Det perfekta tomrummet

Apropå affären Gudmundson:

The ”coffee experience”, however, like the experience of travel, was of the mind as much as the body – literally, in the sense that coffee’s capacity to keep people awake was noted early, especially in relation to prayer and study; more nebulously, through a set of associations that had little to do with the pleasures of a hot beverage and everything to do with new forms of being. Introduced into England in the 1650s at the same time that news became a commodity, coffee was urban, public, radical, egalitarian. Alert coffee drinkers, their brains unfuddled by alcohol, read the papers and pamhplets, discussed what they read – ”What news?” was a customary greeting upon entering a coffee house – and supposedly discoursed without any concern for distinction of rank. In so far as this was true, not everyone was pleased: ”sober clubbs” might spread sedition. In 1675, Charles II issued a proclamation banning coffee houses. His spies had reported: ”the common people talke anything, for every carman and porter is now a statesman”

SVT24 är inte Karl II. Bloggar är definitivt inte den plattform för en ny och omvälvande kommunikationskultur som 1600- och 1700-talets kaffestugor utgjorde (och det var kanske inte heller 1600- och 1700-talens kaffestugor, men det är en helt annan sak).

Men kanske ligger det något lite grand i jämförelsen, ändå.

Om man nu intresserar sig för om det kommer fler avstängningar i stil med Gudmundsons, vilken vägledning ger oss historien? Låt oss fortsätta citera:

The proclamation failed. In its defence, the coffee house was represented as synonymous with free speech and English liberty, modernity, civility, improvement and sociable mingling between different groups. In the City, merchants did business at Jonathan’s or Garraway’s; auctions were held; scientists presented public experiments; clergymen disputed theology at Child’s; aspiring writers hung out at Will’s, hoping to get close enough to be offered snuff from Dryden’s own huge snuffbox; booksellers and printers could be found at the Chapter-House in Paternoster Row; feckless aristocrats were everywhere.

The proclamation failed, alltsÃ¥. Nu vet jag inte hur mycket man kan lära av historien, men om man kan det kanske man kan ha vissa förhoppningar …

(Citaten kommer från Norma Clarkes recension av Markman Ellis, The coffee house: A cultural history, TLS 26 november 2004, s 11.)