The Internet in A Cup

You clearly don't have to be Fellini to figure out how blogging relates to the coffeehouses of the 17th, 18th, and even 19th centuries in Paris and London.  And it didn't take long for me to find a cool article about it: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NNRTSPG

The article talks about how lively coffeehouses were, and I can clearly make the link between the Internet and coffeehouses, but not so much between the coffeehouses of yore and something like Starbucks, or even a local, independently owned place.   The description of coffeehouses as places to socialize in a broad sense is what is interesting to me, since I think that today's actual coffee shops are places were people largely go to be alone, together.  And, of course, to surf the web.

And I loved the little poem about coffee.  I am clearly biased, but coffee is truly one of man's (or God's) greatest inventions:

..that Grave and Wholesome Liquor,
that heals the Stomach, makes the Genius quicker,
Relieves the Memory, revives the Sad,
and cheers the Spirits, without making Mad.


I think the rule that anyone who starts a quarrel has to buy coffee for everyone else is a good one, although we need to be clear that a lively intellectual debate differs greatly from a "quarrel."

All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment shall be under the Article of White's Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; Learning, under...Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News, you will have from St James's Coffee-house.

I think we may need to come up with a name for our coffeehouse.

Another great quote from the article:

The more literary-minded, meanwhile, congregated at Will's coffee-house in Covent Garden, where for three decades the poet John Dryden and his circle reviewed and discussed the latest poems and plays. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary on December 3rd 1663 that he had looked in at Will's and seen Dryden and “all the wits of the town” engaged in “very witty and pleasant discourse”. After Dryden's death many of the literatured shifted to Button's, which was frequented by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, among others. Pope's poem “The Rape of the Lock” was based on coffee-house gossip, and discussions in coffee-houses inspired a new, more colloquial and less ponderous prose style, conversational in tone and clearly visible in the journalism of the day.

Again, although I can quite clearly see the functional link between the internet and coffeehouses, the atmosphere described in the article produces a quite different effect, I think, than that of sitting alone at home (or even in the midst of a crowd) blogging on the net.  It will be interesting to see how both of these conventions work over the course of the semester....

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