I have recently taken for the first time to study in cafes, read and write in them. Many of my friends have been doing it for years, but somehow I was never convinced. Now, however, I have become a convert. I find it to be quite an inspiring experience. It is well known that coffee houses are associated with intellectual activity and have become a public place for the gathering of intellectuals since the 18th century, the age of the democratization of learning and the rise of the secular intellectual. Why is it that the cafe is so intimately linked with the democratic form of being an intellectual, that is, the form of no pre-established hierarchy in the realm of the intellect, where everybody can claim the right to participate and contribute to the intellectual world, no matter what their origin or social status is?  and what does the cafe have to do with thinking or with intellectual activity? My favorite cafe of the moment is called, literally, the living room, and it seems to me that as such it can serve as an allegory for the type of space that a cafe is in general, and can explain what it is that makes the cafe such a productive space for thought and study. what is a living room? it is the place in the house to which each person supposedly come out of their private space, their room, and enter into a common space, where they interact with others, only to return later to their rooms, carrying with them the impression of the others back into their private world. but the living room itself, being in a private house, is itself to an extent a private space, where one is with oneself in an intimate manner, occupying one's private place, from which one goes out to the public places, and then back in again to ones privacy. the living room is thus both an intimate private space as well as a certain public space where one introduces others into ones own intimate sphere. the cafe as living room seems to occupy precisely this middle realm between a room of one's own, an intimate private sphere where one is supposedly most at one with oneself, and a public sphere, where one is forced to interact with others with no relation of intimacy, that is, no protection of one's private sphere. But isn't thinking or studying that which happens precisely between the room of one's own and the public sphere, for what is thinking or studying if not the opening to an exterior space in order to bring it back into one's interiority? studying thus happens in the realm between intimate self-gathering, the room of one's own, and public exposure, the loss of the self and its intimate relation to itself. the coffee house as living room is thus this space that is both intimate, allowing for the self to be itself and privately so, but also a place of an exposure to the public, an opening to an outside beyond the private sphere which is the very condition of study.

My question  then is double: do other people experience studying in a cafe inspiring? and secondly how should one understand a site such as this one which also tries to construct a space understood as a living room, thus both private intimacy and public openness. Are websites such as these the new cafes? can they become a space of study of a new kind? they definitely seem to take the democratic principle at the origin of 18th century cafes one step further. you don't even have to be in Paris to step in into this democratic place where everyone is equal, you can be anywhere, and even anytime, one's origin, and appearance hold no power in these places. would you agree that the internet is the new coffee house for learning?