Monday Coffee Thoughts No. 6 (January 24, 2021)

Clubhouse is THE NEXT BIG THING in social networking...

Well, statements like this are all over LinkedIn, Twitter and all other major social media platforms these days. We are getting swamped with invites (thx for letting me in, Stefan Bielau) and announcements about meetups in clubhouse.

Well, after one week of clubhouse (and yes, a little lack of sleep here and there...), here is my personal 5 Cents of wisdom on it:

1.) Yes, I have been in amazing discussions at clubhouse over the past week - in fact I am listening to great talk on "culture in times of corona" as I typing my thoughts here (thx a lot to Nova Meierhenrich for announcing it here). I have "met" and heard great people speak like they were in my living room - one of them being the amazing Cawa Younosi from SAP. So, in that sense clubhouse is truly awesome!

2.) It′s definitely a product of the current time. In times of Corona we cannot meet to discuss or to just spend time together. All social life has moved to our homes so hey, clubhouse provides us with a great tool to meet, talk and to have fun. It′s a digital answer to lockdown isolation - and potentially a great one.

3.) There is a complete overload of programs - for each one room that is great and interesting to me personally, there are 50 others which I either don′t care about or in which it seems like people try to get their personal couple of minutes of narcistic fame talking complete bullshit and behaving like lunatics.

4.) Just today, there is a huge discussion in Germany about a discussion on clubhouse, in which leading German politicians and journalists were originally set to discuss the state of Corona in Germany. This is how it started. How it ended? In a mess - with politicians singing songs, ridiculing the German chancellor and confessing that they were playing candy crush while being in remote meetings of the German government with the governers to discuss Corona measures. This is disrespectful and shows the danger of a lack of self-discipline - a homy feeling on the couch on saturday night together with a couple of glasses (too many) of red wine cannot excuse such behavior! And of course, journalists as well as some of the 3.300 people in the room are happily communicating this disgrace. So, what we learn is, not to take clubhouse as some kind of alternative world in which you can say what you want without that having any consequences. Participative communication formats require self-discipline and responsibility!

So, is clubhouse going to be the next big thing? Well, it′s up to us!

In summary, it will be as always - clubhouse will be, what we make it. It is a tool for communication and participation. We put bullshit in, we get bullshit out - and the platform will not have too bright of a future and will remain as a niche-only platform for narcicists. If we use it wisely, it can be an amazing platform of interaction and a true clubhouse to meet some of the most interesting people. In that sense, clubhouse is purely demcratic - we can decide the outcome by ourselves. And it′s only up to us, the "club members"!