Public Space v. Online Space

We've all seen them as we stop into the local coffee shop for a mid-morning pick-me-up. The tables are full of people busily working their laptops, iPads and cell phones. (How does one, I wonder, get those types of jobs?) They're definitely engaging in conversations, just not with the people immediately beside them.

Photo courtesy of Cleveland.com

How did  this happen? Coffee houses were once hotbeds of discussion and interaction. True third-places, they were the wellspring of insightful dialogue, like-minded networking, and political posturing.

As The Economist points out:

"The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today's websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint."

Today, this type of interaction has nearly been supplanted by online communities where like-minded people meet to exchange ideas. But new technology is not just changing the way we share ideas, it's changing how we use our public spaces. As today's coffee shops--and parks and plazas--go wireless, are we moving into an era where public spaces are, paradoxically, the places we go to ignore people?

Photo courtesy of Utne.com

Keith N. Hampton, assistant professor, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is studying how these technological changes are affecting public spaces. Just like with popular third places, popular online sites give people access to a more diverse network of people. The question is, can online spaces ever be a substitute for actual physical spaces?

Hampton found that internet use alone is about the equivalent of 7 coffee shops visits a month. Heavy internet use is about equal to 2 church visits a month. Social networking sites are about equal to 3 park visits a month. However, if you combine technology and public spaces, the diversity of your network increases significantly. In fact, he found that half of the social benefit of new technologies comes from combining them with a traditional public space.

So for instance, Hampton discovered that 25% of the people in a typical public spaces would not have visited before wireless was available and 70% said they came more often because of wireless access. The average laptop user makes 2, one hour visits to a public space per week if wireless is an option.

We talk a lot in our field about ways to draw more people to public spaces. Perhaps the answer is not to hark back to a golden age of public spaces, but to find new ways of layering public spaces with technology.