Technology enables the modern nomad
The Economist had a feature recently on how mobile technology is enabling a nomad-like work culture. Blackberries, Wi-Fi availability in Starbucks and other cafes, and lightweight laptops are allowing people to conduct work while being on the move, even to the point of obviating the need for an office. Coburn Ventures completely lacks a formal office; team members typically meet in an coffee shop to touch base before heading out to meet with clients.
I personally consider myself a member of this group - I have long blurred the line between work and home, never really striking that fabled “work and life balance”, but, importantly, I have never really minded. This article was reassuring; there are lots of people like me.
Here are a couple of blogs that chronicle this trend:
Over the past couple of months, I’ve suddenly enjoyed some of the features available on my Blackberry Pearl, including apps for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Chat and Gmail. I’ve taken pictures and posted them immediately to Facebook, and updated my moves around town via Twitter (which updates my Facebook status), and carried on work-related chats as I’ve sat in doctors’ waiting rooms.
One consequences of this hyperconnectivity, though, is its tendency to enhance isolation. With such a huge amount of information available, you have to limit the sphere you’re exposed to, to a small number of friends you already know. You couldn’t possibly follow hundreds of people via Twitter & Facebook and get work done.
Like blogs and recommendations on iTunes and Netflix, the ability to channel your life’s information feed to exactly what you like and preferences, it is very easy to avoid any sort of exposure to something truly novel (even if that’s because you’re completely unlikely to like it).
Think of it in terms of Chrismas presents, too - 20 years ago, we got ugly sweaters we would never wear. Now we get gift cards, which almost never go to waste. But we miss out on those rare gems of gifts that we would have never known about because it wouldn’t have ever nomally crossed our personal attention horizon.
From the Economist article:
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.
So does technology’s ability to personalize one’s experience and liberate us from the confines of a cubicle and commute also limit the sort of exposure to true novelty that’s necessary for the creative impulse?
