Re:Oakland Cafe Owner's Banning Laptop Experiment
by _delirium on Thursday February 25, 2010 @02:36AM
(#1150237)
I'm somewhat ambivalent on this. I can see the motivation, but it does sometimes seem to drift into an overbearing cafe owner trying to socially engineer exactly what kind of culture they want their cafe to have.
The local cafe here that banned laptops after 5pm to encourage more social evenings wasn't happy enough with the results, so subsequently also banned "studying" after 5pm, however you define that. The owner justified it by saying that his cafe wasn't a study hall, and there couldn't be a social scene in his cafe if it was overrun with college kids studying and doing homework.
At some point it becomes kind of ridiculous to feel like you're being socially policed by the owner, and it's more pleasant to just visit other cafes that won't look over my shoulder deciding if I'm being social enough or not.
The local cafe here that banned laptops after 5pm to encourage more social evenings wasn't happy enough with the results, so subsequently also banned "studying" after 5pm, however you define that. The owner justified it by saying that his cafe wasn't a study hall, and there couldn't be a social scene in his cafe if it was overrun with college kids studying and doing homework.
At some point it becomes kind of ridiculous to feel like you're being socially policed by the owner, and it's more pleasant to just visit other cafes that won't look over my shoulder deciding if I'm being social enough or not.