The blogosphere (is)/(is not) like a literary café

...literary cafés... were a bit like the Internet itself. A literary café was a cesspool, an insane asylum, but also an oasis of sanity and an outpost of liberty. It depended on the table you picked.

Ideas spawned at table six could rescue — or destroy — everyone at table seven. Cyberspace is a literary café with countless tables, that’s all...

...the literary café resembled the Internet by offering opportunity for feedback. Although a café wasn’t a club, regulars could promptly debate, exchange, test, refute or refine any notion or information they acquired from inky pages spread out on wooden reading racks...

Underneath an overcast of yellow-blue tobacco smoke, poets and journalists toyed with futuristic concepts and traditional dishes. Alcoholic beverages were available but, unlike pubs, consumed to celebrate rather than to inebriate. The habitués were spirited enough to get drunk on their own words and ideas — not necessarily good, as alcohol isn’t nearly as stupefying or intoxicating as words and ideas can be...

The above are excerpts from an entertaining and insightful essay by George Jonas in the National Post.

At the New Yorker a gentle disagreement is offered, based on the absence in the cyberworld of the physical components of the brick-and-mortar cafés:

For all Jonas’s optimism about out current predicament, though, reading his essay made me nostalgic for a world I’ve never inhabited, and in all likelihood never will. His descriptions of the old days are descriptions of place. Here is what he recalls: espresso cups, ashtrays, cognac snifters, “yellow-blue” tobacco smoke; marble-topped tables, wooden reading racks, inky periodicals that smudged readers’ hands; playing cards, disheveled clothing...

Jonas says that “Cyberspace is a café with countless tables,” but it seems to me that the essential difference is that there is no table. I think many who desire a literary life today find the absence of traditional signifiers troublesome—it is, of course, at the heart of the debate over e-books, when readers complain that they cannot underline passages, or fold pages, or break spines. What will we remember of what we have read and discussed when we are seventy-three? Or, rather, how will we recall our experience of it?

Via The New Shelton wet/dry. Image: Dan Clowes/New Yorker