Digital Nomads Are Changing the World

Posted on April 17, 2008
Filed Under News |

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places - and each other, says The Economist in one of its Special Reports last week called Nomads at last.

We are all becoming digital nomads, says the report’s author, Economist correspondent Andreas Kluth (20-minute mp3 interview with him here), who explains that this is not your grandfather’s telecommuting, because no one is tied to the home office - or any place special for that matter.

Furthermore, says the report, this is not like the rise of the Internet and its impact on the affluent West; this is about cellphone technology, a truly level playing field, universally distributed across the globe, and throughout all demographics (except perhaps the older people).

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it.

The report illustrates with beguiling stories how people are doing business and earning money nowadays without actually having an office. There are two sides to this effect of course, richly detailed in the second article, Labour movement.

At his first staff meeting, in a Manhattan café, he and his five colleagues drew up their to-do list. The most urgent item, everybody agreed, was to get BlackBerries … Eight months later, with seven employees now, Mr Coburn brought up the issue again, at another breakfast meeting in a café. He asked if anybody still wanted an office at all.

[…]

Today “people judge what they should achieve by what they could achieve,” says Mr Katz, and with our new technologies we can always theoretically achieve more. People thus “feel inadequate compared with the enormous opportunity they have”.

The physical shapes of cities and architecture - as well as traffic patterns - are changing in verifiable ways under the weight of the digital nomad shifts. The former rush-hours of eight am and five pm are diffusing softly. Walls are warping.

For instance, people working on laptops find it comforting to have their backs to a wall, so hybrid spaces may become curvier, with more nooks, in order to maximise the surface area of their inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is becoming affordable because computer-aided design and new materials make non-repetitive forms cheaper to build.

[…]

Ms Moritz at Jones Lang LaSalle is already counting more offices leaving suburbs entirely and moving back into downtowns, which tend to be younger and hipper. This helps to revitalise city centres … The big losers, Mr Saffo thinks, are the suburbs that were built for specific functions in a previous era but are now blighted.

-from article three, The new oases

What does this new mix of mobility and technology mean for the human side of life? How do our relationships with each other change? The report in its fourth article, Family ties, summarizes that kith and kin get closer, and this can work to the detriment of strangers. The etiquette of this new age is still being discovered, and the many lively stories in this article illustrate the intricacies of the patterns.

Steve Love, a psychologist, was travelling on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow once when a girl standing next to him started talking to him. She asked him how he was and how his day had been, and Mr Love, though a bit shy, politely told her how much he was looking forward to watching Scotland play football that evening. As he spoke, the girl looked at him in horror, then turned away. Only then did Mr Love hear her say “OK, I’ll call you later.” Not a word or gesture was exchanged for the remainder of the (suddenly uncomfortable) journey.

So does location matter anymore? Perhaps only the chips care.

Within a few years, for example, phones will know where you are at what time, and where you are going next, based on your electronic diary. The phone may also know, from your address book, that you have a friend in the building whose diary says that he is going to the same place. Your two phones will alert you so that you can share a taxi. If you have been sleeping with his wife, or are just not feeling very sociable that day, you can always claim that your battery died at that very instant.

-from Location, location, location

The next article, A world of witnesses, outlines the massive changes occurring in a world where everything can be witnessed and communicated, in real time. Everybody, says the report, is becoming a nomadic monitor. And this is part of the way the crowd gets its wisdom in the first place.

“Today, everybody can look at his phone and say how many signal bars he has,” says Eric Paulos, a researcher at Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker. “In a few years, everybody will look at his phone and see what the pollen count is.”

Finally, the report considers what all this means for language and thought. The last article in the report, Homo mobilis, studies the differing opinions of what a technology of snippeting is doing to us. It depends, as always, on if the glass looks half full or half empty to you.

Today’s creative types do more than stitch together (“mash up”) snippets. They forge new combinations almost as neurons form synapses to create new thoughts.

You can Buy a PDF of the complete special report, including all graphics, for saving or one-click printing. And reprints and customized versions are available also.

Comments

2 Responses to “Digital Nomads Are Changing the World”

  1. thetracksuitceo on April 18th, 2008 12:25 pm

    So many good points mentioned here; well done, Ross. I love the quote about the Suburbs being the big losers. I think that’s my new MySpace quote.

  2. Hunter on April 18th, 2008 1:09 pm

    yes, it’s a great review of the scene they did. I should have Diigo’d all these quotes for the community - maybe I’ll go back and do that.

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