1. Max's Cafe
Young students look engaged with each other, their gadgets. Some -the minority- have books. They read, watch a video, stop, talk to each other, show whatever they are viewing or reading to their peers, go back to their individual technologies, and repeat themselves. They might even txt or email a message, an attachment, a link to the person next to them, lift their faces and show approval or bewilderment to whoever contacted them. They socialize at the café with its wifi services. The older man watching them is quite happy to have a community that can be observed, documented. His friends or colleagues are mostly long gone, either dead or moved someplace else; perhaps, do not want to talk to him, his ideas, his ways; and yet, the kids from the schools around Max’s Café bring him into their new wifi world. He pulls out his tablet, takes a pic of the crowd, and txt someone who now lives in the assisted living community what he has found while researching new approaches to reading methods.
An ex colleague sharing a room in an old people's home wrote about desiring to go back to his privacy and read a book. For those of us who grew up in houses where there were up to four or six people sleeping in the same bedroom, books were never linked to privacy or comfort in a nice bed by oneself next to a lovely light illuminating the printed pages. We rarely appeared in the pictures painted by the Flemish artists documenting the lives of the new middle classes that came about after the Middle Ages, the development of the printed press and its emphasis on the individual consciousness; and if we were, it was always while playing in the streets or in the kitchens or in bars killing each other; but never by ourselves reading a book in solitude next to a window or as a vanishing light in a portrait showing how cultured we were. Never. The “millenials” and their gadgets is another story. They are not only abandoning the suburbs, the old middle class ways, but are moving into the ghettos displacing the same people they want to live with, and, in their search for a common humanity, are reading collectively in wifi cafes.
Young students look engaged with each other, their gadgets. Some -the minority- have books. They read, watch a video, stop, talk to each other, show whatever they are viewing or reading to their peers, go back to their individual technologies, and repeat themselves. They might even txt or email a message, an attachment, a link to the person next to them, lift their faces and show approval or bewilderment to whoever contacted them. They socialize at the café with its wifi services. The older man watching them is quite happy to have a community that can be observed, documented. His friends or colleagues are mostly long gone, either dead or moved someplace else; perhaps, do not want to talk to him, his ideas, his ways; and yet, the kids from the schools around Max’s Café bring him into their new wifi world. He pulls out his tablet, takes a pic of the crowd, and txt someone who now lives in the assisted living community what he has found while researching new approaches to reading methods.
2. Classes and Privacies
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