Going for a coffee and a croissant in Starbucks or Café Nero and indulging in some furtive (and possibly expensive) wi-fi access on your own smartphone or laptop is now so passé. In fact, even the piffling offer of free wi-fi access while you sip just won’t cut it anymore. Now, dotcom has met dining room, and the world’s first techno friendly restaurant has opened in Singapore, where, in addition to feeding you, the Geek Terminal will also lend you a laptop and help you logon for free. Now you can eat out without having to face the inconvenience of lugging equipment along or of having to risk missing out on your online experience.
Of course, the restaurant founders (Christopher Lee, Danny Pang, Woon Keat Goh, and Liza Akubakar) are being far from altruistic. In addition to hoping to attract more isolated business executives who cannot stop working into their restaurant, they have other profit streams. The restaurant doubles as a sales agent for Apple, Nokia, and TV maker Chi Mei.
The only criticism that the restaurant seems to have received so far is from the customers complaining that the food is not up to scratch. It has not yet come from the tech-widows or widowers complaining that instead of spending hours in front of a computer at home, their partners now seem to spend time doing it away from home. The restauranters admit that initially the emphasis has been on the hi-tech service being provided and not on the cooking, but they have promised to address that.
The blurring of boundaries between formerly distinct services for the convenience of the customer is, of course, not new, or of particular concern. My favourite bookshops are those that have combined paper, liquid, and fat, and offer large soft sofas and cheap coffee and cookies in the middle of the books, so that you can browse at leisure, think carefully before you purchase, enjoy the experience away from the children, and indulge in the illusion that you are once again a sophisticated intellectual.
I am not even too concerned about the subtle blending of food and sales that the Geek Terminal offers. Throughout history people have been using food to “soften people up” and persuade others to do things that they might otherwise not consider doing. The romantic dinner or the business hospitality account are ingrained in our culture. Adults can make adult choices about whether they buy a new laptop after the noodles, or not. However, what does seem slightly concerning about this venture is the march of the computer into the social space.
Let me explain. We all have private space and social space. If indulging in a personal passion - photography, for example - I go into personal space and become focussed and exclude others. If inviting the family around for a meal I go into social space. It would be rude of me to say in the middle of the meal, “I need to go out and take some landscape shots, the light is so good now.” If I did that I would be driving my personal space through the middle of the social space.
In a very broad sense, computers involve private space - individuals with their backs to the world, focussed on the task in hand - and restaurants are about social space. Restaurants are for gathering, for talking, sharing, laughing, romancing, celebrating, as well as for eating. If cyber-restaurants become the norm, they will either be frequented by dysfunctional couples or families who need isolating activity to divert them from speaking to each other, or by isolated workaholic individuals who need the net to meet all of their social needs. It is one thing to use the net for serious or fun social contact, and another to depend on it for interaction. Most of the Flickr Junkies or Skype Tarts that I know also have real human contact, and given the choice of a meal with a friend or an hour online, would unquestionably choose the former.
If the advance of private space technology into social space is something that is probably not a good thing, why not let that technology into more areas of private space? Public Lavatories that sold newspapers and loaned out laptops for the duration of your stay? That really would be something!
[...] have written elsewhere about the potentially worrying invasion of technology. Part of the some people’s stress [...]
I think quite a few bloggers have also complained about service quality..
Hi y’all,
thanks for the posting on Geek Terminal. Great to have visitors write something about us. Appreciate the feedback. We are definitely working on the service. Will not give any excuses. Juz come by and talk to one of us, especially me. Will be glad to get know all of ya better as friends rather than just customers.
Warmest Regards,
Danny