Thursday, March 11, 2021

New Social Network: Clubhouse

I was invited to the Clubhouse. It's not a club where you enjoy alcohol, no food, no tables, no lights. I just 'connect' through my iPhone. So begins the column on the Diagnosis of the Times in the Catholic Peace Weekly on the new SNS media. But Isn't this already common? Internet communities, online clubs, various messengers, group chat rooms, and social networking sites?

Nevertheless, Clubhouse is the talk of the town. Bitcoin's stock price soared recently after innovator CEO Elon Musk, who can make U.S. stock prices fluctuate, had a discussion about Bitcoin in the Clubhouse. Elon Musk's Tesla announced that it will buy Bitcoin and use it as a method of payment. Microsoft founder Bill Gates also popped into the clubhouse and talked to thousands of ordinary users about the coronavirus vaccine. Every day, interesting articles about the clubhouse are pouring out.

He gave the Clubhouse a great deal of thought. They're trying to attract attention from the so-called celebrities, trying to make it well known for marketing purposes. Then he was invited to the clubhouse. So he had another experience of traveling around in a new world.

There are several interesting features to why the Clubhouse is receiving social attention. The first is that you can enter only through an invitation. This method is very fairytale-like, it may indicate a secret door to escape from some of the bitter experiences of daily life.

Second, if you install an app and enter through an invitation, this is possible only with iPhone users. What online service covers iPhones and Android phones these days? It's not a very small company, there is a suspicion that it is hiding its strategy.

But thirdly, the most important feature of the clubhouse is the voice-based chat service. When you create your own account and enter the clubhouse, users gather in twos and threes, or hundreds or even thousands, to talk about living with a purpose-oriented theme or without any purpose, and all this communication consists only of your own voice. Voice chat, which feels like many people are talking on the phone at the same time, a digital non-face-to-face service, but stimulates our sensibility and conveys the feeling of people.

It has been about a year since the service began in the U.S. due to strange restrictions, which are now not accessible to everyone, but it has been described as a new virtual space; only been a month or two since its explosive popularity. The scene of deep conversation with people whose faces you don't see and meet only with their voices remind us of the young people in the movie "About Time" turning off all the lights and having a blind date in a dark restaurant.

At this point, a fundamental question comes to mind. We already have a lot of tools for non-face-to-face communication, but why do we need a new SNS? The answer he gives for the Clubhouse is our terrible loneliness.