Along those lines.. One of the most interesting things I learned during the PlaceSite research, was about something called “SFnet” that existed in San Francisco cafes for a few yrs. in the early 90s. This was a proprietary network that consisted of coin-operated kiosks that an entrepreneur set up in SF cafes. Put a quarter in and you get basically multi-user text chat w/ other people in other SF cafes.

A very devoted community emerged around (or, alongside?) SFnet, a community that is still active on the “SFnet nostalgia tribe” on tribe.net, where more than 100 memebers still keep in touch each week.

Some of those folks tell me an important thing about SFnet was, the way the kiosks are set up, it’s not really a private thing and other people in the cafe can fairly easily see what you’re typing. Friends/acquaintances would use a kiosk together.

So these were used much differently from teh way laptops are used, and these folks don’t think you can replicate this w/ laptops — people would often watch others typing, not snooping but just as the accepted way this would work. The lesser privacy, they tell me, actually lead to more trust and a stronger community because at any time you’d have less reason to think someone on the other end is lying about their identity etc. And SFnet very often took place at the same time as face-to-face dialogue, it just added another dimension, another conversation piece to face-to-face talk…

Of course, these kiosks were expensive and the firm went out of business pretty quickly… But nonetheless there may be lessons there.

You can watch a favorite TV show, ball game or political debate on the tube with a group of friends, but surfing the web is usually a solo activity - one person to one screen. I think there is a more participatory aspect to internet use but at the expense of some disembodiment. My girlfriend and I can be computering and occasionally multitask some conversation, but I can’t really be aware if at any particular moment she is in the middle of charting some complex statistics or just reading boingboing.

Anytime I have my computer open I’m typically juggling several things (my inbox, some IM, RSS feeds, a photoshop project, and maybe some link hunting for a bulletin board discussion). The addition of the real world to that juggling often causes me to drop several balls.

Computers are excellent at bifurcating attention. And people with bifurcated attention will often make poor social companions. Teevee is a singular attention grabber and it takes little effort to pause or return our focus to it. We’ve also had a lot more time to become sophisticated to our use of television whereas the net terminal is still relatively new to the social environment.

I’ll be watching where things go with projects like your PlaceSite. I think the relationship between public space and these new technologies is really interesting.

I suppose you have to express that point emphatically to reporters and hope that will shake them out of the frame these quick-hit pieces are too often written within. I failed to do that w/ the P-I reporter. But then again, this surreal glut of “wi-fi free weekend” coverage has been about memes and about whatever media outlets are engrossed in right this minute, not about any real trend in cafes.

But: “Surfing the internet is even more engrossing and less social than watching television” Do you -really- think that’s true? Internet use is usually somewhat participatory, TV viewing is always completely passive, no?

Sean

Nancy E.

What about if you hang an old-fashioned, chiming clock on the wall… one that would cheerily ring out the hour, on the hour. And, for the head-phone wearers, offer a short electromagnetic pulse to get their attention, too.

I know, I know… you’re *not* looking for a solution. Got that. Some of us, however, ’specially those of us with long careers in the advice business, can’t seem to help ourselves. ;)

Best,

-deCadmus

That P-I piece drove me insane. It was so blindingly obvious that the writer had no concept whatsoever of the specialty cafe business and that those “marketing analysts” or whatever were complete and utter fools. I mean good god people, not every cafe on the planet is a Starbucks and they most certainly don’t all have the same business model.

I especially liked the comment about those “high margin pastries” and how important it was for business that you sell a lot of those….