Networked Spaces Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The private, individual use of the laptop (a portal for immaterial, networked space) in the public, shared and material space of the coffee shop is a ubiquitous phenomena, ingrained in the quotidian life of many US cities, and perhaps none less than New York. At the outset this paper identifies the laptop in the coffee shop (henceforth LITC) as an urban condition that occurs, rhetorically and materially, at the intersection of many contemporary threads: networked space, the public sphere, the commodification of urban space and the rise of telecommuting, to name but a few. Yet, as such, the implications of this inherently synthetic quality have been little probed.

The coffee shop itself has, of course, had an enduring place in discussions of urban publics. From its putative role in the emergence of the public sphere in late 17th century Europe (as famously penned by Jürgen Habermas), it has played a continued role as a figure in relation to questions of ‘publicness’ - indeed, into the present. Likewise, albeit in a more recent context, a burgeoning of amount of research has considered how the internet (and devices providing access thereto) provide a new type of public sphere, and–as ’networked space’ has gained more legitimacy as a spatiality– an expanded public realm. It is perplexing then that despite the extensive, ongoing research into these two fields which bear so closely upon it, the LITC has seldom been considered as an urban public space, nor as as potential site or medium of the public sphere.

Identifying this as a glaring gap, this paper attempts to cast light on this phenomenon by bringing the many fields upon which it touches into a critical, directed dialogue. The paper is split into two sections. In the first, I outline how the conditions propelling the coffee shop's rapid emergence in American cities the early 1990s–as an archetypal component of the postmodern city that was transmuted in its infancy by the ICT revolution–are critical to understanding its current existence as a unique urban public site. In the second section, I further unpack the LITC as a site, illuminating it as a ‘blurry’ place whose characteristics–a multiplicity of spatialities, practices, interactions–bare much resemblance to the “thirdspace” espoused by Edward Soja (with a few minor tweaks). Finally, I deploy to Habermas’ coffee-house as a useful comparison through which to deliberate the role of the LITC in relation to the public sphere, and thus to speculate on the continuities and differences between the coffee-house past and the present.