Coffee House Conversations in the Digital Age: An Interpretive Analysis of Cultural Memory and Digitally Mediated Adda

Abstract

This article examines how the Bengali song Coffee Houser Sei Addata Aaj Aar Nei represents adda, friendship, temporal rupture, and cultural memory, and how digital circulation changes the conditions under which that memory is encountered. Rather than treating the song as evidence of population-level change, the study adopts a bounded qualitative and interpretive design. The primary cultural text is the commercially released recording performed by Manna Dey, with lyrics by Gauriprasanna Mazumder and music by Suparnakanti Ghosh. It is read alongside purposively selected scholarship on Bengali adda and coffee-house culture, cultural memory and nostalgia, third places and the public sphere, networked communication, digital memory, and limited Bangladesh-based evidence on university students' mediated social relations. Reflexive thematic analysis is used as an interpretive orientation to develop four themes: place-bound sociability, biographical dispersion and temporal loss, cultural transmission through mnemonic objects, and digitally mediated continuity without equivalence. The analysis argues that the song preserves neither a static past nor a simple opposition between offline intimacy and online superficiality. Instead, it organizes memory around a durable place, absent companions, and recurring cultural performance. Digital platforms can extend access, recirculate the song, and support relational continuity, but their affordances, commercial governance, and altered cues mean that they should not be treated as direct substitutes for embodied adda. The article concludes that the most defensible account is one of hybrid continuity: physical and digital forms of interaction may complement one another while remaining culturally and phenomenologically distinct.