A JOURNEY FROM THE COFFEE AS A BEVERAGE OF AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, TO THE COFFEE AS A GLOBAL CONSUMPTION ACTOR IN POSTMODERN AGE: THE CASE OF LONDON

In today’s liquid and connected world, the thought that globalization idea would contribute to diminish the economic and social class hierarchies gave way to a more rational reality in time. Expanding in the meaning of comprehensiveness on consumption of global products, globalization made consumption to be taken out of the local control boundaries and experienced in global scale. Besides consumption is now getting beyond meeting the individual needs and the individual tends to identify him/herself over the the products that he/she consumes. However these products are not the rare ones. On the contrary, they are the most sold and preferred. Belonging to majority, which emotion of having global products brings along, supercedes the physical experiencing of them. Individuals become special by only differentiating themselves from those who are not members of this community, whose distinction stems from its quantity. As an example of that, the meaning of coffee has also changed today in the context of global coffee chains. As a reflection of the ideal beverage representation of The Age of Reason, the course that coffee has taken in the process of commodification had parallels with the inversion from the idea of enlightenment to capitalism. Coffee transformed from being a bourgeois public sphere drink which has the sobering and rasing the perception level features to a global consumption actor. Within this context, on the purpose of observation the effects of comsumption products in global scale, the emotion of involvement to global tendency investigated if it takes effect more intensely beyond the national boundaries and the results were tried to be interpreted in the scope of short-time visitors in London. Participants were adressed two separate questionnaires in the temporal context including quantitative and open-ended questions, and coffee consumption preferences were observed to take part in more "global" coffee chains side