Nomads at last
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05 Mayo 2008
Internet, Tecnología Personal
AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, Christopher Waters, the owner, opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as Wi-Fi “hotspots” were mushrooming all around town. His idea was to provide a watering-hole for “techno-Bedouins” such as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, whether in Arabian deserts or American suburbs, are inherently tribal and social creatures, he understood from the outset that a good oasis has to do more than provide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new—or very old—kind of gathering place. He thought of calling his café the “Gypsy Spirit Mission”, which also captures the theme of mobility, but settled for the simpler Nomad. 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. But all of those early depictions and predictions of nomadism arguably missed the point. The mobile lifestyles currently taking shape around the world are nothing like those described in the old books. For this the authors cannot be blamed, since the underlying technologies of genuine and everyday nomadism did not exist even as recently as a decade ago. Mobile phones were already widespread, but they were used almost exclusively for voice calls and were fiendishly hard to connect to the internet and even to computers. Laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) needed fiddly cables to get online, and even then did so at a snail’s pace. Reading and sending e-mail on a mobile phone—not to mention synchronising it across several gadgets and computers to create one “virtual” in-box—was unheard of. People took photos using film. There was no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets, but precious little “connectivity”. Astronauts and hermit crabs Without that missing piece, several misunderstandings took hold that now require correcting. One had to do with all those gadgets. The old mental picture of a nomad invariably had him—mostly him, at that time—lugging lots of them. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people assumed that they also made their owners mobile. Not so. The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies. Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts—and are thus more mobile—but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters. Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online. Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel. As the costs of (stationary) telecommunications plummeted, it became fascinating to contemplate “the death of distance” (the title of a book written by Frances Cairncross, then on the staff of The Economist). And since the early mobile phones were aimed largely at business executives, it was assumed that nomadism was about corporate travel in particular. And indeed many nomads are frequent flyers, for example, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are now introducing in-flight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel can coincide, they need not. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large. Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought. Beyond technology Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony’s Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple’s commercialisation of the “graphical user interface”, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset. Cumulatively, all of these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world. The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over. Since humans, as Sigmund Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work and love, in order to find fulfilment, this report will start off by examining how they will work. Labour movement Within three days they had their BlackBerries and were pitching their offerings to fund managers. That went well and kept everybody busy. All six were roaming around the city and country, working from wherever they pleased and meeting clients either virtually—via e-mail, phone or instant messaging—or physically wherever the clients preferred. “No client ever even asked me whether we had an office,” says Mr Coburn, “so the office space never rose to the top of the agenda.” 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. One thirtysomething woman, with two kids and a nanny at home, felt that she might like a quiet office as an option. But the others—all in their 30s except for two fortysomethings, including Mr Coburn—were now against it. “We had learned to love the freedom and autonomy,” says Mr Coburn. So Coburn Ventures remains a “virtual firm”. That changes the way its employees live. While at UBS, Mr Coburn got up at precisely 5.08am on weekdays in order to catch a commuter train into Manhattan that would allow him to be at his cubicle by 6.45 and in a conference room at 7.00. “I never saw my kids in the morning,” he recalls. Now he wakes up at 6.15, does half an hour of yoga, kisses his three children and then turns on his BlackBerry. Usually he works at home or in cafés with Wi-Fi in his suburb of Westchester. When he goes into Manhattan, it is for specific meetings and at off-peak times. He also works from his second home in Maine and uses the five-hour drive for “wonderful, free conversations” on his earpiece. Nomadism works, he says, because everybody on his team is “conscientious and self-motivated”. But it did take some adjusting. At first the team’s communications became more “transactional”—efficient but impersonal. Once a terse e-mail led to an awkward misunderstanding. And without the proverbial water cooler, there was “no space for casual serendipity”, says Mr Coburn. But these drawbacks were easy to fix. His team now gets together regularly for fun, as if they were a clique of college friends. The group has become closer than any he has ever been part of, says Mr Coburn, and everybody has a “deeper connection to the organisation”. James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks. And it is not only the young and digitally savvy. At 64, Mr Ware considers himself a nomad, and accesses the files on his home computer from wherever he happens to be. Today’s work nomadism descends from, but otherwise bears little resemblance to, the older model of “telecommuting”, says Mr Ware. That earlier concept became popular in the 1990s thanks to cheap but stationary telecommunications technologies—the landline phone, the fax and dial-up internet. Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to collaborate, though not necessarily under fluorescent lights in a cubicle farm an hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial difference between telecommuting and nomadism, he says, is that nomadism combines the autonomy of telecommuting with the mobility that allows a gregarious and flexible work style. This new model of nomadic work has become technologically feasible only very recently. Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Research In Motion and inventor of the BlackBerry, the firm’s main product, says that his device “freed you from your desk” just when globalisation seemed to require many office workers to put in 24 hours, seven days a week. “The BlackBerry didn’t cause globalisation, but it helps you manage the reality of it. We wanted you to have a life,” he says. Wi-Fi hotspots have been equally crucial, as have many relatively obscure innovations, such as IMAP, the “internet message access protocol”. It synchronises e-mail across mobile phones, computers and web mail so that the user encounters the same in-box no matter which device he uses. PDF, the “portable-document format”, became a universal standard for producing, sharing and archiving anything that used to require paper. “Cloud computing” increasingly lets people keep their documents online rather than on one particular computer. With the old technological hassles thus mostly conquered, the new questions tend to be sociological. Wes Boyd has worked nomadically for the entire decade since he co-founded MoveOn.org, a leftish organisation for political activism in America, and attributes his “great family life” to this style of work. But as MoveOn.org grew to about 20 staff, thousands of consultants and millions of volunteers, he also realised that “there can’t be any clumps of people in physical offices” because they might turn into cliques or “power centres”. In an effective organisation, “there mustn’t be insiders and outsiders,” he says. So he made it a rule that no two people anywhere may share a physical office. Instead, all of his colleagues are “virtually co-present” throughout the day, says Mr Boyd, pointing to the instant-messaging “buddy list” on his computer screen, which shows who is available and who would rather not be disturbed. Instead of wasting time in pointless physical meetings, he gets most issues resolved with constant and quick electronic communications, arranged ad hoc rather than scheduled in advance. As a result his staff are more “purpose-driven” and less obsessed with relationships, which improves the quality of their work, he says. Conflicts arise only when both models, the old culture and the new, collide or overlap, he says. This usually happens in Washington, DC, where Mr Boyd has a lot of business. In the government bureaucracies he visits, workers still have assistants who “structure their time” so that it can take a week to arrange a meeting to resolve a mundane detail. Yet these same workers are now also expected to do “ad-hoc flexible scheduling”, which tears them apart. “In physical meetings, they are the ones looking at their BlackBerries under the table,” says Mr Boyd. Larger organisations often do not have the option of dispensing with offices entirely, as Coburn Ventures and MoveOn did. So they need to manage a mixed system of work cultures. At Sun Microsystems, a company that makes hardware and software for corporate datacentres, more than half of the workforce is now officially nomadic, as part of a programme called “open work” in which employees have no dedicated desk but work from any that is available (called “hotdesking”), or do not come into the office at all. That has not, however, created the coteries that Mr Boyd fears. “It’s naive to think that the physical infrastructure has anything to do with power,” says Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s chief executive. His experience with nomadism is entirely positive. Sun’s workers love the flexibility, stay with the firm longer and are more productive. Mr Schwartz himself leads by example. He usually carries only his BlackBerry and works from “anywhere that has Wi-Fi”. He has an assistant who manages his diary (“she recently put her foot down and has forbidden me to modify what she puts in”) so that “150% of my time is structured.” The difference is that he now rarely sees her, and that the venues for his scheduled meetings are flexible. He conducts many on Skype, a free internet-telephone service, or in person at cafés. “Time provides the structure, location takes care of itself,” he says. He is now planning to get rid of his physical office entirely; Sun’s top lawyer has already done so. Mr Schwartz, like Messrs Boyd and Coburn, has also noticed that he is having fewer “flesh meetings”. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom of the past few decades, which held that improvements in telecommunications always lead to more physical travel, rather than less. Mr Schwartz used to spend two weeks a month travelling to meet customers; that has come down to less than one week a month. With more than 100,000 customers, he finds that he communicates far more efficiently through his blog, which is translated into ten languages and “on a good day reaches 50,000 people.” When he travels, it is now largely for cultural reasons—his Asian customers, in particular, still find physical meetings reassuring. But in general he finds that “face-to-face is overrated; I care more about the frequency and fidelity of the communication.” Still, nomadic work requires other big adjustments in the culture of an organisation and the behaviour of its individuals, says Mr Ware of the Work Design Collaborative. He finds that older and more traditional supervisors usually oppose the idea because they fear that they cannot manage people whom they cannot see. With time, they usually change their minds, says Mr Ware; but this requires “management by objectives rather than face time”. Not all workers thrive in such a culture; some prefer the structure of the traditional office. But “anyone who did well at college can work well this way,” he thinks. “The prof said ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t care where you did it; it’s the same now.” Death of a road warrior James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University who leads a research centre on the sociology of mobile technologies, says that the shift amounts to a “historical re-integration” of our productive and social spheres. In the hunter-gatherer, agricultural and pre-industrial artisan eras people did not separate the physical space devoted to work, family and play. Blacksmiths, say, worked from their homes, with family and village life all around. It was only with the capital-intensive work of the industrial era that a separation of homes and factories became necessary, because workers “had to be co-located” in order to work efficiently. This also applied to bureaucracies before the digital era. Now, however, the different spheres of life are merging again. This leads to more pressure, says Mr Katz. The difference between the integration of work and family in pre-industrial times and today is that in the old days there were clear limits on personal productivity and now there are not. 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 optimists counter that all it takes is a bit of self-discipline and perspective to overcome that anxiety. Mr Ware advises his clients to draw clear boundaries of etiquette. He has an agreement with his own business partner in another time zone that they not bother each other out of hours. Sun’s Mr Schwartz has an iron rule that he spends two hours after work “rolling around on the floor” with his two sons before returning to his gadgets. Mr Coburn admits that work and family are “all one big blur” but likes it that way. Mr Saffo and his wife ban all gadgets during dinner by candlelight. Almost all the sociologists and psychologists in academia, however, take a more pessimistic view. Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who studies the psychology of gadget use, believes that the addicts, often called “CrackBerries”, are “watching their lives on that little screen and can’t keep up with it”, leaving them permanently anxious. Rutgers’ Mr Katz argues that the “frenzy is only going to get worse.” This is, first, because of “random reinforcement”, the desultory pattern of rewards that comes with addictive behaviours such as gambling. A CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail throughout the day, knowing full well that most of it is chaff, but cannot help himself because of that occasional grain. The second reason, says Mr Katz, is that most people suffer from the illusion that more information always leads to better decisions, and there is always more information available on our phones and laptops. The third reason is that “people today need to do constant impression-management,” because the mere ability to stay connected during weekends, vacations or sabbaticals means that going offline risks reminding others that we are expendable. The flexibility, freedom and productivity of mobile work thus have a cost. Nomads are constantly juggling the social rights of colleagues, relatives and friends, as well as their own right to downtime. All of this, moreover, now tends to happen in public places that were not built specifically for work, in the way offices were. The next article looks at how that affects those kinds of places. The new oases This is best seen in the building’s “student street”, an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance. The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will “make spaces intentionally multifunctional”. This means that 21st-century aesthetics will probably be the exact opposite of the sci-fi chic that 20th-century futurists once imagined. Architects are instead thinking about light, air, trees and gardens, all in the service of human connections. Buildings will have much more varied shapes than before. 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. There will be more “on-demand spaces” and “drop-in centres”, says Ms Moritz, with flexible layouts that facilitate collaboration. Within a typical office building, the area devoted to solitary work, such as the cubicles immortalised in Dilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internal walls and furniture are becoming movable. More space is given to communal areas, some of which are distinguished not by their function but by their etiquette—loud or quiet, say—as in libraries. A particularly striking example, bordering on caricature, is the so-called Googleplex, the headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California. Naturally it has Wi-Fi coverage. But the Googleplex is famous for its good and free victuals, doled out at food courts throughout the sprawling campus, and for the casual mixture of play and work. Over here a software engineer is writing some code on his laptop, sweaty in his workout clothes from the volleyball game in progress on the lawn. Over there another one is zipping along on a scooter, heading for a massage or going to pick up his laundry from the onsite service. Google even extends this workspace, virtually, throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area by running a fleet of commuter shuttles, all of which have Wi-Fi on board to allow uninterrupted coding. Some traditional property developers are drawing inspiration from this sort of thing. Nomadism is “not good for the office industry” as such, concedes Robert Dykstra, who has been developing commercial property for 27 years. He, however, has spotted an opportunity. His new office park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dilapidated city that hopes to take some service-sector jobs from nearby Chicago and Detroit, is unlike any traditional office and “more like a community centre”. Instead of renting to corporate tenants, says Mr Dykstra, he plans to sell memberships as a club does—by the hour, week or month—to nomads dropping by. Mobile workers come in, find all the services they might need—from tech support to copying—and satisfy their needs for “work, love and play” as well, with the aid of fitness studios, restaurants, cooking classes and music rooms. This “flexibility is what separates successful spaces and cities from unsuccessful ones,” says Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at the Institute for the Future, a think-tank. Almost any public space can assume some of the features of a Googleplex or a Stata Centre. For example, a not-for-profit organisation in New York has turned Bryant Park, a once-derelict but charming garden in front of the city’s public library, into a hybrid space popular with office workers. The park’s managers noticed that a lot of visitors were using mobile phones and laptops in the park, so they installed Wi-Fi and added some chairs with foldable lecture desks. The idea was not to distract people from the flowers but to let them customise their little bit of the park. Third places The academic name for such spaces is “third places”, a term originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, “The Great, Good Place”. At the time, long before mobile technologies became widespread, Mr Oldenburg wanted to distinguish between the sociological functions of people’s first places (their homes), their second places (offices) and the public spaces that serve as safe, neutral and informal meeting points. As Mr Oldenburg saw it, a good third place makes admission free or cheap—the price of a cup of coffee, say—offers creature comforts, is within walking distance for a particular neighbourhood and draws a group of regulars. The eponymous bar in the television series “Cheers”, “where everybody knows your name”, is an example. Mr Oldenburg’s thesis was that third places were in general decline. More and more people, especially in suburban societies such as America’s, were moving only between their first and second places, making extra stops only at alienating and anonymous locations such as malls, which in Mr Oldenburg’s opinion fail as third places. Society, Mr Oldenburg feared, was at risk of coming unstuck without these venues for spreading ideas and forming bonds. No sooner was the term coined than big business queued up to claim that it was building new third places. The most prominent was Starbucks, a chain of coffee houses that started in Seattle and is now hard to avoid anywhere. Starbucks admits that as it went global it lost its ambiance of a “home away from home”. However, it has also spotted a new opportunity in catering to nomads. Its branches offer not only sofas but also desks with convenient electricity sockets. These days Starbucks makes bigger news when it switches Wi-Fi providers—it dropped T-Mobile for AT&T in February—than when it sells a new type of coffee bean. Bookshops such as Barnes & Noble are also offering “more coffee and crumbs”, as Mr Oldenburg puts it, as are churches, YMCAs and public libraries. But do these oases for nomads actually play the social role of third places? James Katz at Rutgers fears that cyber-nomads are “hollowing them out”. It is becoming commonplace for a café to be full of people with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones or laptops and hacking away at their keyboards, more engaged with their e-mail inbox than with the people touching their elbows. These places are “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated”, says Mr Katz, which leaves people feeling “more isolated than they would be if the café were merely empty”. That is because the “physical presence of other human beings is psychologically and neurologically arousing” but now produces no reward. Quite simply, he says, we have not evolved biologically to be happy in these situations. Many café-owners are trying to deal with this problem. Christopher Waters, the owner of the Nomad Café in Oakland, regularly hosts live jazz and poetry readings, and actually turns off the Wi-Fi router at those times so that people mingle more. He is also planning to turn his café into an online social network so that patrons opening their browsers to connect encounter a welcome page that asks them to fill out a short profile—as they would on Facebook, say—and then see information about the people at the other tables. Most nomads are very open to this sort of thing. Technology aside, there is not such a big difference between a geek with earphones and a laptop today and a Paris existentialist watching the world go by at the café Les Deux Magots in the 1950s. The first might be simultaneously instant-messaging, listening to music and e-mailing, the other puffing a Gitane and jotting down notes about being and nothingness. But as soon as an attractive new customer breezes in, both will instantaneously realign their focus of interest. As more third places pop up and spread, they also change entire cities. Just as buildings during the 20th century were specialised by function, towns were as well, says Mr Mitchell. Suburbs were for living, downtowns for working and other areas for playing. But urban nomadism makes districts, like buildings, multifunctional. Parts of town that were monocultures, he says, gradually become “fine-grained mixed-use neighbourhoods” more akin in human terms to pre-industrial villages than to modern suburbs. 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. Paul Saffo, the forecaster, sees a simultaneous movement to “charismatic exurbs”, such as Mendocino on the Californian coast or Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where incoming nomads are building “consensual communities” with lifestyles reminiscent of the Utopia movements of earlier times. The big losers, Mr Saffo thinks, are the suburbs that were built for specific functions in a previous era but are now blighted. The same trend is also changing traffic patterns. Alan Pisarski has been researching urban movement for three decades and has written a series of three books called “Commuting in America”—the first in 1986, the others one and two decades later. He is now working on the fourth. Thanks to the ten-year intervals, Mr Pisarski claims he has been able to capture the biggest trends. In 1986, before the era of mobility and at the dawn of the PC era, he still observed “the classic diurnal flow” of the post-war commuting pattern, which had baby-boomers sitting in traffic jams at 8am and 5pm between the suburbs and the downtowns. In 1996 he saw a new “circumferential pattern” as jobs shifted to the suburbs, so the baby-boomers were now sitting in jams “on the beltways”. At the same time he already noticed that the fastest-growing group was telecommuters. Things started looking very different in his 2006 book. Younger workers were now joining the baby-boomers in the workforce. Car trips had stopped increasing and were even declining in cities such as Seattle, Atlanta and Portland. Traffic was still heavy but now spread out over much longer periods, starting at 5am and lasting till noon, say. Bizarre new patterns were cropping up, such as a “reverse commute” in Seattle as lots of male computer scientists at Microsoft in the suburb of Redmond raced downtown to find females—a weekday ritual called “the running of the programmers”. The current data, for use in the next book, are telling Mr Pisarski something else again. The baby-boomers are starting to retire, forcing employers to compete for new talent by letting younger employees work wherever they please. Even the older workers are becoming nomadic (Mr Pisarski himself is 70 and works from his BlackBerry and laptop). Traffic congestion, though still bad, is for the first time not getting worse. Car-pooling, which “green” city governments are still encouraging, is declining sharply as commuting times and directions are becoming more diverse and more complex. Indeed, even though there are as many cars on the roads as ever, they are now making very different journeys. In the previous decade trips followed a “radial pattern”, says Mr Pisarski, as both office workers and telecommuters ran errands away from their workplace and back again in order to check their voice messages and faxes. Now people are making trips in a “daisy-chain” pattern, he says. Nomads set off in the morning to drop off the kids at school and then spend all day hopping from one third place to another, with stops at the gym, the post office and so on. Throughout the day they remain connected to colleagues and family members who are elsewhere, and increasingly their movements form no discernible collective pattern at all. Family ties The tools of nomadism clearly bring families closer by allowing them to stay connected when physically separated. But there are unexpected side effects in many everyday situations, as the following anecdote shows. Richard Ling, a sociologist at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telephone company, and author of “New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion”, was standing on his porch in Oslo one day, saying farewell to a few guests, when a plumber walked around the corner, talking on his mobile phone to what appeared to be his wife. Mr Ling, who had a leak in the kitchen, was expecting him. But the plumber took Mr Ling and his guests aback by walking right past them and into the house, where he took off his shoes and headed for the kitchen, chattering into his handset all the while. It was the sort of thing that perhaps excites only sociologists. Here was an example of two big tensions in nomadic society. First, mobile technology pitted the plumber’s interaction with a stranger (Mr Ling) against that with his own wife on the phone. The plumber, to use the technical term, had a “weak tie” to Mr Ling but a “strong tie” to his wife which easily prevailed over the weak one, leaving a few Norwegians feeling temporarily awkward and pondering the fate of their society. Second, the plumber gave precedence to what Mr Ling calls the “mediated” interaction with the person at the other end of the phone, at the expense of his “co-present” communication with Mr Ling who was standing right next to him. In other words, the person who was physically more distant was nonetheless psychologically closer. So out went social norms and rituals (handshakes, greetings) that Norway and other societies accumulated during a past of exclusively co-present interactions. The plumber’s only nod to ritual was to take off his shoes. Sociologists are always arguing about the precise role of ritual in society and the relative importance of the individual, family and community. Emile Durkheim, the earliest, kicked off the debate more than a century ago when he studied Australian aborigines and found that they used rituals to create and maintain solidarity and cohesion among a group. In the 1950s Erving Goffman broadened the definition of rituals to ordinary interactions of daily American life, such as jokes. In the 1970s Mark Granovetter became one of the most influential sociologists of that decade with a paper titled “The Strength of Weak Ties”. Mr Granovetter argued that society needs not only healthy “strong ties” between relatives and friends but also ample and fluid “weak ties” between casual acquaintances. Far from trivial, these weak ties are the “bridges” between “densely knit clumps of close friends” and thus the conduits for ideas, fads and trends. “Social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent,” Mr Granovetter argued. Any erosion of weak ties is therefore to be deplored. The more dismal science But most of these observations, made in a rich country at the height of the PC era, focused on the wired and stationary kind of communications technology rather than the wireless and mobile sort. Now, as mobile communications are becoming the norm, a new generation of sociologists is scrambling to update all these theories. So far, most of them agree that nomadic technology, far from isolating people, brings them closer to their families, friends and lovers—their strong ties. But they still disagree on what that means for weak ties with strangers, and thus society at large. Nomadic technology deepens family ties because, as another sociologist, Christian Licoppe, puts it, it enables “connected presence”, which is new in history. In the era of stationary communications technology, people used landline phones that belonged to a place rather than a person. In that communication culture people talked infrequently and viewed a conversation as an occasion. Typically, they would plan the call for an appropriate time, such as a Sunday. Both sides would introduce themselves with a greeting—ie, a ritual—and then take time to catch up. With mobile phones, on the other hand, people call, text or e-mail one another constantly throughout the day. Since they are always, in effect, contacting a person rather than a place, and since the receiver can see the caller’s name, and probably his picture, they often dispense with greetings altogether. The exchanges now tend to be frequent and short. People expect less content but instead a feeling of permanent connection, as though they were in fact together during the entire time between their physical meetings. Mr Ling, using data from Norway, has found that about half of all mobile-phone calls and text messages go to the same three or four people, typically within ten kilometres of the caller. A lot of this is what he calls “micro-co-ordination”, as family members are out about town and check in with each other to plan their next stop or errand. Dad might call from the supermarket’s dairy aisle to find out which brand of yogurt to buy; mum might text that she is running late and that dad needs to pick up the kids. But such communications go far beyond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Castells, the sociologist at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that mobile technology affects children the most. On one hand, adolescents today become socially autonomous earlier than their parents did, “building their own communities from the bottom up” through constant text-messaging and photo-sharing among their clique, even if this circumvents the wishes of their parents. On the other hand, they also have their parents on speed-dial, and are only one button away from help if they get into trouble. Mr Castells calls this a “safe autonomy pattern”. This has some sociologists concerned. James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile phone a new sort of umbilical cord between children and their parents and wonders whether this might in some cases “retard maturation”. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gadgets are, ironically, a “tethering technology” and create new dependencies that delay the important “Huck Finn moment” in young lives when adolescents first realise that they are alone on the urban equivalent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk and lost after a party is different when one push of a button summons the parental chauffeur. In 2005 a psychology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont found that undergraduates were communicating with their parents, on average, more than ten times a week. Love in cyberspace Mobile technology also tethers couples, especially young ones, but in a different way. Mimi Ito, an anthropologist who studies the effects of mobile technology on youth culture in Japan and America, has found that Japanese lovers send constant text messages to avoid parental rules and to stay connected emotionally when they are physically separated. Every nomadic culture has its idiosyncrasies, and the Japanese speciality is a rich vocabulary of “emoticons”: “I really want to see you (>_<)”; “I feel like I am going to be sick (;_;)”. This steady stream of emoticons and photos in between physical “flesh meets” amounts to “tele-nesting”, says Ms Ito. It also spices up and prolongs the flesh meets. Young people in Tokyo, she has observed, will start their date by exchanging text messages all afternoon as they do homework or take the train to the rendezvous. At night, on their journey home after the actual date, they use messages again as “fading embers of conversation”, sometimes continuing for days and turning little memories into the couple’s “lore”. Often entire cliques do this sort of thing, creating, in effect, their own tribal medium and narrative. Ms Ito has noticed a new genre of photography on the rise as young people use their phones to snap photos of everyday situations—the view from the escalator on the way to school, say—which mean a lot to their friends and nothing to anybody else. They especially love photos that capture “dumb things that their friends do”, such as getting drunk and falling into puddles, which collectively amount to “everyday, casual documentaries” for a circle of friends. Out with the out crowd The first casualty is usually etiquette. Noise pollution is only one kind of violation. In an American survey conducted in 2005, 62% of the people polled—and 74% of those over 60—felt that “using a cell phone in public is a major irritation for other people,” but only 32% of those between 18 and 27 shared that opinion. That divergence makes for a combustible social cocktail whenever the generations mix. It is routine nowadays for people to answer calls in cinemas, restaurants and public toilets, even at weddings and funerals. The volume of these transgressions varies with the culture—Americans and Italians, say, are louder than Swedes or Japanese. And some societies are beginning to adjust. Some countries now have “quiet cars” on trains where patrons cannot talk on their mobiles but must text instead. Trickier etiquette problems arise when the issue is not so much noise as context. One example that will enter the history books occurred last September when Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, was still waging a vigorous campaign for the presidency. As he was up on his podium and in mid-sentence addressing the National Rifle Association (NRA), a crucial constituency for a Republican candidate, his mobile rang and, to gasps in the huge audience, he decided to answer it. What followed, captured on microphone, is worth repeating in its banality: “Hello, dear. I’m talking, I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello? I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished. OK? OK, have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.” When he hung up, the audience had turned to stone. Usually the situation is subtler and the incongruence has more to do with attention. This can be true even during silent mobile communications. It is now routine for university students to text, e-mail and instant-message during lectures. Mr Ling, whose job includes loitering in public places for observation, watched a woman at an Oslo underground station who texted as she walked. She was wholly focused on her text message but had to look up occasionally to weave through the crowds on the platform. Other people were doing the same. It was an “atomised and individualised” scene, says Mr Ling: a new form of the proverbial lonely crowd. But at least this particular Norwegian woman was signalling through her body language to all around her that she wanted to be left alone. The spread of “hands-free” Bluetooth devices, with hidden earplugs seemingly attached to nothing, is removing even those clues. 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. Probably the single most common etiquette conflict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, when mediated communication interrupts co-present communication, as when two or more people are sitting at a table in conversation or negotiation and one of them gets, and answers, a call. The other co-present people must now keep themselves busy while seeming nonchalant. What is more, they must pretend not to be eavesdropping even though they are only a few feet away from the mediated conversation, ideally by assuming a pose of concentration on some other object, such as their fingernails or their own phone. As soon as the intervening call ends, everybody must try to re-enter the co-present context as gracefully as possible. So there is evidence that nomadism is good for in-groups, but at the expense of strangers. If that is true, Mr Granovetter would consider it bad for society. Fortunately, however, the last chapter has not yet been written. Since the outburst of pessimism about the internet among sociologists in the 1990s, the web has recently become an intensely social medium, thanks in large part to proliferating online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Young people have been using these websites on their PCs to keep in touch with much larger groups of people than has ever been feasible before. It is not uncommon for adolescents to add several “friends” a day to their “social graph” on Facebook or to the “buddy list” of their instant-messaging service. As mobile devices now become, in effect, computers for accessing the wider web, these online services are also moving from stationary to mobile use. Whether that could reinvigorate the weak ties in society along with the strong ties remains to be seen. But etiquette, both online and offline, remains a work in progress. Location, location, location Mr Halbherr, admittedly, had professional reasons to ponder this shortcoming. He runs “location-based services” (LBS) for Nokia, the world’s largest handset-maker. Not letting things such as Austerlitz slip by unnoticed is exactly what LBS is in business for. Some people think it is the “next big thing”. It was Nokia’s reason for spending $8.1 billion to buy Navteq, a firm that collects map data around the world. One advantage that mobile phones have over PCs is that they increasingly know and care where they are. Some use the global positioning system (GPS), which uses satellites, others a slightly less accurate method that calculates the distances of nearby cellular towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. This is a huge advance, says Stephen Johnson, one of Nokia’s strategists, because it adds the third element (“where”) required to understand a person’s context, the other two being who and when. Most obviously, this means that “the idea of being lost will be unheard of”, he says. More interestingly, it allows people to become “more immersed in the real world around them”. 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. A world of witnesses Then, in 2006, a penny dropped. NDI, working with an organisation in Montenegro, realised that practically everybody in that country already had the perfect tool to monitor, in all but real time, its election that May. That tool was the mobile phone and its ability to send text messages directly to a computer. The new approach worked so well that it instantly became the standard for monitoring other precarious elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last August briefly threatened to disintegrate amid rumours of violence—also spread through text messages—but quickly returned to order when some 500 observers at the various polling stations sent text messages to the central system saying that the rumours were false. The sheer ubiquity of mobile phones amounts to “the biggest leap in history, bigger than the printing press, which, after all, stayed in the hands of very few people,” says Katrin Verclas, who runs MobileActive.org, a website and community of about 3,000 activists and NGOs all over the world. Even quite basic features such as text messaging, she says, have already allowed countless people everywhere to get more involved in areas traditionally reserved for “activists”. The snazzy new features and internet access now coming to mobile phones will expand the possibilities yet again. An early and classic example of this new opportunity for citizens to participate in society occurred in 2001 when Filipinos, the world’s most avid texters at the time, overthrew their president, Joseph Estrada, by mobilising enormous crowds at short notice, using text messages to spread the word. Howard Rheingold, the author of “Smart Mobs”, saw in such events a sign of much more to come, as people discover ever more ingenious ways of organising groups of people on the fly and of collaborating towards any sort of collective goal. Those goals range from the uplifting, as in the Philippines, to the repellent. The terrorists who bombed three suburban trains in Madrid in 2004, killing 191 people and injuring nearly 2,000, used their mobile phones to detonate the explosives. But a mobile phone then became the clue that uncovered the plot. Mobile phones also became the tool for organising the huge spontaneous demonstrations in the following days. Thus, like every other technology human beings have ever invented, says Ms Verclas, the tools of nomadism arm both sides in the eternal tug-of-war between good and evil. But there is room for optimism, she thinks, because the side with good intentions is more numerous and—so far, at least—has proved more imaginative. Three big categories in particular lend themselves to mobile activism. First, nomadic technology can expose human-rights abuses as honest citizens use technology to monitor and expose crimes and co-ordinate the response. The best weapon against abuses has always been to confront the public with video evidence. This became clear in 1991 when four policemen in Los Angeles pulled over a black man, Rodney King, for speeding and then beat him brutally, with other policemen watching. A bystander, George Holliday, recorded this abuse on his camcorder and soon the images were playing all over America’s mainstream media, sparking race riots in Los Angeles. That event inspired an initial wave of attempts to support grassroots video testimonies by amateurs. In 1992 Peter Gabriel, a British rock musician, started WITNESS, a not-for-profit group, to try to train and equip activists all over the world to use video to document abuses. But little of consequence followed. It was a pure coincidence that Mr Holliday happened to have a camcorder with him when he saw Mr King being beaten, and most of the world’s population was not about to start walking around lugging cameras. Even if they had, there was no easy and automatic outlet in the media for such clips. All this has changed in the past couple of years. Websites such as YouTube that allow any amateur to upload video have become all the rage, and Mr Gabriel’s WITNESS has just launched a site called “the Hub” that is dedicated entirely to human-rights clips. Simultaneously, mobile phones have become still cameras and are increasingly turning into video cameras as well. This means that all the tools of testimony are now both mobile and ubiquitous. People no longer need to plan to document wrongdoing, but are able to capture it when and as they experience it. At the mundane end of the spectrum, they record cars speeding on roads near schools or snap photos of derelict public parks, then upload them to their community website. At the extreme end, as in Albania and Egypt recently, they film police brutality, or government outrages such as the crackdown by Myanmar’s junta on its Buddhist monks. The second area where mobile technology is beginning to have a big impact is health care, especially in poor countries. In South Africa people can text their location to a number and get an instant reply with the nearest clinic testing for HIV. HealthyToys.org, founded by a parental advocacy group and two American organisations, lets concerned parents text in the name of a toy they are considering buying in a shop and instantly reports back with information about lead or other toxins that may have been found in it. Soon mobile technology could play a large role in detecting, mapping and responding to epidemics. A lot of information about a recent polio outbreak in Kenya became available because health workers were using hand-held devices to collect data that used to be recorded on paper forms. The software on those devices, called EpiSurveyor and made by a not-for-profit organisation called DataDyne, is also used by health workers in Sierra Leone and Zambia. The World Health Organisation has now declared it to be the technological standard, and DataDyne is in the process of loading it onto ordinary mobile phones for use in poor countries everywhere, says Joel Selanikio, a doctor who co-founded the organisation. For most people in poor countries, he thinks, mobile phones are fast becoming the main communications tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, family album and many other things. The third category is environmental monitoring. The humble text message has already changed consumer behaviour in many places. Shoppers in South Africa can text the name of a fish to a service called FishMS and receive an instantaneous recommendation “to tuck in”, to “think twice” or to “avoid completely”, based on how the fish was caught and whether the species is endangered. Londoners can text a service called AirTEXT to get information on air quality, and subscribers receive alerts when pollution is forecast to spike. Scents and sensability The real fun begins when phones start observing and reporting problems automatically. This is now on the horizon. In January researchers at America’s Purdue University reported that they are building a system for the state of Indiana designed to use a network of mobile phones to detect and track radiation. In the event of a nuclear leak or a “dirty bomb”, the sensors of large numbers of phones, all identifying their location through the global-positioning system (GPS), would point authorities to the source of the radiation. Such tracking systems rely on the collective information from large numbers of phones, whose owners may not even be aware of the part they are playing in this. If, say, a car is carrying a dirty bomb and driving down a street, it passes others cars. The mobile phones inside those passing cars would send information to a database. The signal would grow weaker as the distance from the source increases, whereas the signal from phones in approaching cars would grow stronger. The software would then use the sum of this information to pinpoint the bomb. The idea that phones should have sensors is far from outlandish. Phones already incorporate primitive versions, including the sensor that picks up the cellular signal, light sensors that dim the keyboard and acceleration sensors that notice when the user lifts the phone to his ear. “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.” Mr Paulos runs a project on “participatory urbanism” for Intel, which explores exactly how sensors inside mobile phones might improve society. He recently conducted a study in Ghana, where he attached tiny pollution sensors to the phones of 15 taxi drivers. Using the data—the amount of pollution at specific times of day in places where the taxis went—Mr Paulos’s team drew up a pollution map of the city which revealed surprising patterns in particular roads. Some of the taxi drivers changed their routes as a result. Carbon monoxide, ozone, pollen, sun intensity and temperature are among the things that Mr Paulos considers particularly easy to measure by tweaking mobile phones in ways that consumers would not even notice. Any such data would need to be collected in a discreet way to assure the privacy of consumers. But eventually, thinks Mr Paulos, this new twist to the everyday mobility of ordinary people could lead to “grassroots citizen science”. Does this trend give any cause for concern? To some people it suggests a coming surveillance state, as all sorts of titbits about people’s personal lives that used to be private become input for new services such as traffic maps, health warnings or security alerts. Those worries, evoking an earlier era of top-down control by a Big Brother, are mostly misplaced, claims Mr Verclas. A neighbourhood-watch community with global reach is a better metaphor. Instead of surveillance, watching from above, society will rely on a new and opposite concept, sousveillance, watching from below. Such arguments may make more sense in California than in China. Homo mobilis Is that a bit rich? Certainly, tools have always played a big part in defining human nature. Homo habilis, “handy man”, is considered the first species in our genus, surviving until about 1.6m years ago, because he used primitive tools made from stone or bone. Homo erectus, “upright man”, got his name from his stature, but his crucial innovation was to tame fire for his use. And whether or not Homo sapiens, “wise man”, entirely lives up to his name, he has achieved astonishing breakthroughs both in hardware (eg, the wheel) and software (eg, language). If researchers in ivory towers now debate the arrival of Homo mobilis, their tongue is only partially in their cheek. Once again the biggest shift seems to involve language, and by implication thought and feeling. That major linguistic change is afoot is clear to anybody who has been around young people almost anywhere in the world. Entire subcultures now define themselves primarily or exclusively through their chosen text-messaging or instant-messaging argot. Richard Ling, for instance, has studied a teenage fad in Norway that had kids substituting the letter “z” for “s” in Norwegian words, yielding spellings such as “koz” or “klemz”, both meaning “hug”. This substitution defined, as Mr Ling puts it, “middle-class teenyboppers”—until a rap band ridiculed the trend, thus killing it off. The teens immediately took to writing their text messages and e-mails in pidgin Swedish. Among this group of Norwegians, a Swedish word such as “kramar” (again, hugs) became “krämmar”. Both the “z” endings and the pidgin Swedish showed up only in electronic media, never in spoken language. So far, that suggests nothing more than a new variant of traditional in-group markers such as tattoos or Ivy-League class rings. But Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University in Washington, DC, and author of “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World”, sees more worrying trends. Society’s attitude towards language has changed, she thinks. For about 250 years, the consensus in Western societies has been that grammar, syntax and spelling matter, and that rules have to be observed. That consensus now appears to be at risk. In all electronic media, especially when typed on the small screens of mobile handsets, absolutely anything, linguistically speaking, seems to go. Apostrophes that once distinguished between “its” and “it’s” seem quaint and arbitrary. Entire words and sentences now compose themselves with the ever-present “autofill” and spell-check features, which adolescents increasingly regard as a virtual Samuel Johnson or Konrad Duden. The academically and politically correct response is to welcome this trend with open arms. Language, after all, appears only to be returning to its natural and healthy state of flux. When Geoffrey Chaucer was writing in the 14th century there were no set spelling rules, but he managed to compose interesting texts nonetheless. For all we know, today’s digital and mobile world might be teeming with potential Chaucers. Ms Baron will have none of it. Spelling is in decline today, she thinks, not because of the rich diversity of dialects, as in Chaucer’s day, but because the dominant mindset of nomadic culture is that language does not matter. We are entering, as she puts is, an age of “linguistic whateverism”. One reason is that people today are writing vastly larger amounts of text than ever before, and “the more we write online, the worse writers we become.” In the eras of quills, pens or even manual typewriters it was hard to write a lot, so people took time and care in clarifying their thoughts. Many nomads today are convinced that they don’t have the time to think and care, so they concentrate on speed alone. Because language is the primary vehicle for thought, this has consequences. Already, Ms Baron detects a new and widespread intellectual torpor among her students. Young Americans used to cut corners before an exam on “Hamlet” by reading the CliffsNotes. Teachers hated them, but they were pedagogic wonders compared with today’s method of Googling the passage in question, then using the computer’s “find” function to get to the exact snippet. Ms Baron thinks that these days her students even think in snippets, which is to say incoherently. And that is how they write essays. Having internalised the new whateverism, they launch in and stumble through, with nary a thought for what they actually want to say. This criticism dovetails strikingly with what other sociologists and psychologists are observing in the interpersonal behaviour of some nomads. Older people use their mobile phones to “micro-co-ordinate” with partners during the day in order to run their errands more efficiently and perhaps to spend more time together as a result. But many younger people, who have never known paper diaries or an unconnected world, micro-co-ordinate in order to avoid committing themselves to any fixed meeting time, location or person at all. After all, a better opportunity might yet present itself. The concern, therefore, is that young nomads not only write without thinking or leave home in the morning without planning but also enter relationships without tying themselves down. Large parts of human interaction, especially the awkward subjects of rowing and separating, can now be relegated to virtual, as opposed to physical, interaction. A worrying trend in recent years has been adolescents’ practice of dumping their lovers by text message or, worse, by changing the status of their Facebook profile from “in a relationship” to “single”. This is efficient and instantaneous, but potentially traumatic. Oh evolve! Much of this pessimism is probably overblown. Homo sapiens has been creating technological curses throughout history, and has so far managed to cope with every challenge thrown up. Only a few decades ago the prevailing worry was that television, the reigning medium at the time, was creating a generation of unimaginative couch potatoes, if not intellectual vegetables. That description is quite the opposite of what youth culture has in fact become in today’s era of the internet and nomadism. Even if young people today read the Iliad and Shakespeare only in snippets, if at all, says Manuel Castells at the University of Southern California, they are also creating an artistic culture more vibrant and imaginative than arguably any that has preceded it. The common name for this genre is “mash-up culture”, but that does not do it justice. 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.
opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café’s wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.
This special report, in presupposing that a wireless world will soon be upon us, will explore these ramifications of mobile technology, rather than the technologies themselves or their business models. But it is worth making clear that technology underlies all of the changes in today’s nomadic societies, so that its march will accelerate them. Wireless data connections, in particular, seem to be getting better all the time. Cellular networks will become faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in ever more places. And a new generation of wireless technologies is already poised to take over. Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society’s most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.
To people in early-adopter countries such as South Korea and Japan this will come as no surprise. (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as a shock to people in their teens and twenties elsewhere who have never known life without text messages; or to itinerant salesmen and executives who have for years been glued to their BlackBerries day and night. By contrast, many older people will strain to recognise themselves in the behaviour patterns described in this report, and indeed may never adopt them. But the lesson of history is that what the geeks and early adopters do today, the rest of us will probably end up doing tomorrow or the day after. It is the pioneers that set the direction; the mainstream will follow in time.
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere. THREE years ago Pip Coburn left his job as an analyst at UBS, a global bank, in order to start his own investment consultancy, Coburn Ventures. 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. Then they needed to start contacting clients. And at some point they should probably find some office space, ideally in the chic area around New York’s Union Square.
Office politics
The bigger problem is stress. Nomadic work means more autonomy, but “anybody who works for himself has a tyrant as a boss,” says Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley trend-watcher. “The danger is that the anytime, anyplace office will lure us into the tiger cage that is the everytime, everyplace office.” BlackBerries and their kin have already caused marital problems for many couples, who must negotiate whether the gadget is allowed, say, in the bedroom or on the beach while on holiday. Severe addicts pretend to go to the lavatory at home just to check their e-mail. An office worker’s day used to stop when he left the office. When does a nomad’s working day stop?
FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT’s computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building’s most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
Who needs a desk?
The effect already reaches far beyond university campuses and is causing upheaval in the commercial-property industry. Debra Moritz, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a firm that helps companies to manage their office buildings and consults on property investments, says that the total area devoted to traditional office space has begun to decline, although slowly. This is because “inefficiency is more obvious as workers become mobile,” she says. According to Jones Lang LaSalle’s research, workers are at their desks, on average, less than 40% of their time (Ms Moritz ditched her own desk long ago). This does not mean that office space will drop by 60%. But it does mean that office designers are thinking about using space better.
IN AUGUST 2006, the wife of an Israeli soldier on duty in the Lebanon war gave birth to a boy. The army granted the father a brief leave, but he had to return to the front before his son’s bris, the ritual circumcision on the eighth day of his life. So the family did the next best thing. As the sandak held the baby and the mohel made the cut, a relative filmed the entire event on a mobile phone so that the father on the Lebanese border could watch, live, on his own mobile phone and sing and dance with his comrades.
In the 1990s, as the internet came into widespread use, sociologists, never an upbeat bunch to begin with, became decidedly pessimistic. Some observed a “loss of social capital” as people spent their time transfixed by screens rather than other people. Others saw the (real-world, as opposed to online) social networks of Americans shrinking, with ever more people feeling that they were intimate with nobody at all. Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University argued that the internet causes social isolation and depression. Norman Nie at Stanford University believed that “internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family as well as time spent on social activities.”
The potential problem with connected presence is that it usually excludes other people who may be physically present. In situations that might once have been an opportunity to talk to a stranger—waiting for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say—people now fill the time with a few messages to parents, lovers or friends. This strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to “bounded solidarity”, when cliques become so turned in on themselves that they all but stop interacting with the wider society around them.
MICHAEL HALBHERR was driving from Berlin to Budapest the other day when he passed what looked like an empty field. The fact that his mobile phone stayed quiet annoyed him. Here he was, speeding by the site of Napoleon’s great victory at Austerlitz, and nothing even vibrated.
UNTIL a couple of years ago election monitoring was a fiddly, exhausting and often thankless business. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as America’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) would send idealistic student volunteers to complicated places such as Nigeria to observe the balloting, write down data on pieces of paper and then carry or fax the forms somewhere for manual input into a computer system. The process was slow and unreliable. Fraud or violence, if it broke out, spread far faster than credible information.
SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to “the emergence of a new type of person”. In the distant, landline-dominated past, she says, people thought: “I have a feeling so I want to make a call.” Young people today, including Ms Turkle’s teenage daughter, seem to be thinking instead: “I want to have a feeling, so I need to make a call.” What she means is that there is something inorganic, derivative and inauthentic about a lot of mobile communication. As a species, Ms Turkle thinks, we run the risk of letting the permanent wireless social clouds that surround us steal part of our nature.
As for the things that can come between people, technology is certainly one of them. So it has been since a spear missed the mammoth and hit a tribesman. Every technology has created new excess and silliness. In time, each silliness has produced its own backlash and subsequent adjustment. At the simplest level, it is reasonable to assume that Homo sapiens, having invented the “on” button, will discover the “off” button as well.
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