[ad_1]
Guys, guys, have you heard about Clubhouse? Oh, you did, a few months back? Someone sent you an invite for this exclusive audio platform and for a moment you felt special.
You’d heard that Oprah Winfrey and MC Hammer were dropping in for online supper clubs and Elon Musk turned up to host a talk.
But when you logged on for an evening or two, all you could find were rooms full of self-appointed speakers rambling about start-up success and cryptocurrencies. You considered your inevitable mortality and decided there was a better way to spend your time between now and then. Well, me too.
I was surprised this week, not just by its new notional valuation of $4bn after its latest round of funding (up from a $1bn valuation in January), but how quickly it has morphed from its founders’ intentions for C-suite and creatives: it seemed to be performing a social good.
If you haven’t explored Clubhouse, in a nutshell, it has all the social graces of the receptionists at a private members’ club who, despite your £3,000-a-year membership, stare at you like you are an inconvenience.
A friend nominates you. You accept. Clubhouse’s receptionist then data mines your contacts and, as they sign up, asks whether you’d like to “walk†some of them in. The first three walk-ins it suggested for me were a former colleague who I’d hide behind a pillar to avoid, someone with whom our last correspondence was via lawyers and an ex who really doesn’t want to see me again.
The next problem is what to do when there, gliding from room to room, not finding any friends and walking in on talks where the speakers are having their 15 seconds of fame — the average time I spend before boredom sets in. It is an uncurated cacophony of voices — no video — often with only a handful listeners in each talk despite Clubhouse boasting 14m downloads since it started 12 months ago. Even so, companies from Twitter to Reddit are scrambling to emulate it.
Among the highlights this week were how to monetise TikTok (Clubhouse is working on its own monetisation scheme), how to be a great speaker — not by listening to another talk about it, let me tell you — and one with an intriguing title which I had assumed was a typo: Flatulence as a Trust Building Exercise. It wasn’t. They were actually talking hot air.
As in the early days of the internet, people don’t conform to the expectations of the founders. It wasn’t academic papers that drove its expansion in the 1990s. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook wasn’t initially about data, just making friends. Clubhouse, aiming to foster civilised conversations through structured conversations, is already having to ban people for anti-Semitism.
But there is an upside: those founders don’t always understand the real democratising force of their products either. Recall Twitter, founded as a quick messaging service that in 2011 became a tool for the popular gatherings in the Arab Spring.
If you had tuned in on Monday you would have found over 700 people in one of the largest rooms in the app that day, tuned in for a slightly crackly broadcast of the closing arguments in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was, the next day, found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. It was relayed from the US’s official Court TV.
It was impossible not to stop and listen closely to the single line of audio, to the meanderings of the defence lawyer, to the mechanics of a trial for hours on end. No hype, no glitz.
Twitter, a much larger platform, played it too, to an audience of 8,000 at the close, and the New York Times and YouTube ran live streams. What set Clubhouse apart was that, when the jury was sent out to deliberate, the group who had organised the streaming asked the audience to respond.
As Clubhouse had said, the point about using voice rather than text is that it conveys emotion. Lawyers within its community spoke first to explain obscure legal points but there was no dominant presenter, just an audience — majority black — responding with questions and interventions. You could hear anxiety and pain.
It is the law of unintended consequences. Clubhouse pitched itself on razzmatazz and networking. But when it comes to attending the virtual courthouse on the matter of justice, everything else looks trivial in comparison.
There are things that build the reputation of any new medium or format. For Clubhouse, it might be that this is a place to listen, and not just to the usual voices.
Follow Joy on Twitter @joy_lo_dico
Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
[ad_2]
Source link
