Techno-Bedouins
April 12, 2008
According to Nomads at last in the latest on-line Economist, a new generation of techno-Bedouins is emerging in the culture. Is this a Good Thing? You’ll have to decide that for yourselves. The generation gap is too wide for me to even think about it.
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.
I commend the article for your reading. It provides a lot to think about when we consider the way various technologies have impacted our lives. Did you know that there are almost 3.5 million mobile-phone users worldwide, compared to essentially zip in 1996? Or that almost all of those users are in the 18-29 demographic?
Dave, not sure what to make of all this.
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