Nerdy,Trendy or Healthy? Configuring the Internet Café

Abstract

This article analyses how internet cafés, understood as technosocial spaces, are configured in the intersection of human and non-human actants. Based on empirical studies in Scotland and Norway, the article shows how internet cafés are not just adapting a universal concept in the process of configuration, but that some shared images are played with in different ways. The nerdy, trendy and healthy are translocal images that are played with in the configuration process, creating locally specific and embedded spaces. The article further looks at the various ways the internet is used in the cafés, identifying two forms of extenders, as well as players, who in different ways create new social spaces based on the internet café. The article concludes that the internet café is neither a footloose space nor entirely locally embedded, but that spaces are configured in the intersection of translocal images and local circumstances.