Urban nomads - a new social class that lives in a parallel world

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

After the popular post "Generation YAYA: How can we live and work with them?" I remembered another article written back in 2008 about another rather interesting social phenomenon - “nomads”. Considering that we always lag a little behind the West, this topic is now just very, very relevant. Perhaps someone will recognize themselves in the description of the lifestyle of these people?

So who, after all, are these "nomads" and how to work or live with them?

The rapid development of technology makes a person free. For some people, in order to study, it is not at all necessary to go to university - there are a lot of online courses, you can also work remotely, and keep in touch with relatives, friends and employers on the same Skype or other messengers (but don't forget). An office is a place where you can recharge your laptop, tablet or smartphone battery and connect to the Internet. And home is where you feel comfortable, fun, convenient and cheap.

People who adhere to this lifestyle are not attached to anything. They do not watch Channel One and are not "fooled" by standard advertising. They live in their own world with well-tuned communications. But only with those who are interesting to them and close in spirit.

So who are they and how to live with them, make friends and work with them? The article on The Economist in 2008 is now very relevant already for our open spaces, since such a way of life is really becoming widespread.

At the Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Kanlas, a law student at a nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her laptop, and connects to Wi-Fi for in order to connect to their sexual orientation legal assessment classes. She's a regular here and doesn't carry cash with her. Her credit card statement reads "Nomad, nomad, nomad, nomad …" And that says it all, she thinks. Constantly connected to the network, she constantly communicates through texts, photos, videos or voice with her friends and family while doing her work in parallel. She just wanders around the city and often stops in places that cater to nomads like her.

His idea was to provide a kind of bars for techno-Bedouins like himself.

Christopher Waters, the owner, opened Nomad Café in 2003 when there were Wi-Fi hotspots all over the city. His idea was to provide a kind of bars for techno-Bedouins like himself. Because the Bedouins, be they the Arabian desert or the American suburbs, are tribal, social creatures by nature. And he realized that for a good oasis, just decent Wi-Fi is not enough. They have to become new - or very old - gathering places. At first, he thought to name his cafe Gypsy Spirit Mission, which also reflects the theme of mobility, but decided to stay with a simpler one - Nomad.

As a concept, vision and goal, the modern nomadic lifestyle has had the mixed blessing of premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential mass media and communications terrorist, described nomads moving around at high speed, using every means of travel and all that except completely abandoning their homes. In 1980, Jacques Attali, a French economist who was an adviser to President François Mitterrand at the time, used the term nomads to predict the age at which the rich and elite will travel the world in search of fun and opportunity, and the poor but similarly unattached workers will migrate in search of a place to live … In 1990, Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners co-wrote the first book with "digital nomads" in the title, adding the embarrassing capabilities of the latest gadgets to their vision.

But in all these descriptions of the new nomadism as a phenomenon, one very important detail was missing. The mobile lifestyle is currently being formed all over the world and there is nothing in it that was described in these old books. But the authors cannot be blamed for this, since the basic technologies and the true and everyday nomadic way of life did not yet exist. Mobile phones already existed then and were widely used, but only for voice communication, and then it was devilishly difficult to connect to the Internet even from computers. And laptops or personal digital assistants (PDA) to access the network required a connection through inconvenient cables and the speed at the same time was a turtle. Checking emails and composing new messages from a mobile phone - not to mention syncing with multiple gadgets or computers to create a single virtual inbox - was incredible, almost fantasy. People took pictures on film. Wi-Fi didn't exist yet. In general, there were gadgets, but there was no connection.

Astronauts and hermit crabs

Without this missing part, several misunderstandings were accepted, which currently require correction. The first is what had to be done with all these gadgets. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people thought they were making their owners mobile as well. But this is not the case! The right metaphor for someone carrying a portable but bulky gadget with them is an astronaut, not a nomad, says Paul Saffo, an expert on future trends in the Valley. Astronauts have to carry everything they need with them, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on an environment that cannot provide them with the appropriate conditions. They are defined and limited by their instruments and supplies.

At the turn of the century, some astronauts, true warriors of the road, became smarter in their approach to their equipment, says Mr. Saffo. They ended up in the interim, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging a house from the shell left after another mollusk left it for protection and shelter. In a metaphorical sense, the shell can be a "carry-on bag on wheels" filled with discs, cables, candles, batteries, documents (just in case the disc suddenly fails). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated passengers on airliners every time they board, because their shells invariably dig into their innocent shins along the way. They are less worn than astronauts and therefore more mobile, but they are still quite heavy, laden with all this equipment, which is used mainly as protection against natural disasters.

Urban nomads appeared only a few years ago (do not forget that the article dates from 2008!). Like their predecessors in the desert, they are guided not by what they carry with them, but by what they left behind, knowing the environment will provide it again. Thus, Bedouins do not carry water supplies with them because they know where the oases are. And more and more often they don't even bring their laptops with them. Many Google engineers travel with their mobile phones (BlackBerry, iPhone, or other smartphones). And if suddenly they need access to a large keyboard, they simply find a computer anywhere in the world with Internet access and open their documents online.

Another key misunderstanding of the modern nomadic way of life in the past decades is the confusion of the nomadic way of life with migration and travel. As telecommunications costs fell, it became very interesting to re-read The death of distance, a book by Francis Cairncross. And while mobile phones were previously aimed primarily at executives, it was assumed that the nomadic lifestyle would be closely associated with corporate travel in particular. Indeed, many nomads fly frequently, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are introducing Wi-Fi on board their aircraft. But a nomadic lifestyle is not necessarily travel and vice versa.

People have always traveled and migrated, and you don't have to be a nomad for that. Modern nomadism is vastly different from what it used to be, and involves much more than just travel. A modern nomad might as well be a student in Oslo, Tokyo, or suburban America. He or she may never leave their city, board a plane, or change their address. Indeed, how far he moves does not really matter. And even if the nomad is actually locked in a rather tight space, in fact, he has a completely different attitude towards time, place and other people.

"Always connected, not moving, is critical." says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School, which is part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

And that's why a new generation of observers is joining the futurists and gadget geeks in exploring the implications of this technology. In particular, sociologists are trying to figure out how mobile communications change the interactions between people.

Anthropologists and psychologists are studying how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people more independent or more dependent. Architects, developers and urban planners are changing their vision of buildings and cities in order to adapt them to the habits of the nomads who live there. Activists are trying to transfer the tools used by nomads into their activities to improve the world, even if they worry about the same tools in the hands of attackers. Linguists record how the communication of nomads affects language and the way of thinking.

What is behind the technology?

Rather, this special report is aimed at the fact that soon we will most likely be exploring not the mobile technologies themselves or their business models, but their consequences. The quality of Wi-Fi networks and cellular communications is getting better and better, "hotspots" are growing all over the world like mushrooms after a rain. And a new generation of wireless technology is poised to take its place. And regulators realized that radio waves are now one of society's most important assets.

Technologies also do not stand still, and mobile gadgets are developing faster and faster, with each new generation making it easier to work on the network and becoming more functional and smaller.

And all this together constitutes a historical fusion of two technologies that have already proven their right to be revolutionary. The mobile phone has changed the world, becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. Free and ubiquitous internet access is more likely to be found in richer countries, but nevertheless, it has already changed the way people listen to music, shop, work with banks, read the news and communicate.

And the inhabitants of countries such as South Korea or Japan, all this has not been surprising for a long time.

Five out of ten bestsellers written in Japan in 2007 were created on mobile phones

And the main feature of urban nomads is that they do not get hung up on technology (although they follow trends and novelties in this area) - Mrs. sips his double americano.