inflammatory rhetoric and draining pace now appear to be more features than bugs, and even the most committed social media users recognize that while each platform has its uses, they also have many disadvantages. And while Clubhouse, too, will soon face the problems all other platforms have — hate speech, moderation and a culture that may lean too close to libertarianism — for now at least, it feels like a break.