mhoye (temporarily spooky)I don’t spend a lot of time on here telling you all how smart my kids are but today I was talking with my son about the idea of a “Third Place” and he mentioned how all these “coming of age” stories he’s read have kids "hanging out at the mall”, and what a weird, totally alien idea that is to him and his friends. “Did they even have places you could sit down or not buy anything then? None of us have money.”
“I wish I lived in a world where I had a third space that wasn’t my room” and God Damn I felt that.
If we don’t want kids staring at screens all day then maybe we should build a world where online multiplayer chat isn’t the only third space that teenagers have available to them.
Wyatt H Knott@mhoye We made our own "third spaces" no one did it for us. Yes, there were lots of malls, but there were also airport control towers, arboretums, school auditoriums (after hours, at schools we did not attend, and had to break into), commons (concrete "parks" in the middle of intersections,) tree houses (made with lumber stolen from local developments) etc.
Anyone pining for civic mandated "Third Spaces" should be forced to watch Over the Edge.
@Wyatt_H_Knott This is absolute nonsense. How the hell do you tell a teenager in 2025 that they should break into a school after hours to hang in the auditorium. And airport control towers? What?
@mhoye Well, we didn't have to break into the airport control tower. Logan used to have an observation deck below the controller's space, pretty sure it got closed after 9/11. The school auditorium was at Mass Art, which was across the street from a complex of Boston Public Schools, which we attended, and wasn't really locked. We snuck in, but this was before everything had ID readers on the doors.
@mhoye My point is that a bit of harmless juvenile delinquency has become felonious behavior in the surveillance state, and it's a shame. I'm not advocating anything, just reporting what ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN MY LIFE.
@Wyatt_H_Knott the world you did that in doesn’t exist anymore.
@mhoye I'm well aware