Sometime around the mid-16th century, a man from Aleppo and a man from Damascus got together in Istanbul and opened the first ever coffee house.  It quickly became a mecca for music, story telling, and political discourse.  Flash forward 450 years to the descendant of their creation, a corporate trough of browns and pastels with a Coldplay CD at the counter, blonde highlighted suburbanites carrying a yoga mats, and people rushing through with flashing electronics wedged in their ear .  The 90’s of course was the heyday for the American coffee house, a cozy paradise of tattered sofas, bad art, and even worse acoustic wuss rock.  An entire sitcom was developed around the idea of the local coffee house as meeting place.  Granted it was a cultural rip off of the beatniks of the 50’s, with slightly less pot and a lot less heroin, but there was something comforting about the coffee house culture.  It was a place where you could go to read, write, do nothing, or possibly run into someone you know and strike up a conversation.  And it had coffee.  That mythical phenomena of coffee house socialization, once a staple of our culture, has now been replaced by Tweets and Facebook updates.   Social media may have picked up where the coffee house left off, but is it progress, or merely the beginning of the end of something important?

Several studies have come out over the past few years linking online social media with a rise in social capital.  For those not in the know, social capital is essentially connections among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.  In 2000, Harvard professor Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone, in which he detailed the decline of social capital in America and offered as evidence the decline of the bowling league.  Americans, he argued, were for a variety of reasons becoming less civically involved, a situation he felt that was tarnishing our culture.  During the 1990’s, the coffee house became for a brief time, if not an institution of civic involvement, then certainly a band aid on communal disintegration.  Sadly, it was quickly co-opted by the corporate steamroller and regurgitated as a drive through feedbag of America’s misdirected search for material, carnal, and gastric satiety.  

A growing number of social scientists throughout the country have begun to look at social media, specifically online social networks like Facebook, as a possible diffusion from such social destruction.  Scientist at Michigan State University have published several papers on the benefits of Facebook towards what is known as bridging capital, or the weak ties of our communal lives; work mates, friends of friends, that sort of thing.  Facebook has shown to be especially beneficial for those with low self esteem, yet there is still considerable debate over the health of falling deeper and deeper into a virtual life.  

Americans have a vested interest in maintaining social capital, yet so much of that maintenance seems to be unconscious, a borderline reflex action that speaks of something atavistic.  While we allow the coffee houses, the coffee shops, the bars, and the bowling leagues to fall by the wayside of our so-called busy lives, we continue to seek out forms, no matter how brief, of human connection.  It’s difficult to say whether things like Facebook, Twitter, and even sites like this blog will prove to be a point of communal evolution or the last gasp of a disintegrating culture, but clearly people want more than a $4 drive through coffee on their way to work.  Maybe we should all take a moment to raise a glass of our favorite Italian roast to that fallen friend of quasi-boho, caffeine fueled community and hope that these new virtual friendships aren’t the end, but are merely a way station on the path of a better future.