Coffee Break: Re-introducing Instant Cappuccino

Welcome to my virtual coffeehouse. Just like “real” coffeeshops sometimes close down and re-locate, this blog is a re-location of the blog I wrote as a college student. Because the old blog has been acting up lately, and might not survive that long, I’ve archived some of my postings here.

Over my years at Brown and Oxford Universities, I followed the politics and culture of my generation (Y, if you were born between 1980 and 2000). Oftentimes, I found myself defining Gen Y in terms of technological trends: iPods, e-books, Wikis, Facebook, and blogs like this one.

If there’s one place the Internet has made an impact, it’s among university students. I can hardly imagine writing papers without Google and JStor. As David Brooks says, today’s culture wars occur over education, and people are divided by educational experience. Changes in the world of students are the harbingers of changes in the world at large. As I leave the Ivory Tower for the real world, I’ll continue to track these tech-cultural phenomena.

The second front in the Internet culture war is the world of journalism. As a columnist, a blogger and a news reporter , I’ve watched news media slowly adjust to the Internet Age. Mainstream print papers are diving into the blogosphere; blogs are turning into big business. As the place we turn for the truth about our world, changing news media means big changes in our social worldview. Once again, as the first group to grow up with GoogleNews, LexisNexis, RSS feeds and CNN Pipeline, we, generation Y, are the test case.

Here at Instant Cappuccino, I’ll post news stories and videos about our changing world. I’ll post my thoughts on technology, politics, business, popular culture. Not only will I chronicle the spread of information, but as a blog, Cappuccino will be part of the transformation.

Of course, what makes our culture of Wikipedia and YouTube different from the first Internet revolution of Yahoo and Netscape, is that interaction is overtaking information as the premium capital.

So please, post your own thoughts. Tell me when (and this happens often) I am wrong about what’s trendy. Link to Cappuccino on your own blogs, and tell me what other sites I should be following. With your participation, over a cup of virtual coffee, we can make sense of the new world we live in, and predictions for the world to come.