Online People: Lenéa Sims
On third places, performativity, and the business of building communities online
This is the first installment of a new Q+A series called Online People, where I’ll talk with folks about their habits, hangups, and philosophies around social media and online life.
This week, I talked to Lenéa Sims, a community builder and educator who founded two online membership groups called Inner Play and Outer Work. Lenéa and I first met while on staff at our college’s student magazine, the Tufts Observer in 2011. The Observer was one of those spaces Lenéa might call a “third place” — somewhere that’s separate from both home and the workplace —not quite leisure and not quite labor— that opens up possibilities for creative interaction, process-oriented connection, and community building.
When I think of my own experiences with meaningful community, my mind goes to late nights with the Observer staff at the media lab, where we spent hours together each week making a magazine. It was an unusual and alchemic setting, bringing together students from different years and majors outside of their immediate social circles to sit alongside each other, reading drafts and learning the intricacies of Adobe InDesign, switching out our favorite playlists as we worked — there for no other reason beyond loving this shared thing.
It felt apt for this first Q+A to talk to Lenéa, who has carried so much of that spirit and those values into her work today. We discussed the possibilities for building and maintaining that same kind of magic in third places online.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What are Inner Play and Outer Work?
I call Inner Play and Outer Work dual education networks, which sounds really clinical, but basically, they're both membership sites. Inner Play is where I coach primarily young creative people in moving through spiritual blockages, helping them find purpose and direction through energetic self-care. I started that a year ago and then this past June, after George Floyd was killed, I started Outer Work, which originally was called the Inner Play Anti-Racism Practice Group.
Instagram has been an important tool in your work, but you’ve also been vocal about your hangups with the platform. Can you talk a little bit about that?
The performativity on Instagram is something that I had noticed but never really been able to put into words until last summer when it became a social justice platform all of a sudden. Of course, the disclaimer is that there was a lot of good that came from that. But at the same time, it became really clear to me that Instagram was becoming this very toxic bubble of outrage and not doing anything.
A perfect example of this is when I posted something on the Outer Work Instagram about what it means to actually practice anti-racism. I had a poll that was like, "Do you feel like you've been practicing?" and one hundred percent of people said 'Yes.' And then right after I posted, "What does your practice look like?” And literally, no one replied to me. It just became really clear that people were conflating the performance of posting about issues — posting about problems, spreading information— with action. And that was really frustrating to me.
What do you feel is missing from existing social media platforms and online communities?
Recently I watched “The Social Dilemma” and then I watched “The Social Network” again, not necessarily on purpose — I just happened to watch them both within a month of each other. And I started thinking about how when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, it was supposed to be only at your college. And that's the beauty of what it used to be like: it was like an extension of my social life at school. With Instagram now being our primary social tool, especially during the pandemic, it's kind of like we don't have anything that ties us together besides Instagram. It's not like we have a common school connection or even a common career connection. It's just like we're all existing in our own lives. And then we're using Instagram as the focal point. What’s missing in social platforms today is a forum to reflect on behavior. Because there are no moderators, no leaders in the space. And I think that's also important.
Yeah, I feel like so much of social media today is designed to reward the image of an end product. Even the way the little squares function on Instagram’s grid, there's a sense of framing something that’s fully-formed. Like, here I am living my best life with very little acknowledgment of process, which can feel inhuman.
And like, what does a person need to grow? You know, I think it keeps us stuck where we are, more so than it helps us to advance. I was just talking to someone about this yesterday because I was explaining the concept of a third place, which is a sociological term that's basically a space that's not work and not home. So places like barbershops and coffee shops are the classic examples. Someone I know was saying that her third place was being in theater companies, which were places to learn about yourself while you did something that was fun for you and a place where people would show up and applaud you for what you've done so far, even if it wasn't perfect. And that really blew my mind. I was like, that's exactly what's missing, I think, from a lot of our lives.
I think of Inner Play and Outer Work almost like physical third places. Mighty Networks is the platform I run them on, which allows you to build your own niche social networks on specific topics or shared interests and you can charge access for them or not. I feel really excited about the platform because there’s a common thread. It's really blown my mind how powerful both of the spaces have become in terms of how open people are willing to be, how much more care and thought they put into the things they say even when there's inevitably conflict that arises, and just having those tough conversations with so much grace.
You place an emphasis on collective consciousness and community action on your sites. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s an important value in your work?
For Outer Work it's particularly important because when we talk about anti-racism work or any form of oppression, I mean, the real clear-cut kind of way for all of us to take direct action in our lives is through community care. And so it's important to me that this space reflect that value by uplifting the community always. An individualist viewpoint on life is a white supremacist viewpoint and a capitalist viewpoint. So if we're going to kind of rally against those things, we need to embrace approaching things from a community point of view.
How do you put that into practice, especially at scale? Is scale even something that’s even desirable to you?
That's funny that you say that because I am in the process of opening of Inner Play right now for membership sign-ups again. And I'm thinking about putting a cap on. It feels very scary in a way because of this ingrained capitalism. But I also really want to preserve the space. I don't want to have three hundred people in there like talking about their feelings. For one, that's too taxing on me and I think it does also take away from exactly what we're building.
I really see the future of social networking as these niche social networks because I think they afford us so much more accountability. You get the ability to mold the group into something that you want it to be. You have to set an intention for the space if you want people to join it and I think that those barriers are necessary to build better communities online.
🌙 Lenéa’s Bookmarks
Reading:
*How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
*Pleasure Activism by adrienne marie brown
*all about love by bell hooks
*The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope
*Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh & Kai Elmer Sotto
Listening to:
*I'm really into the Chani app and have been listening to the mini astrology podcast and meditations there every week.
Parting shoutout to Jenna Rink, the patron saint of student journalism and making stuff you love (courtesy of Lenéa’s personal IG)