In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade.  In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear.  I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation of a number of social trends and cultural dynamics that are fundamentally changing our society.

Starbucks [for this post I will use them, the biggest brand, as the representation of all the new wave of coffee houses] is often thought to be brilliant because they persuaded tens of millions of people to spend $4 for what had been a $1 product.  I personally have always thought that the other brilliant thing they did was to create unlimited choice in a category that hardly had any choice.  What this means is that everyone, no matter how conformist or bland their daily life may be, can, for a couple of minutes, live in their own uniqueness.  “I’ll have a double decaf soy cappuccino”, or “I’ll have a venti skim vanilla latte, no foam”  In that moment, they have carved out their identity.  Do they really need a decaf soy cappuccino?  Of course not. But practically unlimited choice has allowed everyone to identify themselves by the small choices they make everyday.  Self definition in small ways allows us all to think we are living large in the landscape of free will.

In the last 30 years we have gone …

We seem to have become much more of a coffee culture than ever before.  It is now hard to be in any large city in the United States where there is not an abundance of places to buy coffee. Twenty years ago you could buy coffee in any neighborhood, but it was at a restaurant or a fast food outlet.  Now there are places that basically sell just coffee, with a small selection of companion snacks and cold drinks added into the mix.

Starbucks has gone from being a curiosity to one of the best known brands in the country and now, the world.  People, who, ten years ago knew coffee to be regular or decaf now speak of lattes, mochas, macchiatos  and double espressos. There are heated conversations about the comparative merits of coffee from Guatamala and Costa Rica. People in offices take turns making the mid afternoon ‘Starbucks run’.  ‘Let’s meet for coffee’ is now as common a phrase today as ‘let’s meet for a drink’ has been for decades.

There have always been cultural and culinary cycles in society.  We seem to still be on the upward slope of the coffee cycle in the US.  Why is this?  I think that there are several reasons, both due to the product itself and then all the trappings and social practices that have grown up around the product.  Today a look at coffee the product..

Simply put, caffeine is a stimulant.  We all know this.  It is one of the primary reasons …

The other day Tivo announced that it had created software to allow Internet Video on Television.  The expected convergence of video, TV and the Internet is now in full force.  As I wrote in an earlier post about Apple’s announcement of iTV, everything is converging onto the big flat screen in the living room.  Channel surfing between ESPN, CNN, YouTube and iFilm while sitting on your living room couch will soon be an experience for many.  So the reality of convergence, something spoken about as being in the future for the last ten years, is now upon us.

This development is just another example of disintermediation.  The networks used to control what we saw on TV.  They were joined by cable networks.  Then we got the remote control in our hands and we controlled the viewing.  Now, with Internet video coming to our living room we are in complete control of what we watch regardless of source.  This also points to the continuing flow of economic power and control to the individual.  We are not only choosing what we watch but also when and where we watch.  We can use Tivo to watch our favorite shows whenever we want.  We can download video to hand held devices to watch when and where we want.  We can use Sling Box to watch programs even when we are half way around the world.  We now live in a world of ultimate choice.

One remaining question is whether watching all those quirky videos …

In both the first and second posts with this title I stated that while in many areas it might be difficult to see into the future, in the area of technology the future can be readily seen.  The speed of technological invention and innovation moves so quickly that we have barely assimilated a recent breakthrough when another shows up to knock us back on our heels again.  While these innovations do provide a glimpse of our future, they can be disorienting in that they show us that the Present that we are struggling to accept and assimilate will soon be outdated.

Last week the Nvidia Corporation made a major product announcement that has profound implications in the area of supercomputing, gaming and virtual reality.  Nvidia introduced its next generation processor that has a capability of three trillion mathematical operations per second. To put that in some historical perspective, the first mainframe computer, the ENIAC, built in 1946 performed 50,000 calculations per second.  Ten years later the IBM 704 mainframe performed at 400,000 per second. By 1982 the number has grown to 100 million for the most powerful mainframe computers in the world.  So this new processor just by itself, is 30,000 times faster that the most powerful mainframe of 25 years ago.  In addition this new processor will have 681 million transistors, more than twice as many the current fast processors on the market. I am not sure of my numbers here, but that probably means that each processor …