Starbucks as the Habermasian Public Sphere?

October 23, 2006
Posted by: Yasemin Besen

This weekend New York Times had an interesting article on the new marketing of Starbucks coffee chains as coffeehouses. The stores are marketed not as uniform, standardized assembly lines of coffee, but as local and community based cultural spaces, where books, movies and music are discussed. Recently, they have sponsored the “Salon events”, where community based, not so mainstream authors, musicians and artists read their books, sang and talked while sipping coffee (I can’t deny enjoying Jonathan Lethem’s book reading). This new positioning of Starbucks as a local, cultural space, where intellectual rational conversation takes place reminds me of Habermas.

A student of Frankfurt school and a critique of capitalism and its discontents, Jurgen Habermas, he developed the concept of public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), where he explores the role of individuals in the practice of democracy and social change. He defines public sphere as "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state." People conglomerating in pockets of society, through dialogue and discussion, have the power through discussion, to critique, mainly the discontents of capitalism and voice their opinion. This rational, critical discourse is the very essence of democracy. Public sphere, in the Habermasian sense, started to emerge in the 18^th century with voluntary associations, literary groups and organization and most importantly coffeehouses.

Now we see a very different form of the coffeehouse: a national chain of “coffeehouses” that market the public sphere as a consumption item to be enjoyed with a tall, skim, no foam latte. I wonder if Habermas could predict the public sphere of cool discussion would itself be commodified, packaged and sold along with the music, books and the coffee that makes the public sphere possible.

My Ethnocentrism

October 22, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

What you’re reading on your screen right now probably got there via a broadband connection. Nobody uses phone modems anymore; everybody’s got DSL or cable broadband, right? And the US is way ahead of other countries on this score, right?

Wrong. A former chair of the FCC, William Kennard, noted in a Times op-ed piece yesterday, “Since 2000, the United States has slipped from second to 19th in the world in broadband penetration, with Slovenia threatening to push us into 20th.”

I must admit that I was surprised . . . not this time, since I'd heard this before. But I was surprised when I first read about this a few months ago, when the US had just fallen out of the top ten. I had just assumed that the US had more technology than any other country.

I guess the lesson here is that even social scientists can fall prey to ethnocentrism — the “we’re number one” mentality. (When Bush, in one of the 2004 Presidential debates, said, “America’s health care system is the envy of the world,” nobody challenged him on it.) Or was I falling victim to the sampling error of personal experience. After all, I have high-speed access —at home, at work, at Starbuck’s— and so does everybody I know.

Or maybe my assumption was that Capitalism, the Market, the Invisible Hand, would work best; companies smelling profits would all be intent on bringing the latest technology to as many people as possible.

So why has the US fallen so far down on the list from its earlier high rank? Kennard gives us a pretty good clue: “Studies by the federal government conclude that our rural and low-income areas trail urban and high-income areas in the rate of broadband use. Indeed, this year the Government Accountability Office found that 42 percent of households have either no computer or a computer with no Internet connection.”

Most of the countries that have higher percentages of their populations with broadband are more urbanized than is the US. Iceland, probably not the country that pops into your mind when you think of high-tech and the Internet, ranks third. But it’s over 90% urban. Sweden, Belgium, the UK, and others — all are more urbanized than the US. And broadband providers can reach more people when those people live closer together in cities and not on farms.

But income also matters. Canada’s percent urban is the same as that of the US, but it’s in the top ten on broadband. The same is true for Norway and Japan. But in these countries, the people at the lower ends of the income distribution are not as far away from middle and upper incomes as are the poor in the US. On income inequality, we're number one.

Maybe I was only half right about US capitalism (and capitalism generally). Yes, it’s a very good system for producing more and better stuff. But when it comes to distributing that stuff, the invisible hand deals the good cards to the players with the large chip stacks and is content to ignore others.

Narrowband is all right for text, but that's not where the Internet is going. For things like music and video — roadhogs of the information highway — you need broadband. So when you’re creating that video to upload to YouTube, you might think about adding a soundtrack in Slovenian.

Asking About Housework

October 20, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

The working mother — how does she find the time? Did being a worker mean that she would spend less time being a mom? A new study by Suzanne Bianchi finds that contrary to expectations some years back, work did not reduce the time mothers spent with their kids. In fact, parents — both moms and dads— are spending more time with their kids than parents did in previous generations. What’s been cut back is housework. (NPR did a longish (16 minute) report on the study — an interview with one of the authors, calls from listeners— which you can find here.)

There’s much to be said and blogged about Bianchi’s findings, but I want to make one small methodological observation, something I’ve mentioned to students. Some questions have a built-in “social desirability” bias. Suppose you want to know about reading habits. It’s socially desirable to have read more books (at least I hope it still is), so if you ask “How many books do you read a year?” or “How many books did you read last year?” you’re likely to get something higher than the actual number. Instead, you ask, “Did you read a book last week?” A person who never reads a book might be reluctant to say that he hadn’t read a single book last year. But there’s no social stigma attached to not having read a book last week.

The same thing goes for housework and parenting. Ask me how many hours I spend on housework and childcare each week, even though as a good friend of social research I’d try to be accurate, I’d probably try to be accurate on the good side. So as the Times reports, “Using a standard set of questions, professional interviewers asked parents to chronicle all their activities on the day before the interview.” (The study notes that we dads are doing more of both than fathers of only a few years ago.)

(More later. Right now, I have to put the wash in the drier, start making dinner, and help my son with his homework.)

The New York Walk

October 16, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Walk last Saturday. Here we are, some of us, after lunch, sitting on a bench in Tomkins Square Park in the East Village.

(Left to right: Yasemin, George, Tracy, Marisella, Nila, Laura, Jay)

Some of the people on that bench have been doing this walk for thirty years; others were first-timers. That difference became a theme running through my mind for much of the afternoon, for I realized that a lot of the time, even when our eyes were focused on the same sights, we weren’t really seeing the same thing.

My first inkling of this came soon after we left Port Authority. Our first stop was a flea market on a closed-to-traffic block of 39th St. One of the booths was selling old magazines, and two of our younger walkers and I were leafing through them looking at ads and photos from the 1950s and 60s. For the twenty-year-olds, this was history. Even though these girls pointed out the style elements that had come back into fashion, they might as well have been looking at pictures of Marie Antoinette. But for me it was memory, not history. I knew those clothes, those news stories, those celebrities. They were part of my biography. C. Wright Mills says that sociology is about the intersection of history and biography, and here it all was on W. 39th St.

The same was true of New York geography. If you see Times Square for the first time, it’s very impressive— the buildings, the lights, the tourists. But I wasn’t seeing just those things. I was also remembering what it used to look like ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I wished that I could have shown these kids pictures so that they too could understand the transformation and think about how it had happened.

Sometimes the historical juxtapositions are there for all to see. The New York Public Library at 42nd and Fifth, one hundred years old—broad steps and stone lions outside, and inside the feeling of something vast and solid. You can’t help feeling that you’ve walked into another century. In the reading room upstairs (what library today would have such high ceilings on an upper floor?), on the long, oak tables, you don’t see many books, just flat-screen computer monitors.

Grand Central, too, is nearly a hundred years old. The main room looks and feels largely unchanged, but downstairs, the old walls house a food court with several interesting fast-food restaurants.

(Officially it’s called the “dining concourse” so as to distinguish it from the food court at a suburban mall.) The most fascinating thing for sociology walkers seemed to be the “whispering gallery.”

From Grand Central, we took a very crowded subway down to Astor Square. Tower Records nearby is going out of business. The name says it all: they are a victim of technological change. The change from records (LPs) to CDs was minor; you still have to buy some physical object in a store. But with CDs giving way to MP3 downloads online, it's game over.

The East Village is a study in urban transformation. Here are Laura and Nila at Pommes Frites, a hole-in-the-wall on Second Ave at 8th St. that sells nothing but French fries. Lots of them. As much as 1000 pounds a day.

It’s Nila’s first time here, but Laura grew up just a couple of blocks away long before gentrification came to the East Village. Back in the day, Pommes Frites would have been unthinkable here. And the trendy and pricey restaurants you see now at every corner down here — fuggedaboudit.