Are laptops ruining the coffee shop?
By Michael W. Jones
Technology is beginning to leave a mark on one of the proudest traditions of American gathering and discourse, the coffee shop. No conversation, no philosophy, just the quiet clacking of laptop keys.
For longer than most people can remember, coffee shops in America have been a place where locals gathered to take a little caffeine orally and discuss the issues of the day. That was true of the small-town coffee shop for absolutely forever in this country. It carried over perfectly into coffee shops in downtowns and neighborhoods in American cities. Even when the coffee shop changed, morphing into a place where caff and decaf gave way to lattes and mochas, the tradition was kept whole via conversation with more expensive coffee drinks.
Quietly and insidiously, ten or so years ago, technology began to invade the coffee shop. People began to bring their laptops with them rather than read the newspapers and magazines on the coffee shop tabletops. It has always been easy to interrupt that periodical reading with conversation when someone you knew came in, or a conversation at the next table became interesting.
That seems not to work with laptops. People come in, buy a coffee, open the laptop and don’t move or say a word for hours. Sometimes now, coffee shops seems to be veritable silent seas of laptops and their owners, stuck in a silent intellectual dance with each other, forgetting even that anyone else is in the place. Head down, earbuds in place, coffee gone cold, eyes getting bleary, the very picture of isolation. The only words anyone says are things like “skinny half-caff hazelnut latte,” words that would have been unrecognizable in most coffee shops a couple of decades ago.
This is tough on the owner of these businesses. The laptop people very often order the cheapest drink available and tie up a table or a comfortable soft chair for hours. There is no money to be made giving away free wifi, free table space, and free electricity to someone who is spending less than a dollar an hour. According to an article in the Independent, coffee shops in New York are banning the use of laptops, turning off their wireless routers, taping up the electrical outlets, and putting up anti-laptop signs. You can’t blame them. They are, after all trying to make a living.
That is not the worst part of it, though. Where once coffee shops helped us to communicate, they are now helping us to be more insular. Where once they were a place to discuss the issues of the day, sort of a caffeinated town hall meeting, now they are full of silent people bathed in the eerie glow of backlit LCD screens. It is time for us to make beachheads in our coffee shops, time to take back the territory of great non-alcoholic American discourse and camaraderie. If you want to talk only to your laptop, stay home. Go to a library. Better, go to a mausoleum. Coffee shops are for meeting and talking with friends and strangers. Coffee shops are for companionship and conversation. The sooner we get back to that ideal, the more problems of the world we can solve, one cup of joe at a time.
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August 8th, 2009
Excellent, excellent post. I couldn’t agree more. Not only are people on their laptops, but they’re often using headsets. Or, all you hear out of them is the sound their laptop makes when sending or receiving email.
Those New York coffee shops are where I’d like to be. The last vestige of American conversation…
August 8th, 2009
They should use special non-standard power plugs and rent adapters. They can require people spend a minimum amount per time period. There are plenty of ways these shops can monetize, who are they (or we) to DICTATE that we MUST interact with other persons if we don’t want to? I enjoy a good conversation over a good cup of coffee as much as most, but sometimes I’m not in the mood to chit chat.
August 9th, 2009
Funny, the coffee shop I frequent often has three people at a table, sharing a laptop & conversation. It’s a tool like any other, you can use it for socialization or isolation.
A lot of the Bigbucks shops charge for use of their wifi, which may increase the sense of isolation — you’re on the clock, so you’re going to take care of your laptop needs before moving on to anything else.
August 10th, 2009
The fantastically wonderful Coffee Song!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0k97U6LlYk
November 11th, 2009
The Economist, in an article on “The New Oases”, included a great quote from James Katz describing this phenomenon: “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated”. Keith Hampton and Neeti Gupta, in a study on Community and social interaction in the wireless city: wi-fi use in public and semi-public spaces, noted the “contextual effects” that occur when a critical mass of laptop users are present in a coffee house. I’m curious, though, since nearly all coffeehouses these days offer WiFi, and so nearly all have some proportion of the customers there are using laptops, whether you have a sense of where the dividing line lies, beyond which the coffeehouse starts to have a “psychologically evacuated contextual effect”.