studies

This note considers studies of cybercafes and LAN cafes.

It covers -

• the literature
• relationships
• policy
• precursors

     the literature

There has been surprisingly little in-depth study of cybercafes and similar venues for access to cyberspace.

Research has essentially centred on three themes -

• the sociology of cybercafes in advanced economies, in particular as "technosocial spaces" or manifestations of the 'city of bits'
• internet kiosks, 'tele-cottages' and community access points as mechanisms for rural revitalisation (eg through teleworking) in advanced economies
• use of cybercafes and similar venues for bridging various digital divides in emerging economies

For an entry to literature about the wired city see William Mitchell's contentious City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995) and David Wilmoth's more persuasive 2003 Information Infrastructure & the Connected City (PDF). Other pointers to architecture and urbanism are here.

     relationships

Academic fashions in the deconstruction of social relationships and cultures are evident in Shaping e-access in the cybercafé: networks, boundaries and heterotopian innovation by Sonia Liff & Fred Steward

the properties of Foucault's heterotopia are expressed in cybercafes, but to differing degrees explained by contrasting types of boundary spanning practice

in David Prater & Sarah Miller's 2002 article We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other: The Internet & the 21st Century Street and in 'LAN cafés: cafés, places of gathering or sites of informal teaching and learning?' by Catherine Beavis, Helen Nixon & Stephen Atkinson in 5(1) Education, Communication & Information (2005).

Anne Laegran & James Stewart's 2003 Nerdy, trendy or healthy? Configuring the internet café article suggests that

internet cafes are not just adapting a universal concept in the process of configuration, but that some shared images are played with in different ways. The nerdy, trendy and healthy are translocal images that are played with in the configuration process, creating locally specific and embedded spaces. ... the internet cafe is neither a footloose space or entirely locally embedded, but that spaces are configured in the intersection of translocal images and local circumstances.

For us more incisive analysis is provided by John Stewart's 2000 Cafematics (PDF), Alison Powell's E-Life and Real Life: On- and off-line social life in an Internet Cafe (PDF) and Nina Wakeford's 'Gender and the landscapes of computing in an Internet cafe' in Virtual geographies: bodies, space and relations (London: Routledge 1999).

For LAN cafes see Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic (New York: McGraw-Hill Osborne 2003) by John Borland & Brad King, The State of Play: Law, Games & Virtual Worlds (New York: New York Uni Press 2006) edited by Jack Balkin & Beth Noveck, Ariadne - Understanding MMORPG Addiction (PDF) by Nick Yee, Synthetic Worlds: The Business & Culture of Online Games (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2005) by Edward Castronova and the discussion of multiplayer games and virtual worlds here.

Fans of Laegran may wish to refer to her 'Just another boys' room? Internet cafes as gendered technosocial spaces' in He she and IT. New perspectives on gender in the information society (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk 2003) edited by Merete Lie and 'The patrol station and the Internet cafe: rural technospaces for youth' in 18(2) Journal of Rural Studies (2002).

Internet utopianism - with genuflections to Habermas and "an environment that revitalizes the kind of public sphere that occurred in eighteenth century European coffeehouses" - is reflected in works such as Brian Connery's 'IMHO: Authority & Egalitarian Rhetoric in the Virtual Coffeehouse' in Internet Culture (New York: Routledge 1997) edited by David Porter, Mark Nunes' more nuanced 1999 paper Cybercafes & Social Space: The Realities and Virtualities of Cybercafes, Scott Robinson's 'Cybercafés and national elites: constraints on community networking in Latin America' in Community practice in the network society (London: Routledge 2004) and the 2002 Is there a Place in Cyberspace: The Uses and Users of Public Internet Terminals (PDF) by Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Barry Wellman & Monica Prijatelj.

     policy

Public policy questions are highlighted in Technology & Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide (Cambridge: MIT Press 2003) by Mark Warschauer, Stephen Woolgar's 1998 survey Cyber Cafes & Telecottages: Increasing Public Access to Computers and the Internet, the more searching Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information & Communications Technologies (Hershey: Idea Group 2000) by Michael Gurstein, Patience Akpan-Obong's 'From the Margins to the Centre; ICTs as Tools for Development' in Agenda Setting & Public Policy in Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004) edited by Kelechi Kalu.

Questions of online content regulation, free speech and censorship are discussed in the Censorship guide elsewhere on this site. Works of particular interest include Lokman Tsui's Panoptic Control: Regulation of the Internet in China by Surveillance (PDF) and New Crime In China: Public Order and Human Rights (London: Routledge 2006) by Zhiqiu Lin & Ronald Keith. Notions of 'internet addiction' are discussed here.

     precursors

Antecedents are explored in Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York: Vintage 1993), W. Scott Haine's thoughtful The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) and Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2005), Mark Pendergast's Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books 1999), The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (New York: New Press 1999) by Gregory Dicum & Nina Luttinger and Markman Ellis's An introduction to the coffee-house: a discursive model (PDF).

Howard Schultz & Dori Yang's self-congratulatory Pour Your Heart Into It - How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion 1997), Taylor Clark's Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (London: Little Brown 2007) and a Tuck case study (PDF) cover the caffeine version of Maccas. The 'new urbanism' is evident in Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe 1999) and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community & Everyday Life (New York: Basic 2003).

Hiostorical anxieties about youth spaces and about electronic games feature in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) edited by Henry Jenkins & Justine Cassell, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996 (New York: St Martin's 1998) by John Springhall and other works highlighted here.

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