Week 3: Being unwelcome

Ostracism, the four needs it threatens, and the fact that Oldenburg's eight rules never mention who is kept out.

8 March 2027

Cyberball should not work. Three players, a virtual ball, two of them stop passing to you after a while. Participants who are told the other players are computer programs still report the hit. Participants who are paid more the more they are excluded still report the hit. Williams’s account is that there is a reflexive stage that arrives before you have had time to decide whether being excluded here should matter — and it threatens four things at once: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence.

Then the point of the week. Go back and read Oldenburg’s eight characteristics and count the ones that describe who a place excludes. There are none. “Neutral ground” and “a leveller” gesture at openness, but they describe the experience of people already inside the room.

Every place you audited in week 1 has a boundary. Some of them are priced, some are cultural, some are a door that is hard to find, and some are a set of regulars who go quiet when a stranger walks in. The room does not have to intend any of it. This is the lecture where the course stops being a celebration of third places and starts being an investigation of them.

This Monday is Canberra Day. The lecture is recorded and released Monday morning instead of being delivered live; the Thursday Round runs as normal, and it needs the whole cohort in the room, so read the brief before you come.