Abstract
Wireless local area networks – or Wi-Fi networks – are proliferating in some societies. Our interest in this exploratory essay is to illustrate how ostensibly free, publicly-accessible Wi-Fi requires users to apply conventional understandings of space and place (particularly commercial spaces and places) as they make sense of some ambiguities about proper use in those places. We show, through an examination of the metaphorical terms used to describe Wi-Fi, how spatial notions are employed in an attempt to define ownership of the signal and rights to its use. We consider how place-behaviors require evaluation of legitimacy of users in public places and of hospitality of Wi-Fi providers. We observe that commercial interests underpin notions of ownership, legitimacy and hospitality of social actors in public places like coffee shops and parking lots. As researchers considering matters of participation in virtual places, we must first have some appreciation for the normative constraints and conventions that govern the commercial public places in which users access “free” Wi-Fi.
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Notes
We note that this phenomenon is not happening everywhere. We consider our own current countries of residence. In Denmark, which has enjoyed early and widespread use of mobile phones and other handheld computational devices well in advance of the USA, use of laptops in public places is almost never seen, never mind camping out for hours at a time in downtown coffee shops with one. Dining out is much more expensive in Denmark than in the USA, and it would be unrealistic for most to pay for coffee all day long for the privilege of sitting in a coffee shop where the shopkeeper needs to have adequate turnover to cover her high cost of rent. In Malaysia, Wi-Fi seems to appear only in the coffee shops of wired high-end hotels and in “imported” US coffee shop chains that regularly offer Wi-Fi in the USA (and which charge US prices for their coffees, effectively excluding anyone who balks at paying for a cup of coffee an amount that would feed meals to the entire family in local eateries). These cultural examples highlight some of the essentially commercial/economic matters of Wi-Fi access that we propose to unpack in this paper.
We understand that of course the signal owner may have other concerns (particularly security concerns) that may occupy his mind more than issues of trespass. Our focus, however, is on concerns of the Wi-Fi user, who in this case intended only to “borrow” the connection, not to violate the security of the signal owner. We are concerned mostly with how the user understands this “borrowing.”
The free public park (and perhaps the public library) may be the only public place where judgments of legitimacy do not involve a commercial transaction; the status of the park will be noted again in the final section of this essay. It should be noted, however, that one of the norms of the public park is that it should not be used as a home, as a private place, so people who want to sleep in the park at night may be asked to “move along” – reinforcing the conventional assumption that the park is a place-away-from-home – that is, from the home that one is presumed to have. One wonders whether the Wi-Fi blanket in a public park might not be shut down some hours of the night to encourage patrons to return home, or whether round-the-clock Wi-Fi might effect a shift in this norm of public parks.
The shopping mall that provides free Wi-Fi is acting out this principle on a higher level: it is competing against other malls. While the shops there may be in competition with each other, they also have to deal with competition from similar shops outside their mall, and banding together to lure customers to the mall gives each shop a smaller range of competition and a better chance of getting the customer.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by Center for Interactive Spaces under ISIS Katrinebjerg, Aarhus, Denmark. We thank Liam Bannon for helpful comments on an earlier draft and the three anonymous reviewers of this version whose comments were immeasurably helpful to us in revising it. Finally, Mark Ringer deserves special thanks for photographing on our behalf some intent and industrious customers on a surprisingly busy Sunday in a US coffee shop.
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Leysia Palen completed this work at the University of Aarhus while on sabbatical from the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.
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Sanusi, A., Palen, L. Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi. Comput Supported Coop Work 17, 257–273 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-007-9062-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-007-9062-3