INVITATION TO LISTEN: MAPPING CLUBHOUSE’S EARLY INVITE-ONLY SOCIAL CAPITAL NETWORK

Abstract

Clubhouse has attracted roughly 10 million users to its platform since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as an invite-only, drop-in audio social network app. Yet, few studies examine Clubhouse as a new platform for conducting social media research, and even fewer examine the early invite-only growth of social audio apps. This study theorizes Clubhouse as an emerging social media platform during the COVID pandemic, and empirically investigates its communicative capacity, networked connections, and social dynamics. The primary contribution is a social network analysis of Clubhouse’s early users, wherein segmented networked publics based on invite links emerge. While some researchers explain that the growth of invite-only social networks is often attributed to a platform’s ‘cool factor,’ the growth of the early Clubhouse network reveals a hierarchy of social exclusivity among the networked publics, which indicates an embedded capitalist social structure and connection that grants more access to those with more social and economic power. These networked relationships provide insights into how invite-based emerging viral social media platforms are formed.