The Dairy Queen Community
It’s difficult to perceive the world in new and different ways. CES, Macworld, hundreds of blogs, my clients, my co-workers, my friends create my homophilous network of stimuli. I see the value of the subtle improvements in the UI of a website, the features and functions of a new mobile device, the social impact of Second Life. But it’s all about context.
I spent the weekend in a small town (18,000 pop) in southern Illinois. My wife and I visited my Grandma. I don’t think she’s ever used a computer and has no desire to. I, on the other hand, jonesed for a web-fix and couldn’t find the wifi network my brother claimed he found last time his family visited Grandma. So early Saturday morning I headed out to a coffee shop we always pass on the way to Grandma’s from the highway. I remember it for its name “The Common Ground” and that it advertises “Free Wifi.”
I bought a cup of coffee, fired up the laptop, got good signal strength from the the access point, but no dice on connecting to the Internet. I moved around to different tables and got odd stares from a group of three older men sizing up the new guy. Without success and two large cups of coffee later, I went to plan b. On that same stretch of road the coffee shop is on so too sit tens of gas stations and fast food joints. I had also filed away the advertisement that scrolls on a big LED on the Dairy Queen roadsign: “Free Wifi.”
I drove into a parking spot, laptop still on, and was successfully browsing. I went inside, got a $.79 cup of coffee (in a little diner-style plastic mug they kept refilling), and settled myself into an old wood both. The place was buzzing with customers, all aged 65+. One man, who I later learned was the town’s Wal Mart Greeter, chatted me up about Apple. He had purchased a working iMac (who knows what variant) for 5 bucks and was running OS 9 on it (he purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale). He had an odd mix of seemingly deep knowledge of technology and a naivete regarding its use.
After getting muscled out of my first seat by a 70 year-old woman defending her Saturday morning breakfast club’s area, I continued to check email, read my feeds, and surf a little while taking in the community that was Dairy Queen on Saturday morning in a small town in southern Illinois.
What made the Dairy Queen an actual hive of activity, of relationship, of comfort? More puzzling, when I followed up on Sunday, following the same routine, I was the only customer there for the first 20 minutes or so. The weather was bad, but more likely, I think the community locus that morning centered around the town churches.
As we, who make our lives thinking and building digital communities and experiences of the future, pontificate about the value and the patterns of community building it’s worth changing perspective now and again and looking deeper at the aspects of aliveness that exist in the enduring forms of human connection and communication. I think there is a lot of value at looking at the Late Adopters and Rejectors to see how they live without our innovations…