Nomads At Last

Mobile phones and the inter­net, two rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nolo­gies in their own right, are merg­ing to cre­ate a global nomadic cul­ture based on per­ma­nent con­nec­tiv­ity not mobil­ity:

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.