I was part of a private conversation about how to make a better version of online, audio hangouts, and it basically turned into how to not be Clubhouse and kind of still feel like a clubhouse.

It's one of a million attempts I've seen to fend off the loneliness epidemic, even a little bit. I respect the effort as much as I respect the beauty of how real relationships don’t scale. The balance between helping people out and how people have to help themselves but don’t know how - it hurts.

And I can’t help it, I want to try, too, which is how I end up in conversations like this.

I think I can boil down the sources of our lonely woes to one statement:

There's social media, and then there's a social medium, and they are so not the same thing.

Social media uses media because it's plural. You can connect with lots of people. But you can still be lonely because there's so much social the personal gets watered down. It's breadth over depth. There's just too much competition for attention, on average, to go from interesting to meaningful.

Social medium uses medium because it's singular. You can connect with one person at a time. Maybe a small group, but still, it's much more tedious and slow if you want depth versus breadth. The competition for attention gets horse-blinder'd once you lock in. At the risk of missing out on a million interesting topics, you get to meaningful relationship building with attention invested here.

There's also an invisible layer that deserves a shoutout here: the parasocial mediums. They're related to social media in that they are one-to-many, but unlike either social media or social medium, the para- in parasocial defines how attention only goes in one direction.

Think like when you listen to a podcast or watch a show and feel like you’re becoming friends with the host. It's got all the feelings of a relationship, but because the host doesn't know you, the reality is it's a one way street where you and a bunch of others might all feel the same way about a host who barely knows you exist as an individual.

It’s not a flaw - but it does help explain why social media and parasocial relationships can’t solve for a social medium like friendship.

The reason we need to write these words down and think about what they mean is that it's the only way to understand what each format can offer.

If you want to build meaningful relationships on social media - you won't. You can start them there, but you can’t go deep unless you take the relationship off-line into a social medium, which you can do, but understand the switch is a necessity.

Likewise, if you want to build a breadth of relationships or awareness, social media is great. Only talking to your same old friends at the coffee shop won't get your scene out there. The social medium of a friend group is no match for social media if you want or need scale.

Last but not least, if you want the in-between feeling of curating relationships across social media and the social medium, don't forget parasocial relationships. Podcasts, shows, anything where there's a host or idea curator, these are amazing ways to cover breadth with an awareness of realizing depth, for others in the audience to go social medium and reach out directly to you, or - they can go direct to the people you talk to/about.

What happens in social media is all that visible connection feels hollow because it is hollow. Social media is built for scale. And what happens in a social medium is all that actual connection sometimes feels like not enough because it’s a closed loop. Social medium are inherently anti-scalable.

Both contain these qualities as features. The only bug is in users who expect the wrong outcome. That's the loneliness epidemic in a nutshell for you.

Which, I can tie back to this private conversation I hinted at in the opening. It was an attempt by a mutually known person, to cross a bunch of social medium/friend groups together in a non-social media space, to experiment with the parasocial curation of interesting people and ideas to see what happens.

That experiment alone cannot scale. But if everybody who participates in an experiment like that tries to do it on their own, it might have some scale, if it doesn’t try to be Clubhouse which failed to grasp all these concepts from the beginning.

Get clear on what you’re using and why.

Footnote (because it’s my Personal Archive, which is a parasocial medium for the record!):

Podcasts/YouTube are my parasocial mediums. They are broadcast curation (one-to-many) via the audio/video platforms, via narrowcast connections (one-to-one) between me and the guest(s) collaborating on creating a direct conversation as an episode and then going into the real world to have direct conversations about the episode. Audience/total watch time is the scale focus.

LinkedIn/Twitter/? are my social media. They are broadcast communication of what I’m working on and thinking at a breadth-maximizing level. Audience reach/engagement is the scale focus.

Personal/Private interactions are my social medium. That includes talking to a guest on any show, in a slightly more superficial/narrowcast sense, or anything I do in real life (i.e. Secret Pizza Club with my wife and friends) in a super-communal sense. Deliberate anti-scaling only happens in “just have to be there” experiences, where anti-scale is the focus.

You really can leverage all three!