TikTok is a mostly brain-numbing app, typified by vapid Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos, your typical celebrity gossip click-bait, and some confoundingly nonsensical political takes (recall when TikTok influencers were taking to the platform to praise Osama bin Laden for his repulsive Letter to the American People?)
The app - again, mostly a toxic, digital wasteland - will turn you into a proper misanthrope.
User @madisonraetogo, however, is one exception to the rule.
Madison, in a TikTok-original series she calls "Can It Third Space?" travels around the U.S. to find venues that more or less fit Ray Oldenburg's definition of a "Third Place."
In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg writes that a third place is...
a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.
Madison has her own variation of the Oldenburg criteria for a third space:
1. "It has to be free entry;
2. we have to meet someone;
3. vibes."
While these criteria for third places don't match up exactly with Oldenburg's (Oldenburg mentions low-barrier to entry, not necessarily free entry; he emphasizes the informality of these places and their conduciveness to conversation; the concept of social leveling is extremely important; etc...), it's close enough.
Madison takes us to Washington Square Park in NYC, and cafes and art museums throughout Florida.
After spending some time in these places - and making some valiant effort to socialize with total strangers - she employs a 1-10 rating system.
Her comments throughout these videos are thoughtful, witty, and perceptive. A much welcomed respite from the cacophony of nonsense on TikTok, for sure.
Many people I speak to about this subject lament what they perceive to be the decline in America's social capital and civil society. I, too, share that same lament. The good news, though, is that people - young people, in particular - are yearning for community and social connection in a world of uprootedness and atomization.
Robert Putnam must be taking solace in the fact that young people today no longer want to bowl alone.
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