Cybercafe comfort for global villagers

By PETER SINCLAIR

You can almost feel the pressure of the future building up in central Auckland.

All over the central business district, with flashing detour lights and grumbling machines, men in hard hats are wrenching up the streets again. They are laying fibre-optic cable, the sinew of the 21st century.

For the electron rules. The savvier downtown shops are abandoning yesterday and targeting tomorrow.

The last time I saw Stages, it was a hoary old pinball parlour by the bus terminal, haunted by street kids. Now it has moved centre-stage, an exercise in Queen St glitz at No 62.

The games are still there and zapping noises compete with the lonesome voice of Mishka. But the street kids have been replaced by Asian tourists more interested in checking their e-mail than playing House of the Dead.

Stages was quick to read the fine print, and has adroitly repositioned itself as one of the new Meccas for backpackers, e-mailers and gamers which now feature in all big cites - the cybercafe.

I use the term broadly. Telecom lists them as internet cafes, and that was the idea years ago when the net was young - a bid to transform a new technological experience into an older, more familiar one and humanise the blank stare of the machine.

They were a 20th-century interface where caffeine met computer, and a byte was just that - with tomato sauce, probably.

But in the 21st century, functionality has replaced cosiness and you will be lucky to score a cup of coffee at most of the new class of cafes.

They are web-farms for the footloose and far from home who want to keep in touch with their lives.

To see how times have changed, first visit Net Central at 5 Lorne St.

This is the archetype. At the bar, under giant clocks displaying the time in London and New York, it dispenses cookies and cappuccino and Ponsonby Pies.

Everything is slightly seedy and relaxed - coffee-tables with magazines and empty cups, spaced clusters of terminals populated by a middle-aged clientele cruising the chat groups or gaming at the special rate of $5 an hour.

Normally you will pay $1 for five minutes and $9 an hour, which is more than the going rate in central Auckland, and effectively discourages the backpacker trade.

Which is just fine with regulars such as Chris Duurentijdt. For while Net Central may feel as comfy as an old cardie, they know you get a fast ride - it is hitched to the net on a rapid 2Mb carrier.

In his early 30s, Dutch-born Mr Duurentijdt uses the cafe to keep in touch with relatives in the Netherlands and some of the friends he made while stationed at Scott Base as a cargo-handler some years ago. On the ice, it was a choice between videos, boredom or the net.

He has been logging on ever since, and like most of the cafe's regulars, visits Net Central every other day for a couple of hours.

The cafe of the future can be sampled at the bottom of town, where e-Phone's interpretation of the concept opens onto the square at 1 Queen St.

It is everything Net Central isn't - compact, up-market, cheap and perhaps just a little soulless.

But it functions perfectly, and boasts an ingenious method of payment. The company's phonecards can be bought from a low of $5 to a high of $50 and you can use them almost anywhere.

At $1 for 10 minutes and $5 per hour - more or less standard pricing in central Auckland - there is no lack of customers, roughly a 50-50 split between locals and visitors.

I spoke to young Warfu Yusuf, who is a bit of both - a Somali student, he has studied pharmacology at Auckland University for three years and visits e-Phone each day for 15 minutes to keep in touch with his family on the Horn of Africa.

"My mother and sister at home soon learned how to use e-mail" he says.

Quiet, well-spoken, web-savvy, he seemed typical of the global villager - comfortable away from home and electronically united with his past and his future by the vast vague cobwebs of the net. There is no such thing as rootlessness any more.

As I set off on a slightly mad quest to visit as many cyber-gateways as I could in two days, armed only with a Mavica digital camera (thanks for the loan, Sony, it was fun to use) and a saintly friend to do the parking, I looked back.

Inside e-Phone, nearly every terminal was occupied. Mr Yusuf and the rest were staring at their screens in silence in an Arctic light.

They attempted no relationship with those around them yet each was interacting with a distant universe of family, friends and lovers.

Outside, the machines continued to growl towards the new fibre-optic world. But a man was doing something, slowly, with a shovel. He might have been left over from 1900, still digging a trench for this newfangled electricity.

Sometimes, the future is not so different from the past.


Links


Stages

Mishka

Yellow Pages

e-Phone

Sony Mavica