The rise of Digital Nomads

In his work, “Manuel Castells, Open Source, Technology of Cooperation“, Howard Rheingold said:

When social communication media grow in capability, pace, scope, or scale, people use these media to construct more complex social arrangements—that is, they use communication tools and techniques to increase their capacity to cooperate at larger and larger scales. Human history is a story of the co-evolution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society.

The Economist is carrying a special report on the social consequences of the mobile communication revolution across the planet.

It sets the context with the following words:

As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.

A few interesting nuggets that I gleaned are:

• It provides an example of Coburn Ventures - an investment consultancy that has only virtual offices.  All employees are always connected through their BlackBerries and work mostly through the internet.  Considering that about 40% of IBM’s workforce have virtual offices only, I see this as a positive trend in a truly global, flat world.  Funny, that this is an example where “location, location, location” takes on a different significance.
• Nomadic work life is moving to the ‘third places’.  Yet, James Katz of Rutgers feels that these places are “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated”.  Talk of being in Second Life in the third place using the 7th Mass Media.
• Humans are evolving from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo mobilis.  Tomi Ahonen called this the “Generation C” or “Generation Connected”.  As Manuel Castells says, “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing.” 
• The thumb generation is giving rise to “linguistic whateverism”.  “The more we write online, the worse writers we become”.
• Andreas Kluth, the author of the report says, “Nomadism increases productivity—you get more done. With it comes an addictive behaviour that also occurs in gambling. There is a random pattern of awards, you never know when it pays out, so you keep going.”

In spite of some dire predictions, I am optimistic that something good can still come out of all this.  Before that, may be we will go through paying more and more attention to less and less.

Here are the links:

Our nomadic future
Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy

Nomads at last
Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth

Labour movement
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere

The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic

Location, location, location
It matters

Family ties
Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers

A world of witnesses
When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor

Homo mobilis
As language goes, so does thought

Author interview
A discussion with Andreas Kluth, Bay Area technology correspondent of The Economist

Sources and acknowledgments