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Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, loveand relate to places�and each other, says Andreas Kluth

ban nomadism has had the mixed bless-ing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the mostin�uential media and communicationstheorist ever, pictured nomads zippingaround at great speed, using facilities onthe road and all but dispensing with theirhomes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, aFrench economist who was advising presi-dent François Mitterrand at the time, usedthe term to predict an age when rich anduprooted elites would jet around theworld in search of fun and opportunity,and poor but equally uprooted workerswould migrate in search of a living. In the1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Man-ners jointly wrote the �rst book with �digi-tal nomad� in the title, adding the be-wildering possibilities of the latest gadgetsto the vision.

But all of those early depictions andpredictions of nomadism arguably missedthe point. The mobile lifestyles currentlytaking shape around the world are nothinglike those described in the old books. Forthis the authors cannot be blamed, sincethe underlying technologies of genuineand everyday nomadism did not existeven as recently as a decade ago. Mobilephones were already widespread, but theywere used almost exclusively for voicecalls and were �endishly hard to connectto the internet and even to computers. Lap-top computers and personal digital assis-tants (PDAs) needed �ddly cables to get on-

The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 1

1

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, Califor-nia, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student

at the nearby university in Berkeley, placesher double Americano next to her mobilephone and iPod, opens her MacBook lap-top computer and logs on to the café’swireless internet connection to study forher class on the legal treatment of sexualorientation. She is a regular here butdoesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads �Nomad, Nomad,Nomad, Nomad�. That says it all, shethinks. Permanently connected, she com-municates by text, photo, video or voicethroughout the day with her friends andfamily, and does her �work stu�� at thesame time. She roams around town, but of-ten alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Christopher Waters, the owner,opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just asWi-Fi �hotspots� were mushrooming allaround town. His idea was to provide awatering-hole for �techno-Bedouins� suchas himself, he says. Since Bedouins,whether in Arabian deserts or Americansuburbs, are inherently tribal and socialcreatures, he understood from the outsetthat a good oasis has to do more than pro-vide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new�orvery old�kind of gathering place. Hethought of calling his café the �GypsySpirit Mission�, which also captures thetheme of mobility, but settled for the sim-pler Nomad.

As a word, vision and goal, modern ur-

Also in this section

www.economist.com/specialreports

A list of sources is at

More articles on telecommunications are at

www.economist.com/mobiletelecoms

Nomads at last

Labour movementThe joys and drawbacks of being able towork from anywhere. Page 3

The new oasesNomadism changes buildings, cities andtra�c. Page 6

Family tiesKith and kin get closer, with consequences forstrangers. Page 8

Location, location, locationIt matters. Page 10

A world of witnessesWhen everybody becomes a nomadic monitor. Page 11

Homo mobilisAs language goes, so does thought. Page 13

1

2 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008

2 line, and even then did so at a snail’s pace.Reading and sending e-mail on a mobilephone�not to mention synchronising itacross several gadgets and computers tocreate one �virtual� in-box�was unheardof. People took photos using �lm. Therewas no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets,but precious little �connectivity�.

Astronauts and hermit crabsWithout that missing piece, several misun-derstandings took hold that now requirecorrecting. One had to do with all thosegadgets. The old mental picture of a no-mad invariably had him�mostly him, atthat time�lugging lots of them. Since thesemachines, large and small, were portable,people assumed that they also made theirowners mobile. Not so. The proper meta-phor for somebody who carries portablebut unwieldy and cumbersome infrastruc-ture is that of an astronaut rather than anomad, says Paul Sa�o, a trend-watcher inSilicon Valley. Astronauts must bring whatthey need, including oxygen, because theycannot rely on their environment to pro-vide it. They are both de�ned and limitedby their gear and supplies.

Around the turn of the century, assome astronauts, typically executive roadwarriors, got smarter about packing light,says Mr Sa�o, they graduated to an inter-mediate stage, becoming hermit crabs.These are crustaceans that survive by drag-ging around a cast-o� mollusc shell forprotection and shelter. In the metaphoricalsense, the shell might be a �carry-on� bagon wheels, stu�ed full of cables, discs,dongles, batteries, plugs and paper docu-ments (just in case of disc failure). Thesehermit crabs strike fear into the hearts ofseated airline passengers whenever theyboard, because their shells invariably banginto innocent shins all the way to their

seat. They carry less than astronauts�andare thus more mobile�but are still quiteheavily laden with gear, mostly as a safe-guard against disasters.

Urban nomads have started appearingonly in the past few years. Like their ante-cedents in the desert, they are de�ned notby what they carry but by what they leavebehind, knowing that the environmentwill provide it. Thus, Bedouins do notcarry their own water, because they knowwhere the oases are. Modern nomadscarry almost no paper because they accesstheir documents on their laptop comput-ers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly,they don’t even bring laptops. Many engi-neers at Google, the leading internet com-pany and a magnet for nomads, travelwith only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other�smart phone�. If ever the need arises for alarge keyboard and some earnest typing,they sit down in front of the nearest avail-able computer anywhere in the world,open its web browser and access all theirdocuments online.

Another big misunderstanding of pre-vious decades was to confuse nomadismwith migration or travel. As the costs of(stationary) telecommunications plum-meted, it became fascinating to contem-plate �the death of distance� (the title of abook written by Frances Cairncross, thenon the sta� of The Economist). And sincethe early mobile phones were aimedlargely at business executives, it was as-sumed that nomadism was about cor-porate travel in particular. And indeedmany nomads are frequent �yers, for ex-ample, which is why airlines such as Jet-Blue, American Airlines and ContinentalAirlines are now introducing in-�ight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel cancoincide, they need not.

Humans have always migrated andtravelled, without necessarily living no-madic lives. The nomadism now emergingis di�erent from, and involves much morethan, merely making journeys. A modernnomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo,Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-settingchief executive. He or she may never haveleft his or her city, stepped into an aero-plane or changed address. Indeed, how farhe moves is completely irrelevant. Even ifan urban nomad con�nes himself to asmall perimeter, he nonetheless has a newand surprisingly di�erent relationship totime, to place and to other people. �Perma-nent connectivity, not motion, is the criti-cal thing,� says Manuel Castells, a sociolo-gist at the Annenberg School forCommunication, 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 andgadget geeks in studying the consequencesof this technology. Sociologists in particu-lar are trying to �gure out how mobilecommunications are changing interac-tions between people. Nomadism, mostbelieve, tends to bring people who are al-ready close, such as family members, evencloser. But it may do so at the expense oftheir attentiveness towards strangers en-countered physically (rather than virtu-ally) in daily life. That has implications forsociety at large.

Anthropologists and psychologists areinvestigating how mobile and virtual in-teraction spices up or challenges physicaland o�ine chemistry, and whether itmakes young people in particular moreautonomous or more dependent. Archi-tects, property developers and urban plan-ners are changing their thinking aboutbuildings and cities to accommodate thenew habits of the nomads that dwell inthem. Activists are trying to piggyback onthe ubiquity of nomadic tools to improvethe world, even as they worry about thesame tools in the hands of the malicious.Linguists are chronicling how nomadiccommunication changes language itself,and thus thought.

Beyond technologyThis special report, in presupposing that awireless world will soon be upon us, willexplore these rami�cations of mobile tech-nology, rather than the technologies them-selves or their business models. But it is

1The instrument of choice

Source: International Telecommunications Union

*Computer-based dial-up and broadband

Mobile-phone and internet users, worldwidebn

1996 98 2000 02 04 06 070

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Mobile-phone users

Internet users*

2Anywhere, any time

Source: Pew Research Centre

Use of mobile phone or PDA to do the followingby age group, %, 2007

18-29 30-49 50-64 65+

Send or receive 85 65 38 11text messages

Take a picture 82 64 42 22

Play a game 47 29 13 6

Play music 38 16 5 2

Record a video 34 19 8 3

Access the 31 22 10 6internet

Send or receive 28 21 12 6e-mail

Send or receive 26 18 11 7instant messages

Watch a video 19 11 4 2

At least one of 96 85 63 36these activities

1


2 worth making clear that technology un-derlies all of the changes in today’s no-madic societies, so that its march will ac-celerate them. Wireless data connections,in particular, seem to be getting better allthe time. Cellular networks will becomefaster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fihotspots are popping up in ever moreplaces. And a new generation of wirelesstechnologies is already poised to take over.Regulators have grasped that the airwavesare now among society’s most importantassets. America, for instance, has just auc-tioned o� a chunk of spectrum with newrules that require the owner to allow anykind of device and software to run on theresulting network.

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory.Just as Sony’s Walkman once planted thenotion that music can be mobile, theBlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), aCanadian �rm, has since 1999 made e-mailon the go seem normal. And just as the per-sonal-computer era entered the main-stream only in the 1980s with Apple’s com-mercialisation of the �graphical userinterface�, the mobile era arguably beganonly last summer when the same �rmlaunched the iPhone, with its radically

new and user-friendly touch interface. Asa result, Google, for instance, has received50 times more web-search requests fromiPhones this year than from any other mo-bile handset.

Cumulatively, all of these changesamount to a historic merger, at long last, oftwo technologies that have already provedrevolutionary in their own right. The mo-bile phone has changed the world by be-coming ubiquitous in rich and poor coun-tries alike. The internet has mostlytouched rich countries, and rich people inpoor countries, but has already changedthe way people shop, bank, listen to music,read news and socialise. Now the mobilephone is on course to replace the PC as theprimary device for getting online. Accord-ing to the International Telecommunica-tions Union, 3.3 billion people, more thanhalf the world’s population, now sub-scribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart1, previous page), so the internet at lastlooks set to change the whole world.

To people in early-adopter countriessuch as South Korea and Japan this willcome as no surprise. (Five of the ten best-selling novels in Japan last year were writ-ten on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as

a shock to people in their teens and twen-ties elsewhere who have never known lifewithout text messages; or to itinerantsalesmen and executives who have foryears been glued to their BlackBerries dayand night. By contrast, many older peoplewill strain to recognise themselves in thebehaviour patterns described in this re-port, and indeed may never adopt them.But the lesson of history is that what thegeeks and early adopters do today, the restof us will probably end up doing tomor-row or the day after. It is the pioneers thatset the direction; the mainstream will fol-low in time.

The most wonderful thing about mo-bile technology today is that consumerscan increasingly forget about how it worksand simply take advantage of it. As MsCanlas sips her Americano and dives intoher e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, shegives no thought to the speci�cations andstandards that make her connection possi-ble. It is the human connections that nowtake over. Since humans, as SigmundFreud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, workand love, in order to �nd ful�lment, this re-port will start o� by examining how theywill work. 7

THREE years ago Pip Coburn left his jobas an analyst at UBS, a global bank, in

order to start his own investment consul-tancy, Coburn Ventures. At his �rst sta�meeting, in a Manhattan café, he and his�ve colleagues drew up their to-do list. Themost urgent item, everybody agreed, wasto get BlackBerries. Then they needed tostart contacting clients. And at some pointthey should probably �nd some o�cespace, ideally in the chic area around NewYork’s Union Square.

Within three days they had their Black-Berries and were pitching their o�erings tofund managers. That went well and kepteverybody busy. All six were roamingaround the city and country, workingfrom wherever they pleased and meetingclients either virtually�via e-mail, phoneor instant messaging�or physically wher-ever the clients preferred. �No client evereven asked me whether we had an o�ce,�says Mr Coburn, �so the o�ce space neverrose to the top of the agenda.�

Eight months later, with seven employ-ees now, Mr Coburn brought up the issueagain, at another breakfast meeting in acafé. He asked if anybody still wanted ano�ce at all. One thirtysomething woman,with two kids and a nanny at home, feltthat she might like a quiet o�ce as an op-tion. But the others�all in their 30s exceptfor two fortysomethings, including Mr Co-burn�were now against it. �We hadlearned to love the freedom and auton-omy,� says Mr Coburn. So Coburn Ven-tures remains a �virtual �rm�.

That changes the way its employeeslive. While at UBS, Mr Coburn got up atprecisely 5.08am on weekdays in order tocatch a commuter train into Manhattanthat would allow him to be at his cubicleby 6.45 and in a conference room at 7.00. �Inever saw my kids in the morning,� he re-calls. Now he wakes up at 6.15, does halfan hour of yoga, kisses his three childrenand then turns on his BlackBerry. Usuallyhe works at home or in cafés with Wi-Fi in

his suburb of Westchester. When he goesinto Manhattan, it is for speci�c meetingsand at o�-peak times. He also works fromhis second home in Maine and uses the�ve-hour drive for �wonderful, free con-versations� on his earpiece.

Nomadism works, he says, becauseeverybody on his team is �conscientiousand self-motivated�. But it did take someadjusting. At �rst the team’s communica-tions became more �transactional��e�-cient but impersonal. Once a terse e-mailled to an awkward misunderstanding.And without the proverbial water cooler,there was �no space for casual serendipi-ty�, says Mr Coburn. But these drawbackswere easy to �x. His team now gets to-gether regularly for fun, as if they were aclique of college friends. The group has be-come closer than any he has ever been partof, says Mr Coburn, and everybody has a�deeper connection to the organisation�.

James Ware, a co-founder of the WorkDesign Collaborative, a small think-tank,

Labour movement

The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere

says that nomadic work styles are fast be-coming the norm for �knowledge work-ers�. His research shows that in Americasuch people spend less than a third of theirworking time in traditional corporate of-�ces, about a third in their home o�cesand the remaining third working from�third places� such as cafés, public librar-ies or parks. And it is not only the youngand digitally savvy. At 64, Mr Ware consid-ers himself a nomad, and accesses the �leson his home computer from wherever hehappens to be.

Today’s work nomadism descendsfrom, but otherwise bears little resem-blance to, the older model of �telecom-muting�, says Mr Ware. That earlier con-cept became popular in the 1990s thanksto cheap but stationary telecommunica-tions technologies�the landline phone,the fax and dial-up internet. Because it stilltied workers to a place�the home o�ce�telecommuting implicitly had people �co-cooning at home �ve days a week�, hesays. But people do not want that: instead,they want to mingle with others and tocollaborate, though not necessarily under�uorescent lights in a cubicle farm anhour’s drive from their homes. The crucialdi�erence between telecommuting andnomadism, he says, is that nomadismcombines the autonomy of telecommut-ing with the mobility that allows a gregari-ous and �exible work style.

This new model of nomadic work hasbecome technologically feasible only veryrecently. Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Re-search In Motion and inventor of theBlackBerry, the �rm’s main product, saysthat his device �freed you from your desk�just when globalisation seemed to requiremany o�ce workers to put in 24 hours,seven days a week. �The BlackBerry didn’tcause globalisation, but it helps you man-age the reality of it. We wanted you to havea life,� he says.

Wi-Fi hotspots have been equally cru-cial, as have many relatively obscure inno-vations, such as IMAP, the �internet mes-sage access protocol�. It synchronisese-mail across mobile phones, computersand web mail so that the user encountersthe same in-box no matter which devicehe uses. PDF, the �portable-document for-mat�, became a universal standard for pro-ducing, sharing and archiving anythingthat used to require paper. �Cloud comput-ing� increasingly lets people keep theirdocuments online rather than on one par-ticular computer.

O�ce politicsWith the old technological hassles thusmostly conquered, the new questions tendto be sociological. Wes Boyd has workednomadically for the entire decade since heco-founded MoveOn.org, a leftish orga-nisation for political activism in America,and attributes his �great family life� to thisstyle of work. But as MoveOn.org grew toabout 20 sta�, thousands of consultantsand millions of volunteers, he also real-ised that �there can’t be any clumps of peo-ple in physical o�ces� because they mightturn into cliques or �power centres�. In ane�ective organisation, �there mustn’t beinsiders and outsiders,� he says. So hemade it a rule that no two people any-where may share a physical o�ce.

Instead, all of his colleagues are �virtu-ally co-present� throughout the day, saysMr Boyd, pointing to the instant-messag-ing �buddy list� on his computer screen,which shows who is available and whowould rather not be disturbed. Instead ofwasting time in pointless physical meet-ings, he gets most issues resolved with con-stant and quick electronic communica-tions, arranged ad hoc rather thanscheduled in advance. As a result his sta�are more �purpose-driven� and less ob-sessed with relationships, which im-

proves the quality of their work, he says. Con�icts arise only when both models,

the old culture and the new, collide oroverlap, he says. This usually happens inWashington, DC, where Mr Boyd has a lotof business. In the government bureaucra-cies he visits, workers still have assistantswho �structure their time� so that it cantake a week to arrange a meeting to resolvea mundane detail. Yet these same workersare now also expected to do �ad-hoc �exi-ble scheduling�, which tears them apart.�In physical meetings, they are the oneslooking at their BlackBerries under the ta-ble,� says Mr Boyd.

Larger organisations often do not havethe option of dispensing with o�ces en-tirely, as Coburn Ventures and MoveOndid. So they need to manage a mixed sys-tem of work cultures. At Sun Microsys-tems, a company that makes hardwareand software for corporate datacentres,more than half of the workforce is now of-�cially nomadic, as part of a programmecalled �open work� in which employeeshave no dedicated desk but work from anythat is available (called �hotdesking�), ordo not come into the o�ce at all.

That has not, however, created the cote-ries that Mr Boyd fears. �It’s naive to thinkthat the physical infrastructure has any-thing to do with power,� says JonathanSchwartz, Sun’s chief executive. His experi-ence with nomadism is entirely positive.Sun’s workers love the �exibility, stay withthe �rm longer and are more productive.

Mr Schwartz himself leads by example.1


2


2 He usually carries only his BlackBerry andworks from �anywhere that has Wi-Fi�. Hehas an assistant who manages his diary(�she recently put her foot down and hasforbidden me to modify what she puts in�)so that �150% of my time is structured.�The di�erence is that he now rarely seesher, and that the venues for his scheduledmeetings are �exible. He conducts manyon Skype, a free internet-telephone ser-vice, or in person at cafés. �Time providesthe structure, location takes care of itself,�he says. He is now planning to get rid of hisphysical o�ce entirely; Sun’s top lawyerhas already done so.

Mr Schwartz, like Messrs Boyd and Co-burn, has also noticed that he is havingfewer ��esh meetings�. This runs counterto the conventional wisdom of the pastfew decades, which held that improve-ments in telecommunications always leadto more physical travel, rather than less. MrSchwartz used to spend two weeks amonth travelling to meet customers; thathas come down to less than one week amonth. With more than 100,000 custom-ers, he �nds that he communicates farmore e�ciently through his blog, which istranslated into ten languages and �on agood day reaches 50,000 people.� Whenhe travels, it is now largely for cultural rea-sons�his Asian customers, in particular,still �nd physical meetings reassuring. Butin general he �nds that �face-to-face isoverrated; I care more about the frequencyand �delity of the communication.�

Still, nomadic work requires other bigadjustments in the culture of an organisa-tion and the behaviour of its individuals,says Mr Ware of the Work Design Collabo-rative. He �nds that older and more tradi-tional supervisors usually oppose the ideabecause they fear that they cannot managepeople whom they cannot see. With time,they usually change their minds, says MrWare; but this requires �management byobjectives rather than face time�. Not allworkers thrive in such a culture; someprefer the structure of the traditional o�ce.But �anyone who did well at college canwork well this way,� he thinks. �The profsaid ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t carewhere you did it; it’s the same now.�

Death of a road warriorThe bigger problem is stress. Nomadicwork means more autonomy, but �any-body who works for himself has a tyrantas a boss,� says Paul Sa�o, the Silicon Val-ley trend-watcher. �The danger is that theanytime, anyplace o�ce will lure us intothe tiger cage that is the everytime, every-

place o�ce.� BlackBerries and their kinhave already caused marital problems formany couples, who must negotiatewhether the gadget is allowed, say, in thebedroom or on the beach while on holi-day. Severe addicts pretend to go to the lav-atory at home just to check their e-mail. Ano�ce worker’s day used to stop when heleft the o�ce. When does a nomad’s work-ing day stop?

James Katz, a professor at Rutgers Uni-versity who leads a research centre on thesociology of mobile technologies, saysthat the shift amounts to a �historical re-integration� of our productive and socialspheres. In the hunter-gatherer, agricul-tural and pre-industrial artisan eras peopledid not separate the physical space de-voted to work, family and play. Black-smiths, say, worked from their homes,with family and village life all around. Itwas only with the capital-intensive workof the industrial era that a separation ofhomes and factories became necessary,because workers �had to be co-located� inorder to work e�ciently. This also appliedto bureaucracies before the digital era.Now, however, the di�erent spheres of lifeare merging again.

This leads to more pressure, says MrKatz. The di�erence between the integra-tion of work and family in pre-industrialtimes and today is that in the old daysthere were clear limits on personal pro-

ductivity and now there are not. Today�people judge what they should achieveby what they could achieve,� says Mr Katz,and with our new technologies we can al-ways theoretically achieve more. Peoplethus �feel inadequate compared with theenormous opportunity they have�.

The optimists counter that all it takes isa bit of self-discipline and perspective toovercome that anxiety. Mr Ware adviseshis clients to draw clear boundaries of eti-quette. He has an agreement with his ownbusiness partner in another time zone thatthey not bother each other out of hours.Sun’s Mr Schwartz has an iron rule that hespends two hours after work �rollingaround on the �oor� with his two sons be-fore returning to his gadgets. Mr Coburnadmits that work and family are �all onebig blur� but likes it that way. Mr Sa�o andhis wife ban all gadgets during dinner bycandlelight.

Almost all the sociologists and psychol-ogists in academia, however, take a morepessimistic view. Sherry Turkle, a profes-sor at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology (MIT) who studies the psychologyof gadget use, believes that the addicts, of-ten called �CrackBerries�, are �watchingtheir lives on that little screen and can’tkeep up with it�, leaving them perma-nently anxious.

Rutgers’ Mr Katz argues that the �frenzyis only going to get worse.� This is, �rst, be-cause of �random reinforcement�, the des-ultory pattern of rewards that comes withaddictive behaviours such as gambling. ACrackBerry winnows through his e-mailthroughout the day, knowing full well thatmost of it is cha�, but cannot help himselfbecause of that occasional grain. The sec-ond reason, says Mr Katz, is that most peo-ple su�er from the illusion that more in-formation always leads to better decisions,and there is always more informationavailable on our phones and laptops. Thethird reason is that �people today need todo constant impression-management,�because the mere ability to stay connectedduring weekends, vacations or sabbaticalsmeans that going o�ine risks remindingothers that we are expendable.

The �exibility, freedom and productiv-ity of mobile work thus have a cost. No-mads are constantly juggling the socialrights of colleagues, relatives and friends,as well as their own right to downtime. Allof this, moreover, now tends to happen inpublic places that were not built speci�-cally for work, in the way o�ces were. Thenext article looks at how that a�ects thosekinds of places. 7

1


FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect,likes to cause aesthetic controversy,

and his Stata Centre at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT) did the trick.Opened in 2004 and housing MIT’s com-puter-science and philosophy depart-ments behind its façade of bizarre anglesand windows, it has become a new Cam-bridge landmark. But the building’s mostradical innovation is on the inside. The en-tire structure was conceived with the no-madic lifestyles of modern students andfaculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitch-ell, a professor of architecture and com-puter science at MIT who worked with MrGehry on the centre’s design, was con-ceived as a new kind of �hybrid space�.

This is best seen in the building’s �stu-dent street�, an interior passage that twistsand meanders through the complex and isopen to the public 24 hours a day. It is dot-ted with nooks and crannies. Cafés andlounges are interspersed with work desksand whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fieverywhere. Students, teachers and visi-tors are cramming for exams, �irting, nap-ping, instant-messaging, researching, read-ing and discussing. No part of the studentstreet is physically specialised for any ofthese activities. Instead, every bit of it caninstantaneously become the venue for aseminar, a snack or romance.

The fact that people are no longer tiedto speci�c places for functions such asstudying or learning, says Mr Mitchell,means that there is �a huge drop in de-mand for traditional, private, enclosedspaces� such as o�ces or classrooms, andsimultaneously �a huge rise in demand forsemi-public spaces that can be informallyappropriated to ad-hoc workspaces�. Thisshift, he thinks, amounts to the biggestchange in architecture in this century. Inthe 20th century architecture was aboutspecialised structures�o�ces for working,cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This wasnecessary because workers needed to benear things such as landline phones, faxmachines and �ling cabinets, and becausethe economics of building materials fa-voured repetitive and simple structures,such as grid patterns for cubicles.

The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell,will �make spaces intentionally multifunc-

tional�. This means that 21st-century aes-thetics will probably be the exact oppositeof the sci-� chic that 20th-century futuristsonce imagined. Architects are insteadthinking about light, air, trees and gardens,all in the service of human connections.Buildings will have much more variedshapes than before. For instance, peopleworking on laptops �nd it comforting tohave their backs to a wall, so hybrid spacesmay become curvier, with more nooks, inorder to maximise the surface area of theirinner walls, rather as intestines do. This isbecoming a�ordable because computer-aided design and new materials makenon-repetitive forms cheaper to build.

Who needs a desk?The e�ect already reaches far beyond uni-versity campuses and is causing upheavalin the commercial-property industry. De-bra Moritz, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle,a �rm that helps companies to managetheir o�ce buildings and consults on prop-erty investments, says that the total areadevoted to traditional o�ce space has be-gun to decline, although slowly. This is be-cause �ine�ciency is more obvious asworkers become mobile,� she says. Ac-cording to Jones Lang LaSalle’s research,workers are at their desks, on average, lessthan 40% of their time (Ms Moritz ditchedher own desk long ago). This does not

mean that o�ce space will drop by 60%.But it does mean that o�ce designers arethinking about using space better.

There will be more �on-demandspaces� and �drop-in centres�, says Ms Mo-ritz, with �exible layouts that facilitatecollaboration. Within a typical o�cebuilding, the area devoted to solitarywork, such as the cubicles immortalised inDilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internalwalls and furniture are becoming mov-able. More space is given to communal ar-eas, some of which are distinguished notby their function but by their etiquette�loud or quiet, say�as in libraries.

A particularly striking example, border-ing on caricature, is the so-called Google-plex, the headquarters of Google in Moun-tain View, California. Naturally it hasWi-Fi coverage. But the Googleplex is fam-ous for its good and free victuals, doled outat food courts throughout the sprawlingcampus, and for the casual mixture of playand work. Over here a software engineer iswriting some code on his laptop, sweaty inhis workout clothes from the volleyballgame in progress on the lawn. Over thereanother one is zipping along on a scooter,heading for a massage or going to pick uphis laundry from the onsite service. Goo-gle even extends this workspace, virtually,throughout the entire San Francisco BayArea by running a �eet of commuter shut-

The new oases

Nomadism changes buildings, cities and tra�c

�where everybody knows your name�, isan example.

Mr Oldenburg’s thesis was that thirdplaces were in general decline. More andmore people, especially in suburban soci-eties such as America’s, were moving onlybetween their �rst and second places,making extra stops only at alienating andanonymous locations such as malls,which in Mr Oldenburg’s opinion fail asthird places. Society, Mr Oldenburg feared,was at risk of coming unstuck withoutthese venues for spreading ideas andforming bonds.

No sooner was the term coined thanbig business queued up to claim that it wasbuilding new third places. The most prom-inent was Starbucks, a chain of co�eehouses that started in Seattle and is nowhard to avoid anywhere. Starbucks admitsthat as it went global it lost its ambiance ofa �home away from home�. However, ithas also spotted a new opportunity in ca-tering to nomads. Its branches o�er notonly sofas but also desks with convenientelectricity sockets. These days Starbucksmakes bigger news when it switches Wi-Fiproviders�it dropped T-Mobile for AT&T

in February�than when it sells a new typeof co�ee bean. Bookshops such as Barnes& Noble are also o�ering �more co�ee andcrumbs�, as Mr Oldenburg puts it, as arechurches, YMCAs and public libraries.

But do these oases for nomads actuallyplay the social role of third places? JamesKatz at Rutgers fears that cyber-nomads are�hollowing them out�. It is becoming com-monplace for a café to be full of peoplewith headphones on, speaking on theirmobile phones or laptops and hackingaway at their keyboards, more engagedwith their e-mail in-box than with the peo-ple touching their elbows. These places are�physically inhabited but psychologically

evacuated�, says Mr Katz, which leavespeople feeling �more isolated than theywould be if the café were merely empty�.That is because the �physical presence ofother human beings is psychologicallyand neurologically arousing� but now pro-duces no reward. Quite simply, he says, wehave not evolved biologically to be happyin these situations.

Many café-owners are trying to dealwith this problem. Christopher Waters, theowner of the Nomad Café in Oakland, reg-ularly hosts live jazz and poetry readings,and actually turns o� the Wi-Fi router atthose times so that people mingle more.He is also planning to turn his café into anonline social network so that patronsopening their browsers to connect en-counter a welcome page that asks them to�ll out a short pro�le�as they would onFacebook, say�and then see informationabout the people at the other tables.

Most nomads are very open to this sortof thing. Technology aside, there is notsuch a big di�erence between a geek withearphones and a laptop today and a Parisexistentialist watching the world go by atthe café Les Deux Magots in the 1950s. The�rst might be simultaneously instant-mes-saging, listening to music and e-mailing,the other pu�ng a Gitane and jottingdown notes about being and nothingness.But as soon as an attractive new customerbreezes in, both will instantaneously re-align their focus of interest.

As more third places pop up andspread, they also change entire cities. Justas buildings during the 20th century werespecialised by function, towns were aswell, says Mr Mitchell. Suburbs were forliving, downtowns for working and otherareas for playing. But urban nomadismmakes districts, like buildings, multifunc-tional. Parts of town that were monocul-tures, he says, gradually become ��ne-grained mixed-use neighbourhoods�more akin in human terms to pre-indus-trial villages than to modern suburbs.

Ms Moritz at Jones Lang LaSalle is al-ready counting more o�ces leaving sub-urbs entirely and moving back into down-towns, which tend to be younger andhipper. This helps to revitalise city centres.Paul Sa�o, the forecaster, sees a simulta-neous movement to �charismatic exurbs�,such as Mendocino on the Californiancoast or Cape Cod in Massachusetts,where incoming nomads are building�consensual communities� with lifestylesreminiscent of the Utopia movements ofearlier times. The big losers, Mr Sa�othinks, are the suburbs that were built for

tles, all of which have Wi-Fi on board to al-low uninterrupted coding.

Some traditional property developersare drawing inspiration from this sort ofthing. Nomadism is �not good for the o�ceindustry� as such, concedes Robert Dyks-tra, who has been developing commercialproperty for 27 years. He, however, hasspotted an opportunity. His new o�cepark in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dilapi-dated city that hopes to take some service-sector jobs from nearby Chicago and De-troit, is unlike any traditional o�ce and�more like a community centre�. Insteadof renting to corporate tenants, says MrDykstra, he plans to sell memberships as aclub does�by the hour, week or month�tonomads dropping by. Mobile workerscome in, �nd all the services they mightneed�from tech support to copying�andsatisfy their needs for �work, love andplay� as well, with the aid of �tness stu-dios, restaurants, cooking classes and mu-sic rooms.

This ��exibility is what separates suc-cessful spaces and cities from unsuccessfulones,� says Anthony Townsend, an urbanplanner at the Institute for the Future, athink-tank. Almost any public space canassume some of the features of a Google-plex or a Stata Centre. For example, a not-for-pro�t organisation in New York hasturned Bryant Park, a once-derelict butcharming garden in front of the city’s pub-lic library, into a hybrid space popularwith o�ce workers. The park’s managersnoticed that a lot of visitors were usingmobile phones and laptops in the park, sothey installed Wi-Fi and added somechairs with foldable lecture desks. Theidea was not to distract people from the�owers but to let them customise their lit-tle bit of the park.

Third placesThe academic name for such spaces is�third places�, a term originally coined bythe sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989book, �The Great, Good Place�. At the time,long before mobile technologies becamewidespread, Mr Oldenburg wanted to dis-tinguish between the sociological func-tions of people’s �rst places (their homes),their second places (o�ces) and the publicspaces that serve as safe, neutral and infor-mal meeting points. As Mr Oldenburg sawit, a good third place makes admission freeor cheap�the price of a cup of co�ee, say�o�ers creature comforts, is within walkingdistance for a particular neighbourhoodand draws a group of regulars. The epony-mous bar in the television series �Cheers�, 1


2

IN AUGUST 2006, the wife of an Israelisoldier on duty in the Lebanon war gave

birth to a boy. The army granted the fathera brief leave, but he had to return to thefront before his son’s bris, the ritual cir-cumcision on the eighth day of his life. Sothe family did the next best thing. As thesandak held the baby and the mohel madethe cut, a relative �lmed the entire event ona mobile phone so that the father on theLebanese border could watch, live, on hisown mobile phone and sing and dancewith his comrades.

The tools of nomadism clearly bringfamilies closer by allowing them to stayconnected when physically separated. Butthere are unexpected side e�ects in manyeveryday situations, as the following anec-dote shows. Richard Ling, a sociologist atTelenor, the largest Norwegian telephonecompany, and author of �New Tech, NewTies: How Mobile Communication Is Re-shaping Social Cohesion�, was standingon his porch in Oslo one day, saying fare-well to a few guests, when a plumberwalked around the corner, talking on hismobile phone to what appeared to be hiswife. Mr Ling, who had a leak in thekitchen, was expecting him. But the

plumber took Mr Ling and his guests abackby walking right past them and into thehouse, where he took o� his shoes andheaded for the kitchen, chattering into hishandset all the while.

It was the sort of thing that perhaps ex-cites only sociologists. Here was an exam-ple of two big tensions in nomadic society.

First, mobile technology pitted theplumber’s interaction with a stranger (MrLing) against that with his own wife on thephone. The plumber, to use the technicalterm, had a �weak tie� to Mr Ling but a�strong tie� to his wife which easily pre-vailed over the weak one, leaving a fewNorwegians feeling temporarily awkwardand pondering the fate of their society.

Second, the plumber gave precedenceto what Mr Ling calls the �mediated� inter-

action with the person at the otherend of the phone, at the expense

of his �co-present� communi-cation with Mr Ling who wasstanding right next to him. Inother words, the person whowas physically more distantwas nonetheless psychologi-

cally closer. So out went so-cial norms and rituals (hand-

shakes, greetings) that Norwayand other societies accumulated

during a past of exclusively co-present in-teractions. The plumber’s only nod to rit-ual was to take o� his shoes.

Sociologists are always arguing aboutthe precise role of ritual in society and therelative importance of the individual, fam-

Family ties

Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers

1


2 speci�c functions in a previous era but arenow blighted.

The same trend is also changing tra�cpatterns. Alan Pisarski has been research-ing urban movement for three decadesand has written a series of three bookscalled �Commuting in America��the �rstin 1986, the others one and two decadeslater. He is now working on the fourth.Thanks to the ten-year intervals, Mr Pisar-ski claims he has been able to capture thebiggest trends. In 1986, before the era ofmobility and at the dawn of the PC era, hestill observed �the classic diurnal �ow� ofthe post-war commuting pattern, whichhad baby-boomers sitting in tra�c jams at8am and 5pm between the suburbs andthe downtowns. In 1996 he saw a new �cir-cumferential pattern� as jobs shifted to thesuburbs, so the baby-boomers were nowsitting in jams �on the beltways�. At thesame time he already noticed that the fast-est-growing group was telecommuters.

Things started looking very di�erent in

his 2006 book. Younger workers were nowjoining the baby-boomers in the work-force. Car trips had stopped increasing andwere even declining in cities such as Seat-tle, Atlanta and Portland. Tra�c was stillheavy but now spread out over much lon-ger periods, starting at 5am and lasting tillnoon, say. Bizarre new patterns were crop-ping up, such as a �reverse commute� inSeattle as lots of male computer scientistsat Microsoft in the suburb of Redmondraced downtown to �nd females�a week-day ritual called �the running of the pro-grammers�.

The current data, for use in the nextbook, are telling Mr Pisarski somethingelse again. The baby-boomers are startingto retire, forcing employers to compete fornew talent by letting younger employeeswork wherever they please. Even the olderworkers are becoming nomadic (Mr Pisar-ski himself is 70 and works from his Black-Berry and laptop). Tra�c congestion,though still bad, is for the �rst time not get-

ting worse. Car-pooling, which �green�city governments are still encouraging, isdeclining sharply as commuting times anddirections are becoming more diverse andmore complex.

Indeed, even though there are as manycars on the roads as ever, they are nowmaking very di�erent journeys. In the pre-vious decade trips followed a �radial pat-tern�, says Mr Pisarski, as both o�ce work-ers and telecommuters ran errands awayfrom their workplace and back again in or-der to check their voice messages andfaxes. Now people are making trips in a�daisy-chain� pattern, he says. Nomads seto� in the morning to drop o� the kids atschool and then spend all day hoppingfrom one third place to another, with stopsat the gym, the post o�ce and so on.Throughout the day they remain con-nected to colleagues and family memberswho are elsewhere, and increasingly theirmovements form no discernible collectivepattern at all. 7

1


2 ily and community. Emile Durkheim, theearliest, kicked o� the debate more than acentury ago when he studied Australianaborigines and found that they used ritu-als to create and maintain solidarity andcohesion among a group. In the 1950s Er-ving Go�man broadened the de�nition ofrituals to ordinary interactions of dailyAmerican life, such as jokes.

In the 1970s Mark Granovetter becameone of the most in�uential sociologists ofthat decade with a paper titled �TheStrength of Weak Ties�. Mr Granovetter ar-gued that society needs not only healthy�strong ties� between relatives and friendsbut also ample and �uid �weak ties� be-tween casual acquaintances. Far from tri-vial, these weak ties are the �bridges� be-tween �densely knit clumps of closefriends� and thus the conduits for ideas,fads and trends. �Social systems lacking inweak ties will be fragmented and incoher-ent,� Mr Granovetter argued. Any erosionof weak ties is therefore to be deplored.

The more dismal scienceIn the 1990s, as the internet came intowidespread use, sociologists, never an up-beat bunch to begin with, became de-cidedly pessimistic. Some observed a �lossof social capital� as people spent their timetrans�xed by screens rather than otherpeople. Others saw the (real-world, as op-posed to online) social networks of Ameri-cans shrinking, with ever more peoplefeeling that they were intimate with no-body at all. Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mel-lon University argued that the internetcauses social isolation and depression.Norman Nie at Stanford University be-lieved that �internet use at home has astrong negative impact on time spent withfriends and family as well as time spent onsocial activities.�

But most of these observations, madein a rich country at the height of the PC era,focused on the wired and stationary kindof communications technology ratherthan the wireless and mobile sort. Now, asmobile communications are becoming thenorm, a new generation of sociologists isscrambling to update all these theories. Sofar, most of them agree that nomadic tech-

tells, the sociologist at the University ofSouthern California’s Annenberg Schoolfor Communication, says that mobile tech-nology a�ects children the most. On onehand, adolescents today become sociallyautonomous earlier than their parents did,�building their own communities from thebottom up� through constant text-messag-ing and photo-sharing among their clique,even if this circumvents the wishes of theirparents. On the other hand, they also havetheir parents on speed-dial, and are onlyone button away from help if they get intotrouble. Mr Castells calls this a �safe auton-omy pattern�.

This has some sociologists concerned.James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobilephone a new sort of umbilical cord be-tween children and their parents and won-ders whether this might in some cases �re-tard maturation�. Sherry Turkle, thepsychologist at MIT, says that wireless gad-gets are, ironically, a �tethering technol-ogy� and create new dependencies thatdelay the important �Huck Finn moment�in young lives when adolescents �rst real-ise that they are alone on the urban equiv-alent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk andlost after a party is di�erent when onepush of a button summons the parentalchau�eur. In 2005 a psychology professorat Middlebury College in Vermont foundthat undergraduates were communicatingwith their parents, on average, more thanten times a week.

Love in cyberspaceMobile technology also tethers couples,especially young ones, but in a di�erentway. Mimi Ito, an anthropologist whostudies the e�ects of mobile technology onyouth culture in Japan and America, hasfound that Japanese lovers send constanttext messages to avoid parental rules andto stay connected emotionally when theyare physically separated. Every nomadicculture has its idiosyncrasies, and the Japa-nese 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 andphotos in between physical ��esh meets�amounts to �tele-nesting�, says Ms Ito. Italso spices up and prolongs the �eshmeets. Young people in Tokyo, she has ob-served, will start their date by exchangingtext messages all afternoon as they dohomework or take the train to the rendez-

nology, far from isolating people, bringsthem closer to their families, friends andlovers�their strong ties. But they still dis-agree on what that means for weak tieswith strangers, and thus society at large.

Nomadic technology deepens familyties because, as another sociologist, Chris-tian Licoppe, puts it, it enables �connectedpresence�, which is new in history. In theera of stationary communications tech-nology, people used landline phones thatbelonged to a place rather than a person. Inthat communication culture people talkedinfrequently and viewed a conversation asan occasion. Typically, they would planthe call for an appropriate time, such as aSunday. Both sides would introduce them-selves with a greeting�ie, a ritual�andthen take time to catch up.

With mobile phones, on the otherhand, people call, text or e-mail one an-other constantly throughout the day. Sincethey are always, in e�ect, contacting a per-son rather than a place, and since the re-ceiver can see the caller’s name, and prob-ably his picture, they often dispense withgreetings altogether. The exchanges nowtend to be frequent and short. People ex-pect less content but instead a feeling ofpermanent connection, as though theywere in fact together during the entire timebetween their physical meetings.

Mr Ling, using data from Norway, hasfound that about half of all mobile-phonecalls and text messages go to the samethree or four people, typically within tenkilometres of the caller. A lot of this iswhat he calls �micro-co-ordination�, asfamily members are out about town andcheck in with each other to plan their nextstop or errand. Dad might call from the su-permarket’s dairy aisle to �nd out whichbrand of yogurt to buy; mum might textthat she is running late and that dad needsto pick up the kids.

But such communications go far be-yond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Cas-

1


2

MICHAEL HALBHERR was drivingfrom Berlin to Budapest the other

day when he passed what looked like anempty �eld. The fact that his mobilephone stayed quiet annoyed him. Herehe was, speeding by the site of Napo-leon’s great victory at Austerlitz, andnothing even vibrated.

Mr Halbherr, admittedly, had profes-sional reasons to ponder this shortcom-ing. He runs �location-based services�(LBS) for Nokia, the world’s largest hand-

set-maker. Not letting things such as Aus-terlitz slip by unnoticed is exactly whatLBS is in business for. Some people thinkit is the �next big thing�. It was Nokia’sreason for spending $8.1 billion to buyNavteq, a �rm that collects map dataaround the world.

One advantage that mobile phoneshave over PCs is that they increasinglyknow and care where they are. Some usethe global positioning system (GPS),which uses satellites, others a slightly lessaccurate method that calculates the dis-tances of nearby cellular towers andWi-Fi hotspots.

This is a huge advance, says StephenJohnson, one of Nokia’s strategists, be-cause it adds the third element (�where�)required to understand a person’s con-text, the other two being who and when.Most obviously, this means that �the ideaof being lost will be unheard of�, he says.More interestingly, it allows people to be-come �more immersed in the real worldaround them�. Within a few years, for ex-ample, phones will know where you areat what time, and where you are goingnext, based on your electronic diary. Thephone may also know, from your ad-dress book, that you have a friend in thebuilding whose diary says that he is go-ing to the same place. Your two phoneswill alert you so that you can share a taxi.If you have been sleeping with his wife,or are just not feeling very sociable thatday, you can always claim that your bat-tery died at that very instant.

It matters

Location, location, locationvous. At night, on their journey home afterthe actual date, they use messages again as�fading embers of conversation�, some-times continuing for days and turning littlememories into the couple’s �lore�.

Often entire cliques do this sort ofthing, creating, in e�ect, their own tribalmedium and narrative. Ms Ito has noticeda new genre of photography on the rise asyoung people use their phones to snapphotos of everyday situations�the viewfrom the escalator on the way to school,say�which mean a lot to their friends andnothing to anybody else. They especiallylove photos that capture �dumb thingsthat their friends do�, such as gettingdrunk and falling into puddles, which col-lectively amount to �everyday, casualdocumentaries� for a circle of friends.

Out with the out crowdThe potential problem with connectedpresence is that it usually excludes otherpeople who may be physically present. Insituations that might once have been anopportunity to talk to a stranger�waitingfor a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say�people now �ll the time with a few mes-sages to parents, lovers or friends. Thisstrengthens the strong ties, but weakens,or even cuts, the weak ties in society. Insome cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to�bounded solidarity�, when cliques be-come so turned in on themselves that theyall but stop interacting with the wider soci-ety around them.

The �rst casualty is usually etiquette.Noise pollution is only one kind of viola-tion. In an American survey conducted in2005, 62% of the people polled�and 74% ofthose over 60�felt that �using a cellphonein public is a major irritation for other peo-ple,� but only 32% of those between 18 and27 shared that opinion. That divergencemakes for a combustible social cocktailwhenever the generations mix. It is routinenowadays for people to answer calls incinemas, restaurants and public toilets,even at weddings and funerals. The vol-ume of these transgressions varies withthe culture�Americans and Italians, say,are louder than Swedes or Japanese. Andsome societies are beginning to adjust.Some countries now have �quiet cars� ontrains where patrons cannot talk on theirmobiles but must text instead.

Trickier etiquette problems arise whenthe issue is not so much noise as context.One example that will enter the historybooks occurred last September whenRudy Giuliani, a former mayor of NewYork, was still waging a vigorous campaign

for the presidency. As he was up on his po-dium and in mid-sentence addressing theNational Ri�e Association (NRA), a crucialconstituency for a Republican candidate,his mobile rang and, to gasps in the hugeaudience, he decided to answer it. Whatfollowed, captured on microphone, isworth repeating in its banality: �Hello,dear. I’m talking, I’m talking to the mem-bers of the NRA right now. Would you liketo say hello? I love you, and I’ll give you acall as soon as I’m �nished. OK? OK, have asafe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. Ilove you.� When he hung up, the audiencehad turned to stone.

Usually the situation is subtler and theincongruence has more to do with atten-tion. This can be true even during silentmobile communications. It is now routinefor university students to text, e-mail andinstant-message during lectures. Mr Ling,whose job includes loitering in publicplaces for observation, watched a womanat an Oslo underground station whotexted as she walked. She was wholly fo-cused on her text message but had to lookup occasionally to weave through thecrowds on the platform. Other peoplewere doing the same. It was an �atomisedand individualised� scene, says Mr Ling: a

1


2 new form of the proverbial lonely crowd. But at least this particular Norwegian

woman was signalling through her bodylanguage to all around her that she wantedto be left alone. The spread of �hands-free�Bluetooth devices, with hidden earplugsseemingly attached to nothing, is remov-ing even those clues. Steve Love, a psychol-ogist, was travelling on a train from Edin-burgh to Glasgow once when a girlstanding next to him started talking to him.She asked him how he was and how hisday had been, and Mr Love, though a bitshy, politely told her how much he waslooking forward to watching Scotland playfootball that evening. As he spoke, the girllooked 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 gesturewas exchanged for the remainder of the(suddenly uncomfortable) journey.

Probably the single most common eti-quette con�ict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it,when mediated communication inter-rupts co-present communication, as whentwo or more people are sitting at a table in

conversation or negotiation and one ofthem gets, and answers, a call. The otherco-present people must now keep them-selves busy while seeming nonchalant.What is more, they must pretend not to beeavesdropping even though they are onlya few feet away from the mediated con-versation, ideally by assuming a pose ofconcentration on some other object, suchas their �ngernails or their own phone. Assoon as the intervening call ends, every-body must try to re-enter the co-presentcontext as gracefully as possible.

So there is evidence that nomadism isgood for in-groups, but at the expense ofstrangers. If that is true, Mr Granovetterwould consider it bad for society. Fortu-nately, however, the last chapter has notyet been written. Since the outburst of pes-simism about the internet among sociolo-gists in the 1990s, the web has recently be-come an intensely social medium, thanksin large part to proliferating online socialnetworks such as Facebook and MySpace.Young people have been using these web-sites on their PCs to keep in touch with

much larger groups of people than hasever been feasible before. It is not uncom-mon for adolescents to add several�friends� a day to their �social graph� onFacebook or to the �buddy list� of their in-stant-messaging service.

As mobile devices now become, in ef-fect, computers for accessing the widerweb, these online services are also movingfrom stationary to mobile use. Whetherthat could reinvigorate the weak ties insociety along with the strong ties remainsto be seen. But etiquette, both online ando�ine, remains a work in progress. 7

UNTIL a couple of years ago electionmonitoring was a �ddly, exhausting

and often thankless business. Non-gov-ernmental organisations (NGOs) such asAmerica’s National Democratic Institute(NDI) would send idealistic student volun-teers to complicated places such as Nigeriato observe the balloting, write down dataon pieces of paper and then carry or faxthe forms somewhere for manual inputinto a computer system. The process wasslow and unreliable. Fraud or violence, if itbroke out, spread far faster than credibleinformation.

Then, in 2006, a penny dropped. NDI,working with an organisation in Montene-gro, realised that practically everybody inthat country already had the perfect tool tomonitor, in all but real time, its electionthat May. That tool was the mobile phoneand its ability to send text messages di-rectly to a computer. The new approachworked so well that it instantly became thestandard for monitoring other precariouselections. A vote in Sierra Leone last Au-gust brie�y threatened to disintegrateamid rumours of violence�also spread

through text messages�but quickly re-turned to order when some 500 observersat the various polling stations sent textmessages to the central system saying thatthe rumours were false.

The sheer ubiquity of mobile phonesamounts to �the biggest leap in history,bigger than the printing press, which, afterall, stayed in the hands of very few peo-ple,� says Katrin Verclas, who runs Mo-bileActive.org, a website and communityof about 3,000 activists and NGOs all overthe world. Even quite basic features suchas text messaging, she says, have alreadyallowed countless people everywhere toget more involved in areas traditionally re-served for �activists�. The snazzy new fea-tures and internet access now coming tomobile phones will expand the possibil-ities yet again.

An early and classic example of thisnew opportunity for citizens to participatein 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 shortnotice, using text messages to spread the

word. Howard Rheingold, the author of�Smart Mobs�, saw in such events a sign ofmuch more to come, as people discoverever more ingenious ways of organisinggroups of people on the �y and of collabo-rating towards any sort of collective goal.

Those goals range from the uplifting, asin the Philippines, to the repellent. The ter-rorists who bombed three suburban trainsin Madrid in 2004, killing 191 people andinjuring nearly 2,000, used their mobilephones to detonate the explosives. But amobile phone then became the clue thatuncovered the plot.

Mobile phones also became the tool fororganising the huge spontaneous demon-strations in the following days. Thus, likeevery other technology human beingshave ever invented, says Ms Verclas, thetools of nomadism arm both sides in theeternal tug-of-war between good and evil.But there is room for optimism, she thinks,because the side with good intentions ismore numerous and�so far, at least�hasproved more imaginative.

Three big categories in particular lendthemselves to mobile activism. First, no-

A world of witnesses

When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor

1


2 madic technology can expose human-rights abuses as honest citizens use tech-nology to monitor and expose crimes andco-ordinate the response. The bestweapon against abuses has always been toconfront the public with video evidence.This became clear in 1991 when four po-licemen in Los Angeles pulled over a blackman, Rodney King, for speeding and thenbeat him brutally, with other policemenwatching. A bystander, George Holliday,recorded this abuse on his camcorder andsoon the images were playing all overAmerica’s mainstream media, sparkingrace riots in Los Angeles.

That event inspired an initial wave ofattempts to support grassroots video testi-monies by amateurs. In 1992 Peter Gabriel,a British rock musician, started WITNESS,a not-for-pro�t group, to try to train andequip activists all over the world to usevideo to document abuses. But little ofconsequence followed. It was a pure coin-cidence that Mr Holliday happened tohave a camcorder with him when he sawMr King being beaten, and most of theworld’s population was not about to startwalking around lugging cameras. Even ifthey had, there was no easy and automaticoutlet in the media for such clips.

All this has changed in the past coupleof years. Websites such as YouTube that al-low any amateur to upload video have be-come all the rage, and Mr Gabriel’s WIT-

NESS has just launched a site called �theHub� that is dedicated entirely to human-rights clips. Simultaneously, mobilephones have become still cameras and areincreasingly turning into video cameras aswell. This means that all the tools of testi-mony are now both mobile and ubi-quitous. People no longer need to plan todocument wrongdoing, but are able to

capture it when and as they experience it.At the mundane end of the spectrum, theyrecord cars speeding on roads near schoolsor snap photos of derelict public parks,then upload them to their communitywebsite. At the extreme end, as in Albaniaand Egypt recently, they �lm police brutal-ity, or government outrages such as thecrackdown by Myanmar’s junta on its Bud-dhist monks.

The second area where mobile technol-ogy is beginning to have a big impact ishealth care, especially in poor countries. InSouth Africa people can text their locationto a number and get an instant reply withthe nearest clinic testing for HIV. Healthy-Toys.org, founded by a parental advocacygroup and two American organisations,lets concerned parents text in the name ofa toy they are considering buying in a shopand instantly reports back with informa-tion about lead or other toxins that mayhave been found in it. Soon mobile tech-nology could play a large role in detecting,mapping and responding to epidemics. Alot of information about a recent polio out-break in Kenya became available becausehealth workers were using hand-held de-vices to collect data that used to be re-corded on paper forms.

The software on those devices, calledEpiSurveyor and made by a not-for-pro�torganisation called DataDyne, is also usedby health workers in Sierra Leone andZambia. The World Health Organisationhas now declared it to be the technologicalstandard, and DataDyne is in the processof loading it onto ordinary mobile phonesfor use in poor countries everywhere, saysJoel Selanikio, a doctor who co-foundedthe organisation. For most people in poorcountries, he thinks, mobile phones arefast becoming the main communications

tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, fam-ily album and many other things.

The third category is environmentalmonitoring. The humble text message hasalready changed consumer behaviour inmany places. Shoppers in South Africa cantext the name of a �sh to a service calledFishMS and receive an instantaneous re-commendation �to tuck in�, to �thinktwice� or to �avoid completely�, based onhow the �sh was caught and whether thespecies is endangered. Londoners can texta service called AirTEXT to get informationon air quality, and subscribers receivealerts when pollution is forecast to spike.

Scents and sensabilityThe real fun begins when phones start ob-serving and reporting problems automati-cally. This is now on the horizon. In Janu-ary researchers at America’s PurdueUniversity reported that they are buildinga system for the state of Indiana designedto use a network of mobile phones to de-tect and track radiation. In the event of anuclear leak or a �dirty bomb�, the sensorsof large numbers of phones, all identifyingtheir location through the global-position-ing system (GPS), would point authoritiesto the source of the radiation.

Such tracking systems rely on the col-lective information from large numbers ofphones, whose owners may not even beaware of the part they are playing in this.If, say, a car is carrying a dirty bomb anddriving down a street, it passes others cars.The mobile phones inside those passingcars would send information to a data-base. The signal would grow weaker as thedistance from the source increases,whereas the signal from phones in ap-proaching cars would grow stronger. Thesoftware would then use the sum of this

SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist atMIT who studies the nexus between

people and gadgets, believes that the toolsof mobility are leading to �the emergenceof a new type of person�. In the distant,landline-dominated past, she says, peoplethought: �I have a feeling so I want to makea call.� Young people today, including MsTurkle’s teenage daughter, seem to bethinking instead: �I want to have a feeling,so I need to make a call.� What she meansis that there is something inorganic, deriv-ative and inauthentic about a lot of mobilecommunication. As a species, Ms Turklethinks, we run the risk of letting the per-manent wireless social clouds that sur-round us steal part of our nature.

Is that a bit rich? Certainly, tools havealways played a big part in de�ning hu-man nature. Homo habilis, �handy man�,is considered the �rst species in our genus,surviving until about 1.6m years ago, be-cause he used primitive tools made fromstone or bone. Homo erectus, �uprightman�, got his name from his stature, buthis crucial innovation was to tame �re forhis use. And whether or not Homo sapiens,�wise man�, entirely lives up to his name,he has achieved astonishing break-throughs both in hardware (eg, the wheel)and software (eg, language).

If researchers in ivory towers now de-bate the arrival of Homo mobilis, their ton-gue is only partially in their cheek. Onceagain the biggest shift seems to involve lan-

spelling matter, and that rules have to beobserved. That consensus now appears tobe at risk.

In all electronic media, especiallywhen typed on the small screens of mo-bile handsets, absolutely anything, lin-guistically speaking, seems to go. Apostro-phes that once distinguished between�its� and �it’s� seem quaint and arbitrary.Entire words and sentences now composethemselves with the ever-present �auto-�ll� and spell-check features, which ad-olescents increasingly regard as a virtualSamuel Johnson or Konrad Duden.

The academically and politically cor-rect response is to welcome this trend withopen arms. Language, after all, appearsonly to be returning to its natural and

Homo mobilis

As language goes, so does thought

guage, and by implication thought andfeeling. That major linguistic change isafoot is clear to anybody who has beenaround young people almost anywhere inthe world. Entire subcultures now de�nethemselves primarily or exclusivelythrough their chosen text-messaging or in-stant-messaging argot.

Richard Ling, for instance, has studied ateenage fad in Norway that had kids sub-stituting the letter �z� for �s� in Norwegianwords, yielding spellings such as �koz� or�klemz�, both meaning �hug�. This sub-stitution de�ned, as Mr Ling puts it, �mid-dle-class teenyboppers��until a rap bandridiculed the trend, thus killing it o�. Theteens immediately took to writing theirtext messages and e-mails in pidgin Swed-ish. Among this group of Norwegians, aSwedish word such a �kramar� (again,hugs) became �krämmar�. Both the �z�endings and the pidgin Swedish showedup only in electronic media, never in spo-ken language.

So far, that suggests nothing more thana new variant of traditional in-groupmarkers such as tattoos or Ivy-League classrings. But Naomi Baron, a linguist at Amer-ican University in Washington, DC, andauthor of �Always On: Language in an On-line and Mobile World�, sees more worry-ing trends. Society’s attitude towards lan-guage has changed, she thinks. For about250 years, the consensus in Western soci-eties has been that grammar, syntax and 1


2 information to pinpoint the bomb.The idea that phones should have sen-

sors is far from outlandish. Phones alreadyincorporate primitive versions, includingthe sensor that picks up the cellular signal,light sensors that dim the keyboard andacceleration sensors that notice when theuser lifts the phone to his ear. �Today,everybody can look at his phone and sayhow many signal bars he has,� says EricPaulos, a researcher at Intel, the world’slargest chipmaker. �In a few years, every-body will look at his phone and see whatthe pollen count is.�

Mr Paulos runs a project on �participa-tory urbanism� for Intel, which exploresexactly how sensors inside mobile phonesmight improve society. He recently con-

ducted a study in Ghana, where he at-tached tiny pollution sensors to thephones of 15 taxi drivers. Using the data�the amount of pollution at speci�c timesof day in places where the taxis went�MrPaulos’s team drew up a pollution map ofthe city which revealed surprising patternsin particular roads. Some of the taxi driv-ers changed their routes as a result.

Carbon monoxide, ozone, pollen, sunintensity and temperature are among thethings that Mr Paulos considers particu-larly easy to measure by tweaking mobilephones in ways that consumers would noteven notice. Any such data would need tobe collected in a discreet way to assure theprivacy of consumers. But eventually,thinks Mr Paulos, this new twist to the ev-

eryday mobility of ordinary people couldlead to �grassroots citizen science�.

Does this trend give any cause for con-cern? To some people it suggests a comingsurveillance state, as all sorts of titbitsabout people’s personal lives that used tobe private become input for new servicessuch as tra�c maps, health warnings or se-curity alerts. Those worries, evoking anearlier era of top-down control by a BigBrother, are mostly misplaced, claims MrVerclas. A neighbourhood-watch commu-nity with global reach is a better metaphor.Instead of surveillance, watching fromabove, society will rely on a new and op-posite concept, sousveillance, watchingfrom below. Such arguments may makemore sense in California than in China. 7


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healthy state of �ux. When Geo�rey Chau-cer was writing in the 14th century therewere no set spelling rules, but he managedto compose interesting texts nonetheless.For all we know, today’s digital and mo-bile world might be teeming with poten-tial Chaucers.

Ms Baron will have none of it. Spellingis in decline today, she thinks, not becauseof the rich diversity of dialects, as in Chau-cer’s day, but because the dominant mind-set of nomadic culture is that languagedoes not matter. We are entering, as sheputs is, an age of �linguistic whateverism�.One reason is that people today are writ-ing vastly larger amounts of text than everbefore, and �the more we write online, theworse writers we become.� In the eras ofquills, pens or even manual typewriters itwas hard to write a lot, so people took timeand care in clarifying their thoughts. Manynomads today are convinced that theydon’t have the time to think and care, sothey concentrate on speed alone.

Because language is the primary vehi-cle for thought, this has consequences. Al-ready, Ms Baron detects a new and wide-spread intellectual torpor among herstudents. Young Americans used to cutcorners before an exam on �Hamlet� byreading the Cli�sNotes. Teachers hatedthem, but they were pedagogic wonderscompared with today’s method of Goog-ling the passage in question, then using thecomputer’s ��nd� function to get to the ex-act snippet. Ms Baron thinks that thesedays her students even think in snippets,which is to say incoherently. And that ishow they write essays. Having internal-ised the new whateverism, they launch inand stumble through, with nary a thoughtfor what they actually want to say.

This criticism dovetails strikingly withwhat other sociologists and psychologistsare observing in the interpersonal behav-iour of some nomads. Older people usetheir mobile phones to �micro-co-ordi-nate� with partners during the day in orderto run their errands more e�ciently andperhaps to spend more time together as aresult. But many younger people, whohave never known paper diaries or an un-connected world, micro-co-ordinate in or-der to avoid committing themselves to any�xed meeting time, location or person atall. After all, a better opportunity might yetpresent itself.

The concern, therefore, is that youngnomads not only write without thinkingor leave home in the morning withoutplanning but also enter relationshipswithout tying themselves down. Large

parts of human interaction, especially theawkward subjects of rowing and separat-ing, can now be relegated to virtual, as op-posed to physical, interaction. A worryingtrend in recent years has been adolescents’practice of dumping their lovers by textmessage or, worse, by changing the statusof their Facebook pro�le from �in a rela-tionship� to �single�. This is e�cient andinstantaneous, but potentially traumatic.

Oh evolve!Much of this pessimism is probably over-blown. Homo sapiens has been creatingtechnological curses throughout history,and has so far managed to cope with everychallenge thrown up. Only a few decadesago the prevailing worry was that televi-sion, the reigning medium at the time, wascreating a generation of unimaginativecouch potatoes, if not intellectual vegeta-bles. That description is quite the oppositeof what youth culture has in fact becomein today’s era of the internet and nomad-

ism. Even if young people today read the Il-iad and Shakespeare only in snippets, if atall, says Manuel Castells at the Universityof Southern California, they are also creat-ing an artistic culture more vibrant andimaginative than arguably any that haspreceded it. The common name for thisgenre is �mash-up culture�, but that doesnot do it justice. Today’s creative types domore than stitch together (�mash up�)snippets. They forge new combinations al-most as neurons form synapses to createnew thoughts.

As for the things that can come be-tween people, technology is certainly oneof them. So it has been since a spearmissed the mammoth and hit a tribesman.Every technology has created new excessand silliness. In time, each silliness hasproduced its own backlash and subse-quent adjustment. At the simplest level, itis reasonable to assume that Homo sapi-ens, having invented the �on� button, willdiscover the �o�� button as well. 7

Future special reportsCountries and regionsVietnam April 26thEU enlargement May 31st

Business, �nance, economics and ideasInternational banking May 17thThe future of energy June 21stTerrorism July 19thThe business of sport August 2nd

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The Economist - Republication, copying or redistribution by any … · 2017. 12. 6. · Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their ante-cedents in