By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering


Stop whatever you're doing for 90 seconds and think deeply about a place -- any place -- that you love.

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Alright. So where were you? The beach? The coffehouse? The bowling alley?

We have lots of reasons to love the places we do. Our hike and bike trails give us the chance to leave our cities and make us feel better when we're done. The movies give us the chance to experience things together as a group.

We all have our favorites. And we all have our reasons for our favorites. And sometimes it can be interesting to push a little further and ask why it is that we love what we love. And, in this connection, to to ask how voice and place connect.

In this series of posts we'll address that question. Does voice help us love the places we love?

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We start with the coffeehouse. The coffeehouse ranks high on my list of places to love. I've probably spent a cumulative total of years in different coffeehouses across the country. (And the best is still Spiderhouse at 29th and Fruth not too far a drive from our home engineering offices here in Austin.) We use the coffeehouse to study, to read, to write, and to make friends. We come to the coffeehouse for dessert, or after a show, or when we want to talk politics. Most important of all, we come to the coffeehouse when we want to have a conversation. Or at least be somehow surrounded by conversation.



Ever notice the different games we play when we're at the coffeehouse? There's "hey, I've really got some work to do here so I'm going to look very studious so you don't interrupt me ... even though I've surrounded myself with hordes of other people." Then there's "I'm gonna sit here and soak up all the free wireless internet I possibly can and too bad there's not enough bandwidth to download MP3s because other I'd drink myself to latte-death and never leave this place." And then there's "wow, I'm so glad I'm not in grad school anymore because that grad student with the massive pile of books looks totally burned-out and I think I'll just get a piece of pie and gloat for a bit."

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So how many our coffeeshop games depend in some way on voice? To what extent is the coffeeshop experience driven by our use -- or avoidance -- of voice?

To me the answer is clear. Voice determines the coffeeshop experience in a massive way. The coffeeshop isn't the bar. The music is never as loud. How could it be? There's at least a pretense that we come to the coffeeshop to study, or to read. But the coffeeshop isn't the library, either, and stone-cold silence would be way off. My theory is that the coffeeshop ideal is neither noise nor quiet but chatter -- not just conversations but the sound of conversation. Preferably all around us. A comfortable social envelope where we have the option to alternately retreat into ourselves or interact as the mood strikes us. And this probably explains why we don't always go to the coffeeshop looking to vigorously participate. Sometimes we do. But more often than not I think what we're looking for is simply the social comfort of the sound of conversation.

This is the voice as social reassurance. The sound of regulars and friends and strangers drinking and talking connects us to whatever counts as the social fabric in the 21st century. And I think recent discussion of the "third place" as the social space away from the home and the office owes a lot to way that voice helps create the coffeehouse as a place that we love.