One of my students pointed out this very interesting article from the Economist. It draws parallels between coffee houses as public places during the Enlightenment and the Internet today. I particularly like the discussion of 17th century European coffee house as a network for information exchange between writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists and as sources of democracy and innovation. The growth of coffee-houses in London (82 in 1663 and more than 500 by 1700) also seems to have many parallels to the explosive growth of the Internet in the 20th century. There is a short discussion of the role of academics in early coffee-houses, particularly of the Royal Society. For anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson’s newest book Quicksilver, I highly recommend it, also a nice (semi-historical) discussion of coffee shops and pubs, academia and I assume in the forthcoming 2nd and 3ed volumes in this series, a connection to the origins of digital technologies.
Interesting article from the BBC on a the use of data mining software that analyzes emails, Web activity and other documents to identify the location of individuals. spooks turn to hi-tech geography
According to Ipsos-Reid, Canadians (particularly young Canadians) are a social bunch when it comes to the Internet. My antidotal offline experience has always told me that my fellow Canadians were high in social capital; it looks like the same may be true online. According to the study 42% of Canadian adults who have Internet access have participated in chat sessions on the Internet, and 32% say that they have participated in interactive gaming (the average increases dramatically for those 18–34). I”m somewhat surprised by these numbers, email has long been the killer app of the Net, to see such a large number of adults using chat, IM and interactive gaming is astounding. Less surprising, and consistent with my own work, 24% of Canadian”s have met a person offline that they first came to know online. A full 14% of online Canadians have actually dated someone they first met online. This is good news for me, social acceptance of online dating has obviously increased and my wife and I can finally drop our “big fat lie” about having met at the library! Ipsos-Reid