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October 17, 2007
The dream of free public wireless internet has found a new business model - flashing advertising at coffee drinkers.The newly launched CafeScreen business has placed big digital screens in 25 cafes in Melbourne and Sydney. In offering a choice to the exorbitant hotel internet rates it discloses how the 'online presence’ of individuals means that there are more of us online, in more places, more often.
The screens carry paid advertising, as well as information and entertainment. But they also come with free high-speed wi-fi internet access for the nearby caffeine quaffers. The system, hardware and internet access are free to cafe owners as well. In addition, they receive a share of the advertising revenue from ads featured on the screens.
Why so?
Cafes have become the new meeting and study rooms where people expect to be connected. They increasingly include free internet access as an bonus to dine-in customers increasingly conducting their office meetings, desk research and sundry work assignments on a laptop or PDA over a cup of coffee.
In Adelaide, people have free internet access in the central business district through a city-sponsored wi-fi network built by Internode. Using the lap top instead of the cafe computer enables me to access most of the blogs I read via RSS, which underpins the idea of blogging as a networked practice. Jean at Creativity/Machine notes that the interlinking within blog entries is occurring nearly so much as it used to, due to the obsessive characterisation of blogs as a kind of ‘personal publishing’ (or at most ‘journalism’), and the continued reification of ‘authorship’, rather than as a conversational or networked form of cultural production.
The last thing we want as we develop the conversational form of cultural production are large screens carrying paid advertising and entertainment of the culture industry. Can you imagine smart inner city professionals trying to do business with one or two LCD screens blaring political advertising and gossip about the latest stars in the entertainment world?
When I was in Melbourne I had trouble finding wi-fi public access points. Melbourne says that it is the wi-fi capital of Australia. They are there---the locations are listed by Azure Wireless on its website--- but in most cases there was little evidence of their presence. I asked, but few seemed to have the faintest idea of what I was talking about. Then there was the additional problem of their being no power point available in the cafe I'd chosen to prevent the laptops batteries from being drained.
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Gary, The drop down little (fold out) desks on US Airways Airbuses now have advertising on them too.