I’m interested in the history of coffeehouses, which is intertwined with the history of newspapers. It seems the civilization that I know and love began there.
In the 1600s, people in Europe began to meet for coffee, but it wasn’t really the coffee they were after. It was the conversation — and the atmosphere that encouraged conversation. People met to exchange ideas and news, creating a market for newspapers.
Jeremy Cliffe has retraced that history in a lovely essay in the New Statesman.
One of the diseases of old newspaper editors is nostalgia, and I was afraid that the essay might descend into a diatribe about social media when I saw the subhead: “How a centuries-old institution can save today’s faltering social media culture.”
Instead, Cliffe provided a corrective.
He mentions a pamphlet “The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses,” published by John Starkey in 1661, which was a diatribe. The pamphlet complained that the information spread in coffeehouses was outrageous because coffeehouses had “neither moderators nor rules.”
Some complaints about new media are, if not eternal, at least older than you might suspect.
• Source: Jeremy Cliffe, “The restoration of the coffeehouse”; New Statesman, 7 Dec. 2022. You’ll need to register to read:
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