This Social Network Involves A Very Early Wake-Up Call
What’s the Latest Development?
Several times a week, a randomly-selected group of subscribers to a free service titled Call in the Night receives a phone call in the middle of the night that connects each of them to one other subscriber. After listening to a short prompt, the two people are then supposed to discuss a topic — their dreams, their night, or anything else — while their conversation is recorded. Clips of the resulting interactions may eventually appear on a corresponding podcast that’s still in development. Since it began in November, the “collaborative nighttime art experiment” has made more than 20,000 phone calls and amassed a subscriber base of over 3,000 people from across the US and Canada.
What’s the Big Idea?
Carnegie Mellon student Max Hawkins originally created Call in the Night to help him get a better handle on his own dreams. Now, he says, “[p]eople regularly have 1-2 hour long conversations on the service.” After trying it out for herself, writer Jam Kotenko says it’s a novel way to step out of the online comfort zone: “Call in the Night is part sleep experiment, part social network, all human interaction. And that’s more than you can say for most of the social services we ‘communicate’ on.”
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