This weeks Topic - The Cyber Cafe

I feel that a current popular culture topic is the internet café, or cyber café. According to www.cafeinternet.co.uk and Wikipedia, the first café was in San Francisco in 1991 by Wayne Gregori, as a place to check your email; the concept has grown into a popular meeting place, a location to grab a cup of coffee, tea, or something else, and more than just checking your email, a place to conduct business, an opportunity to keep in touch with friends or coworkers, an anonymous chat, and best of all, the opportunity for a person who does not have the financial ability to own their own computer to experience the internet; all for a relatively inexpensive hourly rate.
While there are many types of café’s out there, I have found that my favorite cyber café is any café that allows me, for the price of purchasing a cup of coffee, unlimited wireless access on my own laptop. The room, set up much like a living room, with large lounge chairs, cup holders and laptop desks attached, soft music playing in the background, excellent coffee, and if you’re lucky, fresh biscotti. I have visited and observed several types of these establishments, from Fort Benning, GA to cafés on the street corner in several cities across the country, to forward operating base (FOB) Hammer, Iraq and some nameless FOB in Kuwait to passing several while on patrol in the city of Baghdad. No matter the location, I have found that when I relax in a chair, enjoy some coffee, and work on that night’s homework assignment, I am not alone. There are people from all walks of life hanging out in the same location, people conducting a business meeting, just grabbing a cup of coffee, or just there for the internet access. It is this reason, that I believe, that the cyber café is a current popular culture phenomenon.
 
References
Internet Café (2009). In Internet Café. Retrieved January 28 2010 from, http://www.cafeinternet.co.uk/