Most Thursday afternoons, a loose group of four or five people spread out a deck of cards at a specific table at a coffee shop on Franklin Avenue in Bed-Stuy and begin arguing. Not with regard to poker hands. About media identity, David Gauntlett, and whether Instagram has actually altered young men’s perceptions of masculinity. The cards are printed with theoretical frameworks that most people only come across in a $300 university textbook, laminated, and color-coded. This is the Gauntlett Theory Card Deck, and for some reason, café culture in Brooklyn has welcomed it much more than lecture halls, where it may belong.
This may indicate something about the lecture halls. It might also reveal something about Brooklyn. Most likely both.
Gauntlett’s central claim, which has been expanded upon in several editions of his book “Media, Gender and Identity,” is that media exposure almost certainly influences our behavior and expectations of those around us. On its face, that isn’t a radical concept. However, the way he presents identity as something that is created, malleable, and purposefully put together from cultural cues is the kind of thinking that sounds different when a professor is lecturing at a whiteboard forty feet away than when you are discussing it over a cortado. Here, there’s a feeling that closeness counts. The informality is important.
Gauntlett’s ideas, such as the fluidity of gender representation, the transition from passive housewife archetypes to assertive female figures, or the evolving face of masculinity in magazines like Men’s Health, are arranged into digestible, discussion-friendly chunks by the card deck itself. Every card asks for an answer, a refutation, or a personal example. People actually react in a coffee shop, where the background noise creates a sort of conversational privacy. They quarrel. They relate theories to their personal Instagram and TikTok usage. That is not insignificant.
Despite their structural advantages, universities have their own noise problem: institutional noise rather than acoustic noise. The implicit hierarchy between the person holding the chalk and those taking notes, the formality of seminar rooms, and the pressure of grades. Drawing on Goffman’s theatrical framework for identity performance, Gauntlett himself was interested in the “back stage” personality versus the “public face.” It’s difficult to ignore the fact that students are practically always performing in lecture halls. Something loosens in a coffee shop with a card deck and no grades at stake.
In any case, this isn’t a complete criticism of universities. However, it becomes evident that media theory has always had an audience outside of academia as this specific type of engagement spreads throughout Brooklyn’s creative communities. Simply put, that audience wasn’t being satisfied where it was. A generation that has grown up consciously and quickly assimilating cues from influencers, movies, and social media into who we are finds great resonance in Gauntlett’s ideas about constructed identity.
It’s still unclear if this Brooklyn café phenomenon is a sign of something long-lasting or just a clever educational design finding its natural habitat. Without a syllabus or not, people will find a way to understand why they are who they are if they truly want to. Sometimes all it takes to sit across from someone and disagree is a good deck of cards and a compelling enough argument.
