That's just nostalgia, electronic communication is in many ways better than face to face, even if it is worse in others. Electronic communication allows you to communicate with the specialist in your field, located in the other side of the world. It is constantly available thanks to smartphones. If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately, if your phone is waterproof, you don't even need to leave your shower. You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.

Pandemic aside, our "newest adult generation" still can meet in real life. But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.

I don't worry about them, not on that subject anyways. They are perfectly able to understand the beauties in life, like every human did since humans existed. It is just that times change and people adapt.

I understand your point, even if I do disagree somewhat. While the freedom to interact in ways that are not electronic is still an option, it is such a tiny fraction of the choices most people make when communicating, that the presence of this option almost seems irrelevant.

A lot of what you list are anti-features:

> Electronic communication allows you to communicate with the specialist in your field

Which makes it less likely you will communicate with someone closer to your level. The specialist will be inundated, whereas perfectly fruitful conversations with merely competent/slightly expert people will not happen. You are a lot more likely to know the famous experts than you are to know very good people in the field who are right in your (or any) backyard. A dense network of communications will likely generate better ideas than those centered around very few specialists.

> It is constantly available thanks to smartphones.

Time sink spent on sites like the Math stackexchange, etc at all possible hours. With a coffee house, you have a dedicated time, and you cannot utilize it outside of those few hours. This frees up your mind to ponder and create. With "constantly available", you can spend all your time on it.

> If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately,

This is a huge problem for two reasons: 1. It leads to way too many false positives. I reckon most such ideas are flawed, and you would have discovered the flaws if you had waited a few hours/days to share it. 2. Spending the time to curate your idea, formulate it well, etc is much more effective than simply messaging out your half baked idea (even if the idea is a good one).

> You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.

This is the same anti-feature and is why when I worked in teams where we were colocated, I would keep my IM off at work (sometimes for months at a time). If people wanted to talk to me, they could email me if it's not urgent otherwise they would have to walk to my cube and interrupt me (I don't mind these interruptions). This worked well for 2 reasons: 1. They are much more conscious of interrupting me, so they will think more before deciding to interrupt me. 2: Just that extra physical motion of getting up and walking would be enough for their brains to figure out the solution on the way to my cube.

You could very well argue that some people have the discipline and skills to manage all the problems above. In my experience, they are in a minority, and a smaller proportion of the population can/will manage them compared to the old days.

> But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.

Very much disagree on "better manage potential distractions." We have an order of magnitude more distractions, and looking around I see that most people are doing a very poor job of managing them.

Nothing like that.

And its not either or. You can have both side by side or just one or the other. It depends on your Personality type and Needs.

We are born unconscious of both. And take time to learn them. And learning about the needs and personality types of others and realizing there is a huge spectrum that has nothing to do with yours takes even longer.

So making contact with Beauty is never confined to how someone else did it. Its good to be aware of all the routes though. And sample as many as you can.

You do understand that pre-pandemic people still met face-to-face, right?

Notwithstanding your condescending tone of stating something obvious to me as a question, I’m not talking about the pandemic at all. The majority of communication between people is electronic now, messaging, email, the Internet as a whole. You have to go back nearly a couple of decades really to see teenagers (or many adults) who are not glued to their phones and primarily communicating in a digital way. And with regards to the OP, you certainly can’t replicate an intellectual coffeehouse digitally.

It’s unfortunate, because the raw improvised social interaction of recent eras past is forever gone, and the newer generations will never know what they missed.

I'm being condescending because your point is just another repackaging of the classic "back in my day" argument. People these days use electronic devices to communicate, yes, but they also meet face-to-face, and go grab lunch and coffee just like people used to in the past. There's nothing especially "raw" or "improvised" about social interaction in the past.

It seems you think a differing point of view in a debate must be delivered via condescension, which is unfortunate.