In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade.  In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear.  I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation of a number of social trends and cultural dynamics that are fundamentally changing our society.

Starbucks [for this post I will use them, the biggest brand, as the representation of all the new wave of coffee houses] is often thought to be brilliant because they …

We seem to have become much more of a coffee culture than ever before.  It is now hard to be in any large city in the United States where there is not an abundance of places to buy coffee. Twenty years ago you could buy coffee in any neighborhood, but it was at a restaurant or a fast food outlet.  Now there are places that basically sell just coffee, with a small selection of companion snacks and cold drinks added into the mix.

Starbucks has gone from being a curiosity to one of the best known brands in the country and …

The other day Tivo announced that it had created software to allow Internet Video on Television. The expected convergence of video, TV and the Internet is now in full force. As I wrote in an earlier post about Apple’s announcement of iTV, everything is converging onto the big flat screen in the living room. Channel surfing between ESPN, CNN, YouTube and iFilm while sitting on your living room couch will soon be an experience for many. So the reality of convergence, something spoken about as being in the future for the last ten years, is …

In both the first and second posts with this title I stated that while in many areas it might be difficult to see into the future, in the area of technology the future can be readily seen.  The speed of technological invention and innovation moves so quickly that we have barely assimilated a recent breakthrough when another shows up to knock us back on our heels again.  While these innovations do provide a glimpse of our future, they can be disorienting in that they show us that the Present that we are struggling to accept and assimilate will …