The Other Third Places We Need

Wild Waves/Enchanted Village, Seattle’s schlocky amusement park, is closing and I couldn’t be sadder about it. While significantly crappier than a Disney Park or even a Six Flags, running around Wild Waves is a rite of passage for many Seattle-area adolescents. It is THE end-of-year good behavior field trip that makes students think twice about racking up detentions.

It’s not just Seattle—since 2020, at least 10 major American amusement parks have closed and many regional parks are struggling to return after pandemic losses. Nor is it just the rollercoaster lovers that are in trouble, other classic teen hangouts like malls are in serious decline. High school dance attendance is down too, blamed largely on teens preferring screen-based activities like gaming and scrolling.

Where are the teens supposed to go? Is this just another sign of the times? Am I merely weeping for my own Millennial nostalgia, shaking my fist at a generation that would rather be playing Roblox?

Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Online Connection is Still Connection…Right?

It’s not like kids these days are digital hermits. Observing my own teens and their friends have showed me that many of their online activities are, in fact, very social. My sons love to game with friends while chatting away over headsets, alternatively strategizing and trash-talking.

Likewise, technology enables teens to stay connected outside of school in ways an elder Millennial like me could only have dreamed of. Heck, we were confined to the world of desktops, dial up, and, if you were lucky enough, AIM chats. (Pity the rural kids like me, who were beyond the reach of AOL.)

This heightened connectivity is also seen in the sprawling online presence of events like prom. This dance, one of the few to survive the decline, has spread into cyberspace, with kids planning (and posting) elaborate “prom-posals” and girls hopping into online groups to share which dresses they’ve purchased so that—gasp!— no one shows up in the same ‘fit.

And yet, while the average teen has a higher quantity of social connections, the quality of these interactions has changed. Instead of tying up a family landline with marathon phone calls, many kids now mainly communicate via brief DMs. And that text-based communication has its downsides: it’s both less stimulating to the brain and lacks context clues (like facial expressions and tone of voice) leading to higher instances of misunderstanding.

Studies show, we need face-to-face interaction to form deep relationships, but our technology is increasingly crowding out this option. Gaming systems have shifted away from in-person together play (via shared account and split-screen) to siloed play on separate accounts and screens. While older technology like the Nintendo Switch makes multiplayer, in-person gaming easy (provided you have enough controllers), many popular games and systems (such as Roblox or Xbox’s Halo) set up a ridiculous amount of hurdles to in-person gaming.

There’s also a serious downside to real-life events turning into social media spectacle. This technology is, by nature, performative—are you actually having fun at the prom or are you merely performing having fun for your followers? If so much of your social life revolves around your platform, can you ever completely forget the virtual audience? Teen brains are already wired to see peer acceptance as a life-or-death situation, adding parasocial pressure is like throwing gasoline on an open flame.

Why Community Needs Physical Space