By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering The coffeehouse and the bar. Now the club. What a good club? Bright lights and loud music. Lots of us in one place. The chance to dress up. And be seen. Tribalism? Why is the club a place we love? It's certainly not to have a conversation. Or to wrap ourselves in the conversations of others. That's what the coffeehouse is for. And it's not really to network. Or to reach out to new friends. A good club is a nerve center of fascinating people. But we don't renew old friendships while looking for the new here. That's the draw of the bar. So what else? The club is about celebration. About being with other people. Massive numbers of people. Considered as masses of other people. We engage in a type of objectification of the people around us at the club that wouldn't otherwise be acceptable. We willing turn the people around us into agents in a play or a spectacle that we come to see and wind up playing in ourselves. Brokering this fantasy seems to be an important part of celebration. Does the voice determine our experience at the club? Absolutely. By all but disappearing. When we think of the club we think finally of a place that we love that does away almost completely with the voice. The environment forbids against it. We come to listen. But to the music. And not to each other. In the club we build ourselves a place not to listen but to experience with each other. There's an element of this in the movies. Shared experience with many people around us. (And maybe more intimacy than that with the person right next to us.) But the movies and the club do different things with time. Movies package time into a box. The clubs open up time for celebration. ---Voice makes the places we love. At the coffeehouse we meet with the voice as reassurance. At the bar, as companion, helping us navigate new friendships and old. For a night out dancing we trade our voices to celebrate with others. We multiply examples and we find the voice to be a reassurance, a tool and powerful determiner of social context. These things can only help us in the experiences we seek out and the way we choose to help ourselves and others. Starting next week we'll look closely at what it means to help. And we'll ask ourselves what voice and collaboration have to do with each other.