Third Spaces: A reimagined childhood

Courtesy of Unsplash

If you were to retrace the memories of your childhood, where would you begin first?

Every now and then, I come across a post on my for you page; think sappy slideshows dedicated to ‘2000s childhood memories you probably forgot’ that have long retired from my memory. Forgotten theme songs, discontinued toys, archived movies, you get the gist. What strikes me the most however, are the physical spaces; arguably mundane and liminal in their emptiness, yet why does my heart ache?

Retro carpeted cinemas with a lingering smell of caramel popcorn now renovated into minimal state-of-the-art luxury theatres. Those cascading red, yellow, green slides at the indoor playground which closed five years ago without a notice. For you it may be a KidZania you are now just too old for, the local library with PCs that no longer work the same way, or those trampoline centers with the grippy socks you were guaranteed to lose. 

These are what are known as third spaces; physical spaces that exist temporally between the first place (the home) and second (the work, the office, the school). It is in these third spaces where arguably, we could be ourselves with other children. We were free from the behavioural expectations and the closed-wall confinements of the home and school, and here the possibilities were endless.

However, in these volatile past few years, the number of these active third spaces have decreased. The new generation of kids, Gen-Alpha if you will, no longer have these same privileges of an outside world reserved just for them. Because for us, in these third spaces, the outside world hung on its axis and until the time came for us to go, you simply existed. 

Gen-Alpha after all, is the first generation victimised by a total Internet colonisation. As Gen-Z, we witnessed the shortcomings of the digital age; we foresaw the humble beginnings of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, we were the first entrepreneurs of curated realms like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters, and we watched as the Internet grew into what it has manifested into today.

But for Gen-alpha, the Internet looms over them like a predatory beast; it exists as a being and a space within itself, yet it is all-encompassing. We entered it sure, in a PC room with the noisy CPU boxes, or on our tablets when we could access our home WIFI, but after that we were free to escape back into our third spaces and remain blissful in our ignorance of what happened outside. 

For Gen-alpha, the Internet follows wherever they go; it permeates conversation and manifests itself in the form of iPad kids, physically unable to leave the realm of the Internet. Here the Internet has itself become a third place, and even the first, and the second. Simply put, there is nowhere else to go.

With the popularity of Internet devices and the soaring capitalised market of Internet ‘third spaces’, such as Roblox, Twitch comment boxes, Discord servers and TikTok dance stitches, the imagination of our children has transfused with the Internet away from the fantasy of innocence and into the dangerous possibilities of the ‘real’ world. And so, the beloved memories of our childhood disappear further away into a liminal presence, and slowly the number of physical third spaces begin to close. How many bookstores have you witnessed closing in the past few years? Or childhood cinemas turned cold and desolate?

This potentially poses a danger for the generation of today; children and even ourselves. Third Spaces are vital in establishing mundaneness, a concept of which the Internet completely opposes. In mundaneness, there is comfort and security in knowing that this space is reserved for you. We escaped the outside world, and we were free from it.

The viral Senate hearing between social media platforms’ big bosses (Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew and Evan Spiegel) is only an example of one of many cases. Here, in Gen-Alpha’s third spaces, there are no boundaries. Adults and children enter the third space, but without the expectations in physical third spaces of watchful parental and judging societal eyes. There are no restrictions, no codes, no age formalities; this is the first third space, the largest of them all even, where adults and children exist together, and the boundaries are limitless.