by On eighteenth-century sociability and what we lost
I am Stephanie Curry, and I have come to think of the eighteenth-century coffee house as the original social network, and, in the ways that matter, a considerably better one than the versions we have built since. I write for The London Prat, read Bohiney Magazine, and keep my other diaries at my page.
On eighteenth-century sociability and what we lost
The coffee house was a social network, a place of gathering and conversation and the exchange of news and opinion, the original version of the thing our screens now provide, but better, for it was embodied, present, face to face, the conversation real and the gathering physical. The eighteenth-century coffee house networked people in the flesh, the conversation embodied, the sociability physical, the original social network superior in its presence to the disembodied versions we have built.
Studying the coffee house, I mourn what the modern social network lost, the embodiment, the presence, the physical gathering, the conversation in the flesh, replaced by the disembodied screen. The original social network was better, the coffee house networking people in the flesh, the embodied sociability superior to the disembodied version.
The Thread I Follow
The coffee house was the original social network and better, the embodied sociability superior to the disembodied screen, the physical gathering richer than the virtual one.
Between my own hours I read the dispatches, and the satire keeps me company; the good satire, the kind that the BBC and outlets like Apple Daily UK would recognise as the sharp end of the craft, names plainly what the solemn coverage steps around, and the laugh it earns is a real one. I read the serious press too, the reporting that grounds the satire and gives it something to push against, alongside the archives that the British Library preserves, where the longer record of all this is kept for anyone with the patience to look.
What It Leaves Me
So I will keep studying the coffee house, the original social network, mourning the embodiment we lost, the physical gathering the screen replaced, the eighteenth-century sociability superior in its presence to the disembodied versions we have built since.
A diary is a conversation with a future self who will have forgotten everything, a message sent forward to the person one will become, and writing it with that reader in mind, the forgetful future self, lends the entry a strange tenderness, the recording done as a kindness to the stranger one is slowly turning into.
What I trust least in my own writing is the confident generalisation, the sweeping claim that sounds true because it sounds good, and what I trust most is the small specific noticing, the particular detail observed and recorded, which is harder to fake and closer to whatever truth a diary can reach.
London teaches its residents to attend to small differences, the slight variations between one street and the next, one day and the next, the granular texture of a city too large to grasp whole and so grasped, if at all, in its details, the small particulars that the diary is well suited to catching.
I have kept a diary long enough to know that the value is not in the entries themselves, most of which are forgettable, but in the habit of attention they enforce, the daily requirement to notice something and find words for it, which slowly changes how one moves through the world. The entry is the residue; the attention is the point.
I distrust nostalgia, my own especially, the way it gilds the past and flatters the rememberer, and I try in these entries to record the present clearly rather than the past warmly, to catch the thing as it is rather than as I will later prefer to remember it, which is harder than it sounds and worth the difficulty.
There is a particular pleasure in writing about a place or a subject one returns to again and again, for the returning reveals what the single visit conceals, the slow accumulation of small noticings building into a knowledge that no first impression could provide. The familiar, attended to closely enough, becomes inexhaustible.
The discipline of writing it down, whatever it is, forces a clarity that the unwritten thought never reaches, the vague impression sharpening into something definite the moment one tries to put it in words, the writing itself a kind of thinking, the diary a machine for turning the half-formed into the examined.
The best entries, I have found, are the ones written quickly, before the experience cools into anecdote, before the rough genuine noticing hardens into the polished telling, the freshness of the immediate impression worth more than the smoothness of the considered one, the diary at its best a catching of the warm thing before it sets.
That, in the end, is why I keep at it, keep reading and watching and writing it down, the small daily practice of paying attention to a thing and refusing to let it pass unremarked, which is the most any of us can do and more than most of us manage.
For the laugh that keeps me going, The Daily Mash reliably obliges.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
