Creating and maintaining digital third places: Orchestrating interaction ritual chains at a distance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With online and offline lives increasingly intertwined, hybrid retail spaces are emerging as new social hubs akin to classical third places. Third places refer to spaces apart from work and home, such as cafes and bars, that provide opportunities for social interaction. While prior research has primarily conceptualized third places as physical establishments, it also acknowledges that online environments, such as multiplayer gaming platforms or chatrooms, can fulfil similar functions. Yet, despite the recognized social-supportive role of retail venues, relatively little is known about how third place atmospheres can effectively be orchestrated in online retail settings. This study addresses this gap through an ethnographic investigation of a digital platform that recreates a physical third place online, enabling consumers to gather for long hours, consuming, conversing, and socializing. We find that, in online retail settings, third place atmospheres can be cultivated through the deliberate orchestration of technology-mediated interaction ritual chains. Through three interconnected processes – ritual framing, boundary regulation, and affective synchronization – that unfold before, during, and after the gatherings, the online setting transforms into a digital third place. Both retailers and consumers play pivotal roles in this transformation. Drawing on these findings, we offer several theoretical contributions and managerial recommendations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it