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TV's sitcom bar, "Cheers," was a perfect, though fictional, example. The café Les Deux Magots in Paris was a real one for artists and intellectuals such as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. If you're lucky, you live near one, too: a coffeehouse, pub, barber shop or general store where you can visit and linger almost any time. You'll see people you know and people you don't, and no one makes you leave 'til you're ready.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg deemed them Third Places in his 1991 book, "The Great Good Place." He wrote that Third Places (not work, not home) are "the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy." But in the U.S., he wrote, we've almost lost them as people spend more time in cars or at home in front of a screen. And that was well before Facebook.
This week I spent a few days in Toronto at a conference for the Information Architecture Institute (iainstitute.org), which drew hundreds interested in the human mind, IT and how they intersect. One speaker talked about Oldenburg and proposed that online social networks are America's new Third Places.
Well, no.
This is a defense of the value of real places, where real people meet.
Online social networks can, of course, create social and business relationships. Facebook and Twitter enable much human discourse. Their popularity may well be fed by the lack of Third Places in our lives. Still, they are mere metaphors for the real thing.
A Third Place must exist in the three-dimensional world inhabited by the bodies of human beings.
Sure, at any hangout, what people talk about may resemble reading their Facebook wall or their Tweets. But being in someone's physical presence transforms the relationship. You hear vocal inflections and regional accents and notice whether their teeth are straight or their cuticles ragged. You may even smell them - for better or worse.
Not infrequently, when I meet politicians or other public figures whose opinions I completely disagree with, they turn out to be personable and sympathetic human beings. (And some are nutty as a Payday candy bar, but that's a column for another day.) Meeting in person isn't likely to change my views - or theirs - but seeing someone in the whole shifts the relationship.
Studies find anywhere from 65 percent to 93 percent of human communication is nonverbal - through tone of voice, small expressions and body language. That's why diplomats meet in person. It's why the president sits down with foreign leaders.
It's why real places - and real public places - matter.
Online, people tend to mingle with people they agree with. Observer reporter Jeff Elder reported recently that among Facebook users he interviewed, people on both sides of the health care reform issue thought most Facebook users agreed with them.
That may be making us ruder. Research shows that people in groups where all agree tend to become more extreme in their views, while people in groups that disagree become more moderate. As our neighborhoods grow more homogenous and public discourse moves online, we are moving to the extremes - and that's making people shrill and hostile.
By contrast, if you're lucky enough to have a Third Place you run into all kinds of people there: your neighbors whose political yard signs drive you bonkers, the odd guy who works at the drug store, people who may not be like you at all except in their liking for this place. Most likely you'll have at least a small, civil interaction. It will not be like the commentary on political blog sites.
It's no exaggeration to say that transactions of that sort - peaceable and in person - underpin civilization.
Maybe, indeed, we'll someday recall how posting on our neighbors' Facebook walls brought society together and enabled us to solve hatred and poverty and injustice.
But somehow I doubt it.
