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Social Space In A VirtualWorld

On 14 December 2004 Cyberia founder Eva Pascoe delivered the annual NMK Cybersalon Christmas lecture: Social Space In A Virtual World...

On 14 December 2004 Cyberia founder Eva Pascoe delivered the annual NMK Christmas lecture to a capacity audience at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre

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Report by Deirdre Molloy

Chair, Dr Richard Barbrook, introduced the event, noting that over the last 10 years the example of Cyberia has replicated and inspired worldwide. There may be no post office at your holiday destination, but they will have a cyber café. Something that was seen as incredibly new and interesting is now mainstream and central to life. London, once a hub of coffee houses and salons, has in turn led the way in the cyber café field.

In telling the Cyberia story, Eva Pascoe dubbed it “The Mother Of All Cyber Cafes”. At the start, the team behind Cyberia were so unsure of the concept’s reception that they had to explain it in the URL. Cyberia was also theinternetcompany.com ! Although the definition has now migrated and evolved, said Pascoe, it is still, after 10 years, a social space in a virtual world and the most significant invention in communications since the establishment of the Royal Mail in 1783.

What made it so special was the people who were involved, all of whom went on to pioneer a variety of internet businesses and technologies. They carried on the traditions of the coffee shop – discussion and exchange of opinion. Coffee shops tend to surface at times of change when people have time to sit, chat and come up with new ideas. Coffee shops led to London’s domination of the news – Jonathan Swift was a regular and The Times described the coffee shop as “an academy of civility and a home for philosophers and scholars.”

For Cyberia mail was the key. Royal Mail network opened to the public in 1635. The first public international mail came in 1841 with packet ships. Airmail arrived in 1918, and trends toward paperless mail soon surfaced, firstly with the Aerograph in 1938 (135 million letters were exchanged this way in 1943). It died out but paperless mail remained an attractive idea.

Then came e-mail – Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first e-mail over the internet in 1971. It was also a new format – the argot was informal, a community already existed, the attitude was brief, friendly, intimate and typos were ok! E-mail parlance was accepted very quickly but the emphasis was on the English sphere. Despite its popularity, the spread of e-mail was still limited.

The XXI Century Library

While the Oxford Library opened in 1448, the first public library in Europe only arrived in the late 18th century, an era of democratisation, Pascoe notes. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee gave the internet an easy interface – www - developing it for scientists who found it too difficult to crack themselves. Making technology difficult is good for elites, suggested Pascoe, because they can always find and pay someone to make it easy for them.

The fact that e-mail and web were “toys for the boys” is ironic, she continued, when women have contributed so much to mail delivery in the past, as coach and then mail van drivers in the two world wars. For Cyberia, it was a case of cyberfeminism fights back... The vision? To create a women-focused friendly public space that allowed access to new emerging technologies and financed it from providing access to the internet. However, banks wouldn’t support the Cyberia idea. There was no money, and a poor location off Tottenham Court Road.

The reality check came on day one - there were 300 male customers who all wanted to simultaneously drink coffee and go on the internet. Plus Cyberia staff had to bridge the chasm between customers’ lack of FTP/Telnet knowledge and their desire to know. They could only make one cappuccino every 5 minutes & the connection was 9.6KB. There was access to Eudora e-mail, Usenet Groups, Listservers, Gopher, Veronica, FTP and Telnet. There was no Yahoo or Google. It took courage to go out to people with such primitive tools, but people lapped up the resources.

“Cunning Plan No 2” had three main prongs: set-up the Easynet ISP, introduce Cyberhosts to teach people how to use the pre-browser internet, and buy a coffee machine that can make more than one cappuccino at a time. This dovetailed with the 1995-1997 global explosion phase of www and cyber cafes. Cyberia set up in Paris. Tokyo, Bangkok, and Manila followed as they managed to hook some interesting investors, Mick Jagger and Maurice Saatchi included. Jagger particularly saw the web as a place of importance for music, and free, unsigned artist sites were then a great driver and core growth sector of the web.

Only in 1997 did they discover that Cyberia was indeed the world’s first cyber café. It emerged that the original San Fran cafés were only connected to nearby laundromats! This discovery gave them the confidence they had cracked something.

Pascoe outlined how the cyber café concept evolved from coffee shop + internet access to community centre – help for women, free or discounted training – and beyond. They became digital arts centres with artists tackling the aesthetics and the belief that software could be made into art. Then VJ Culture arrived and the growth of web culture in general accelerated.


Profile of users 1994 – 2004: 

1994	2004
· over 90% male	· under 60% male
· 85% aged 20-28	· 69% aged 20-39
· 88% university degree	· 57% University degree
· 5% use café daily	· 30% use cyber café daily
· 35% emails as predominant application	· 88% emails as predominant application
· 3% business research	· 31% business research
· 5% relief from work via cyber café access	· 57% relief from work via cyber café access

Pascoe painted a fascinating picture of cyber cafés with a mission worldwide, with problems surmounted and opportunities realised at every turn. In Africa, where water and electricity are in short supply never mind modems, the likes of Zulu Net café in Zambia were set up by people returning from Europe after experiencing the cyber café concept. Local language web page content was an issue and ZuluNet exploited this.

Other permutations have also flourished: a Scottish eco-education cyber café, banks merged with cyber cafés to introduce the joys of personal finance by stealth. Child-friendly Cyber Mom cafés have caught on in the US, as have Third Age enterprises everywhere. From sleek, “hedonsitically beautiful” outlets to the once-a-day satellite uplink 12,000 feet above sea-level operated in Nepal, the cyber café has morphed with verve and aplomb. Even the Serenghetti desert has one.

Internet for The People

Pascoe rounded off the story with some reflection. The cyber café movement finally has recognition for what it achieved. It bridged the gap between women and men as users of the internet, and developed female confidence as creative users, publishers and digital artists (35% of webmasters are women). It speeded up the transfer of IT knowledge via public space and service. Now, we have almost completed the transition from public libraries to virtual libraries, ebooks can be downloaded in the deepest countryside.

And cyber cafés have largely stayed true to their mission, giving a hand to the disenfranchised to become participants and not bystanders in the information age. Looking ahead to the next 10 years of development, networks like Cybersalon and NMK have been established to develop and support digital culture activities. Join in those debates and events. People make the changes and people make it work, so get active!

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During the Q & A that followed subjects covered spanned commerce, technology and culture. Bill Thompson asked, with hindsight, what Pascoe would have done differently. She replied by touching on the tension between Cyberia’s two strands, the political/philosophical and the commercial. Currently many technology service charges, such as ringtone sales, pay for the development of the platform supporting it. But with the internet, the premise was different as the taxpayer had funded the scientific technology. It was hard for Cyberia because they had to pass on the price of the computers, etc, to customers. Pascoe said this acted as an inherent brake on going faster with cyber café culture. Because the philosophy of the movement was not to charge a premium they couldn’t fund development. That was the biggest dilemma for Cyberia which she might have tackled differently.

Responding to a question on new business models required for the laptop and wi-fied world, Pascoe said wi-fi had a different model with users usually business owners or self-employed, not average café users. As such, it’s a threat not an opportunity. Another question focused on the benefits of government subsidy of cyber cafés in developing counrtries in order to enable access. The Chair added that Brazil’s government have interesting plans in this field. But Pascoe said such government subsidy projects were only viable in big city contexts. They can’t be too subsidised, she argued, as the innovation then dies away.

An education, culture and class gap exists between people who use cyber cafés and those who use telephone call centres, Pascoe explained, adding that social space is a very divided space. The cyber cafés with the longest lifespan will be the ones that embed themselves in the community.

A delegate from the Tate website revealed that in contrast to the slower adoption rate of women generally, their web demographics show that 70% of site users are female. Pascoe said this was unsurprising, as Cyberia had noted from the beginning that women were more interested in web / internet art and aesthetics.

About The Speaker:

Eva Pascoe first came to prominence in 1994 when she founded the world’s first cybercafé. Her company, the highly successful Cyberia Group was responsible for the development of the high street cybercafé concept model and rolled it out worldwide.

In 1996 she co-founded the first cybercafé in Paris, the success of which has been applauded by the French Retail Council leading to a very special award, the Gold Medal of Madame de Commerce, sponsored by Madame Chirac.

Her journey into “cyberland” started in Poland, where she studied linguistics and worked on the early computer-based speech simulation models. She then moved to London to study Cognitive Psychology at London University where she worked on computer-based risk management.

In 1998 she co-founded Zoom.co.uk, bringing the first fashion shops on line. Recently she has set up a new venture, combining her human-computer interface and e-commerce expertise in the new area of m-commerce. Eva is also currently involved in the development of the European e-commerce and m-commerce regulations for the European commission.

Held in association with: Cybersalon

Sponsored by: Accenture eDemocracy Services

See the original EVENT PAGE

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