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. I’m sitting in one as I type this. The place is full of people, poking at their computers and poking at each other. I can see what they’re reading. I can hear what they’re saying. I can see who they’re dating. I can see how poorly their dates are going (very poorly).

Everyone is busy doing a funny dance: half-ignoring each other while half-hearing everything, for hours on end. You don’t do that at Tim Hortons, where the object of the game is to grab your double-double and head for the hills. On the other hand, Tim Hortons doesn’t have a claim on representing the future of wired society. But, if you pay close attention, this coffee shop does.

Recently, a respected American research group released a study on how the Internet is affecting the way people socialize. It turns out – popular wisdom notwithstanding – that technology doesn’t make people antisocial after all.

According to the study, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, people who use the Internet and cellphones are more likely to have a larger cadre of actual confidants than those who don’t – real friends, not just the dodgy Facebook variety. Netizens are more likely to have close conversation with people outside their families. And Internet users are also more likely to have meaningful conversations with people of other political persuasions and racial backgrounds. It’s all fairly rosy.

But buried in the report is a nugget packed with even happier irony: Internet users, on the whole, get out more. They’re considerably more likely to spend time in public and semipublic places that are not home or work – places like parks, restaurants and, yes, coffee shops.

The study’s authors, a collection of university sociologists, are quick to point out that this could be a function of economic status and age: People who use the Internet at work are likely to be in a demographic that spends time out and about. They also, rather tepidly, suggest that the Internet might enable users to make more trips to public spaces by helping them find places to go and arrange to meet up with friends.

I think there’s more to it than that.

Much has been made, over the years, of the fact that North Americans have withdrawn from the civic street and made the private spheres of home and office the centres of their social lives. The public spaces in between have withered as suburbs and drive-throughs coated the countryside instead of the tightly packed cities we used to build.

Even for city-dwellers, the mindset we’ve been left with doesn’t leave much room for casual contact with people we don’t know. Deprived, we seem to crave it like some exotic fruit. Six years later, for example, East Coasters still prattle on about the great blackout of 2003, the one glorious night when strangers and neighbours had a pretext to speak to one another.

This is why coffee shops are such curious places. Spending time in one means spending time in public around strangers, being privy to their conversations and flirting with the possibility of talking to them.

The ritual of preening, ignoring, overhearing, rubbing elbows with, and occasionally chatting with, people we barely know is as tantalizing as it is intimidating, especially for people who spent their childhoods being told to out-and-out fear strangers. And the more time I spend in coffee shops, the more familiar it all seems.

This is old hat: It’s exactly what we’ve been learning to do online.

Anyone who has started presenting facets of their life through status updates – on Facebook, on Twitter (which an astounding 26 per cent of Internet surfers in the United States is now using, according to Pew), or on chat services – has already learned to perform this ritual, just in a different way.

Living life through the lens of Facebook or Twitter amounts to doing the dance of the seven veils with your character. After all, not everybody we list as an online “friend” is really a friend. Twitter lists are often full of complete strangers by design.

As a result, they’ve opened up a whole world of casual contact with semi-strangers, whether it’s the brief, one-off exchanges that Twitter encourages or the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend interactions that Facebook engenders.

Just like people casually bumping along with strangers in a coffee shop, users are getting comfortable presenting themselves to a crowd of people they may not know. And they’re getting used to overhearing – and jumping into – intimate conversations they weren’t privy to before.

We’re not building city blocks like we used to, the kind that fit coffee shops in the middle of neighbourhoods. But decades after we built ourselves into an isolated corner, the Internet is teaching us to live in public again. Something good is brewing there.