Piers Young picks up on a recent thread about Continuous Partial Attention (see here, here, and there), and wonders about the backlash against laptops in some coffee shops who offer free wifi:

[from Monkeymagic: Wifi, Cafes and Solitude]

What is curious about the Seattle Coffee Shop (real world) example above, is not that they don't talk. I think they do, just via laptops, blogs, etc. What's curious to me is that, even though a lot of the roles of the old-fashioned coffee shop get subsumed by their online variants, people still go to coffee shops (rather than staying at home). The coffee can't be that good, can it?

The Seattle Coffee Shop owner noticed increasing numbers of 'customers' who were not buying coffee, but sitting using their computers for hours on end, sucking up free wifi. In principle, she was concerned about the increasing lack of 'interaction' in the shop, not so much the fact that these wifi freeloaders were occupying space without buying a single cup of coffee.

I'd like to separate the two elements of this story, and address them separately:

1. If you offer free wifi to all you are going to get slammed by people looking for free access in a congenial atmosphere. My recommendation: switch over to a solution where network ids (perhaps time limited) are handed out to those buying coffee, and for those not buying coffee charge a minimal fee. That will get rid of the true freeloaders.
   
2. People -- even ferocious connectheads -- like the ambiance of a coffeeshop, even if they desire to share the foreground of their attention: a screenplay they are writing, friends in other locales (via IM), or email. Coffehouses do offer chance opportunites to interact face-to-face, new music, people watching, and a change in setting from staring at the same old wall in your home office.

   The coffeeshop's owner, I guess, devalues the interaction that might be going on via network, in favor of the interaction that she'd like to see face-to-face. But labeling continuous partial attention a public nuisance, like talking too loudly, taking cellphone pictures of the unsuspecting, or urinating in the corner, is too much. Staying linked up via PC while situated in a coffeeshop is much less annoying than loud conversations or people shouting into their cellphones, which seems to go on all the time, and has led me to leave many a coffeeshop for one down the street.

   I think what is happening here is a flip-flop in perception. The coffeeshop owner believes that people leave behind other contexts when they walk through her doors, and subsume themselves in the coffeeshop experience until leaving. Continuous partial attention blends context: I am in the coffeeshop, but I am still in conversation with my buddies, worldwide, who are not there. I am watching the people go by, but reading the online musings of various folks in my inner circle, not just the newspapers strewn about. I am available to business partners for a quick email interchange, even though I am watching a beautiful woman I have never met licking whipped cream from her lips. By remaining connected we enrich our own experience. But the coffeeshop owner views the result as destructive, because the heightened experience of the connected is invisible to the unconnected, and all she registers is a decrease in things she can see.

   So, by all means charge for the access to keep out the freeloaders. But don't turn off the wifi. The connected -- which increasingly means the young, the creative, the digerati -- will just go to the coffeeshop down the street, where we can get the fix we want: good coffee, the circus of life swirling by as we sip, and the foreground of attention shared with connected pursuits, where we remain in conversation with those not present.