It’s easy to sneer at coffee shops. This country properly belongs to Tim Hortons, after all, which is really more of a fast-food joint in drag. Coffee shops are urban inventions: game reserves for students, layabouts, guitarists and wearers of thick-framed glasses whose primary concern at this time of year is keeping their scarves out of their lattes. If that earns the scorn of middle Canada, I hear you.

But something is afoot here: The web is teaching us to do something that decades of suburbanization and fetishizing privacy made us forget: how to live in public.

There is, without a shadow of a doubt, something profoundly disconcerting about FourSquare. It’s not even the Web service’s fault; it’s a perfectly nice piece of software. It’s more what it does – encourage users to pinpoint themselves on a map, in real time, as often as they can. It’s like Twitter, but for locations. Instead of asking the question, “What are you thinking?” FourSquare asks, “Where are you right now?” It uses your smart phone’s GPS locator to answer – and then it tells all your friends. Why? Because it’s 2009, and that’s the kind of thing we do nowadays.