I have published a new paper with a former student, Neeti Gupta, in the journal New Media & Society (NM&S), on wi-fi use in cafes. This paper explores how wireless internet use influences community, the trend toward privatism, and the social life of public spaces. It is based on ethnographic observations of four coffee shops located in Boston and Seattle: free wifi cafes and Starbucks locations. The paper concludes with mixed findings; that there are two primary types of wireless users that offer divergent implications for community and public sociability: networked individualism and glocalization. This paper also explores the possibility of \’contextual\’ or \’neighborhood effects\’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space. We hypothesis about the implications of municipal wi-fi (muni wi-fi) projects for public spaces in general.
Coincidentally, this past weekend the New York Times Freakonomics blog posted an article that discussed similar findings to what we reported in our paper, that there is a tendency for cafe owners to view wi-fi users as \’wireless squatters\’ and to push them out. The Freakonomics blog post was based on a study of Paris coffee shops.
The NM&S paper was written a couple years ago and ends where a more recent project on the \’Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces\’ begins. This broader study of wireless Internet use is based on observations of over 1300 laptop users, book readers, mobile phone users, and users of other portable media in seven field sites (parks, plazas, and public markets) located in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Toronto. A paper based on this project is currently under review.
If you do not have access to the NM&S article but would like a copy, send me an email.
In the last couple weeks I have made a few minor updates to my homepage. But today I decided to take it to the next level. I have added Twitter and will be making an effort to journal more of my informal life – nothing too personal, but all the things I wish I could put in my blog, but never have time, like what I’m currently reading, conferences I’m attending, interesting lectures, and interesting people. If you want to follow along, you can see it on my website, my Facebook profile, or here on my Twitter site. Stay tuned!
Over the last couple weeks there has been a burst of news items on how neighborhoods are using the Internet to communicate. The most interesting is this article from the New York Times on how a \”Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid\”. There was also an article in the Globe and Mail about an apartment building that is using Facebook to communicate, and an article about the opposite of communicating, from CNN how to publicly shame your neighbors: Annoying neighbors? Rant about \’em online.