The coffee shop in question is the Brûlerie St-Denis on rue Masson (recently styled “La Promenade Masson”). This pleasant, gentrified Rosemont neighbourhood is known for its population of young families and aging hipsters pushed out of Mile End and the Plateau by exorbitant property values. The café is known for nothing in particular. The food is crap, and so is the coffee. If the word “utopia” applies to it, it is only in the literal Greek sense—i.e., “nowhere.” It is worth mentioning here only because it’s where I happened to write the first paragraph of this probe.

Brûlerie St-Denis sur Masson

Inspired by Latour’s Laboratory Life, I’m observing the spaces in which the kind of knowledge I produce—little studies of literary works, analyses I support by ransacking the work of knowledge producers in a wide variety of fields—gets produced. As a participant in the production of this kind of knowledge and a frequent patron of cafés, I cannot claim to approach my subject, as Latour does, from a position of “anthropological strangeness” (40). I can, however, remember a time when cafés seemed strange and exotic to me.

I grew up on the outskirts of a small town where the only public establishments suited to daytime loitering were the tavern and the roadhouse. To me, cafés were fictional places where men wore berets and recited poetry (activities portrayed in American movies and TV shows as both unmanly and somehow subversive). When I moved to Montreal, I discovered that the true appeal of coffeehouses was their status as zones of public sociability. People went to relax, read, people-watch, meet friends, exchange opinions, expand their social circle. Some came to work, but this work usually consisted of taking long-hand notes in a ratty journal.

Coffee shops have changed since 1994. For one thing, there seem to be a lot more of them.

Four cafés less than a four-minute walk from my house

And a lot more people (myself included) now go to coffee shops alone, with no intention or desire to engage in any social exchanges beyond the transaction at the service counter which legitimizes, for an indeterminate length of time, their right to plop their laptop on any table they choose. They are there to work, and they’d appreciate your keeping the noise down at the next table, thank you.

Feeling a bit peckish, I’ve relocated to Café Lézard, a much superior café with better food and more attractive people than the Brûlerie. It’s retained some status as a cool local gathering place, however, and is thus probably less conducive to my work.

The development of mobile computing and the proliferation of free wi-fi enabled this transformation of the coffeehouse into a sort of communal office space. I choose to work in these spaces because they are outside of my home, where my family places constant demands on my attention, and yet nearby in case I am needed. The noise and movement of the space are dynamic enough to stave off boredom but not enough to seriously distract me. The bustle may even enhance creativity, a phenomenon that has inspired at least one silly app. Above all, there is a sense of being visible in a public space, which compels me to keep my fingers moving over the keyboard.

When we are alone in a public place, we have a fear of “having no purpose”. If we are in a public place and it looks like that we have no business there, it may not seem socially appropriate . . . so coffee-shop patrons deploy different methods to look “busy”. Being disengaged is our big social fear, especially in public spaces, and people try to cover their “being there” with an acceptable visible activity. (Gupta 49)

All of those people who claim premium tables so they can hunch over their laptops all afternoon have good reasons for doing so, and yet it’s possible that I mildly resented them before I became one of them. They seem to break an implied agreement by entering a social space and refusing to socialize.

But what if we expand our conventional understanding of the social to include our laptops and tablets, the coffee shop’s router and ISP, and the infrastructure of the Internet? Suddenly our activity doesn’t seem antisocial; it may in fact constitute a new kind of society. Wilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images, first published in German in 1985, may offer a path toward an understanding of “the consciousness of a pure information society.” Assuming the imminent dominance of technical images over print and other media, Flusser posits two divergent trends in his near future—possibly our present—the first moving “toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers and image administrators, the other toward a dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors.” He claims we have “the right and the duty to call this emerging society a utopia.” His also uses the word “utopia” in the literal Greek sense of “nowhere” because society “will no longer be found in any place or time but in imagined surfaces, in surfaces that absorb geography and history” (4). If I accept Flusser’s often deliberately provocative analysis of the destined state of media and culture, the coffee shop takes on a new aspect as a transcendent workspace based on the collaborative production (and reproduction) of images and texts.

The work that I and other coffeehouse denizens do is unlike that done by creative people in the past, who published works “without self-regard, from the information they have stored within themselves” (95). Flusser claims that this model of information production is over: “The time for such creative individuals, such heroes, is definitively past: they have become superfluous and impossible at the same time” (103), their status as authors done away with by technology that can faithfully reproduce all generated information. Creation based on inner dialogue will be replaced by a model in which everyone “can have outer dialogue, intersubjective conversations that are disproportionately more creative than any the ‘great people’ could ever have had, dialogues such as those that occur in the laboratory or work team, in which human memories are linked to artificial ones to synthesize information” (99-100). In this new future, anyone is potentially a creator (171). My work in the coffee shop, which seems like lonely intellectual drudgery—searching databases and constructing arguments around snippets of other people’s texts—is revealed as the new paradigm of creativity and social competence. And the scholars whose works I pillage are my interlocutors, as are the databases containing those works.

All this is so, if Flusser is correct—and his record as a prophet earns him some credibility—but as he indicates in his book’s first chapter, sensibly entitled “Warning,” he offers more questions than answers. I stare across the room at a pair of my fellow creators huddled over their MacBooks, faces lit by cold electroluminescence, and vow to do more work in bars.

Works Cited

Flusser, Wilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.

Gupta, Neeti. “Grande Wifi: Understanding What Wifi Users are Doing in Coffee-Shops.” MS Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. Web. 4 Nov. 2015. 

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 1979. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Print.