Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 1
Nomads at last Also in this section
Labour movement The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere. Page 3
The new oases Nomadism changes buildings, cities and tra c. Page 6
Family ties Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers. Page 8
Location, location, location It matters. Page 10
A world of witnesses When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor. Page 11 Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places and each other, says Andreas Kluth Homo mobilis As language goes, so does thought. Page 13 T THE Nomad Café in Oakland, Califor- ban nomadism has had the mixed bless- Ania, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student ing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and at the nearby university in Berkeley, places 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most her double Americano next to her mobile in uential media and communications phone and iPod, opens her MacBook lap- theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping top computer and logs on to the café’s around at great speed, using facilities on wireless internet connection to study for the road and all but dispensing with their her class on the legal treatment of sexual homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a orientation. She is a regular here but French economist who was advising presi- doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit- dent François Mitterrand at the time, used card statement reads Nomad, Nomad, the term to predict an age when rich and Nomad, Nomad . That says it all, she uprooted elites would jet around the thinks. Permanently connected, she com- world in search of fun and opportunity, municates by text, photo, video or voice and poor but equally uprooted workers throughout the day with her friends and would migrate in search of a living. In the family, and does her work stu at the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Man- same time. She roams around town, but of- ners jointly wrote the rst book with digi- ten alights at oases that cater to nomads. tal nomad in the title, adding the be- Christopher Waters, the owner, wildering possibilities of the latest gadgets opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as to the vision. Wi-Fi hotspots were mushrooming all But all of those early depictions and around town. His idea was to provide a predictions of nomadism arguably missed watering-hole for techno-Bedouins such the point. The mobile lifestyles currently as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, taking shape around the world are nothing whether in Arabian deserts or American like those described in the old books. For suburbs, are inherently tribal and social this the authors cannot be blamed, since A list of sources is at creatures, he understood from the outset the underlying technologies of genuine that a good oasis has to do more than pro- and everyday nomadism did not exist www.economist.com/specialreports vide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new or even as recently as a decade ago. Mobile very old kind of gathering place. He phones were already widespread, but they An audio interview with the author is at thought of calling his café the Gypsy were used almost exclusively for voice www.economist.com/audiovideo Spirit Mission , which also captures the calls and were endishly hard to connect theme of mobility, but settled for the sim- to the internet and even to computers. Lap- More articles on telecommunications are at pler Nomad. top computers and personal digital assis- www.economist.com/mobiletelecoms As a word, vision and goal, modern ur- tants (PDAs) needed ddly cables to get on-1 2 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
seat. They carry less than astronauts and of Southern California, Los Angeles. 1 The instrument of choice are thus more mobile but are still quite This is why a new breed of observers is Mobile-phone and internet users, worldwide heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safe- now joining the ever-present futurists and bn guard against disasters. gadget geeks in studying the consequences 3.5 Urban nomads have started appearing of this technology. Sociologists in particu- 3.0 only in the past few years. Like their ante- lar are trying to gure out how mobile Mobile-phone users cedents in the desert, they are de ned not communications are changing interac- 2.5 by what they carry but by what they leave tions between people. Nomadism, most 2.0 behind, knowing that the environment believe, tends to bring people who are al- 1.5 will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not ready close, such as family members, even carry their own water, because they know closer. But it may do so at the expense of 1.0 where the oases are. Modern nomads their attentiveness towards strangers en- 0.5 carry almost no paper because they access countered physically (rather than virtu- Internet users* 0 their documents on their laptop comput- ally) in daily life. That has implications for 1996 98 2000 02 04 06 07 ers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, society at large. *Computer-based dial-up and broadband they don’t even bring laptops. Many engi- Anthropologists and psychologists are Source: International Telecommunications Union neers at Google, the leading internet com- investigating how mobile and virtual in- pany and a magnet for nomads, travel teraction spices up or challenges physical 2 line, and even then did so at a snail’s pace. with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other and o ine chemistry, and whether it Reading and sending e-mail on a mobile smart phone . If ever the need arises for a makes young people in particular more phone not to mention synchronising it large keyboard and some earnest typing, autonomous or more dependent. Archi- across several gadgets and computers to they sit down in front of the nearest avail- tects, property developers and urban plan- create one virtual in-box was unheard able computer anywhere in the world, ners are changing their thinking about of. People took photos using lm. There open its web browser and access all their buildings and cities to accommodate the was no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets, documents online. new habits of the nomads that dwell in but precious little connectivity . Another big misunderstanding of pre- them. Activists are trying to piggyback on vious decades was to confuse nomadism the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve Astronauts and hermit crabs with migration or travel. As the costs of the world, even as they worry about the Without that missing piece, several misun- (stationary) telecommunications plum- same tools in the hands of the malicious. derstandings took hold that now require meted, it became fascinating to contem- Linguists are chronicling how nomadic correcting. One had to do with all those plate the death of distance (the title of a communication changes language itself, gadgets. The old mental picture of a no- book written by Frances Cairncross, then and thus thought. mad invariably had him mostly him, at on the sta of The Economist). And since that time lugging lots of them. Since these the early mobile phones were aimed Beyond technology machines, large and small, were portable, largely at business executives, it was as- This special report, in presupposing that a people assumed that they also made their sumed that nomadism was about cor- wireless world will soon be upon us, will owners mobile. Not so. The proper meta- porate travel in particular. And indeed explore these rami cations of mobile tech- phor for somebody who carries portable many nomads are frequent yers, for ex- nology, rather than the technologies them- but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastruc- ample, which is why airlines such as Jet- selves or their business models. But it is1 ture is that of an astronaut rather than a Blue, American Airlines and Continental nomad, says Paul Sa o, a trend-watcher in Airlines are now introducing in- ight Wi- 2 Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what Fi. But although nomadism and travel can Anywhere, any time they need, including oxygen, because they coincide, they need not. Use of mobile phone or PDA to do the following cannot rely on their environment to pro- Humans have always migrated and by age group, %, 2007 vide it. They are both de ned and limited travelled, without necessarily living no- 18-29 30-49 50-64 65+ by their gear and supplies. madic lives. The nomadism now emerging Send or receive 85 65 38 11 Around the turn of the century, as is di erent from, and involves much more text messages some astronauts, typically executive road than, merely making journeys. A modern Take a picture 82 64 42 22 warriors, got smarter about packing light, nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Play a game 47 29 13 6 says Mr Sa o, they graduated to an inter- Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting mediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. chief executive. He or she may never have Play music 38 16 5 2 These are crustaceans that survive by drag- left his or her city, stepped into an aero- Record a video 34 19 8 3 ging around a cast-o mollusc shell for plane or changed address. Indeed, how far Access the 31 22 10 6 protection and shelter. In the metaphorical he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if internet sense, the shell might be a carry-on bag an urban nomad con nes himself to a Send or receive 28 21 12 6 e-mail on wheels, stu ed full of cables, discs, small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new Send or receive 26 18 11 7 dongles, batteries, plugs and paper docu- and surprisingly di erent relationship to instant messages ments (just in case of disc failure). These time, to place and to other people. Perma- Watch a video 19 11 4 2 hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of nent connectivity, not motion, is the criti- At least one of 96 85 63 36 seated airline passengers whenever they cal thing, says Manuel Castells, a sociolo- these activities board, because their shells invariably bang gist at the Annenberg School for into innocent shins all the way to their Communication, a part of the University Source: Pew Research Centre The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 3
2 worth making clear that technology un- new and user-friendly touch interface. As a shock to people in their teens and twen- derlies all of the changes in today’s no- a result, Google, for instance, has received ties elsewhere who have never known life madic societies, so that its march will ac- 50 times more web-search requests from without text messages; or to itinerant celerate them. Wireless data connections, iPhones this year than from any other mo- salesmen and executives who have for in particular, seem to be getting better all bile handset. years been glued to their BlackBerries day the time. Cellular networks will become Cumulatively, all of these changes and night. By contrast, many older people faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi amount to a historic merger, at long last, of will strain to recognise themselves in the hotspots are popping up in ever more two technologies that have already proved behaviour patterns described in this re- places. And a new generation of wireless revolutionary in their own right. The mo- port, and indeed may never adopt them. technologies is already poised to take over. bile phone has changed the world by be- But the lesson of history is that what the Regulators have grasped that the airwaves coming ubiquitous in rich and poor coun- geeks and early adopters do today, the rest are now among society’s most important tries alike. The internet has mostly of us will probably end up doing tomor- assets. America, for instance, has just auc- touched rich countries, and rich people in row or the day after. It is the pioneers that tioned o a chunk of spectrum with new poor countries, but has already changed set the direction; the mainstream will fol- rules that require the owner to allow any the way people shop, bank, listen to music, low in time. kind of device and software to run on the read news and socialise. Now the mobile The most wonderful thing about mo- resulting network. phone is on course to replace the PC as the bile technology today is that consumers Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. primary device for getting online. Accord- can increasingly forget about how it works Just as Sony’s Walkman once planted the ing to the International Telecommunica- and simply take advantage of it. As Ms notion that music can be mobile, the tions Union, 3.3 billion people, more than Canlas sips her Americano and dives into BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a half the world’s population, now sub- her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she Canadian rm, has since 1999 made e-mail scribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart gives no thought to the speci cations and on the go seem normal. And just as the per- 1, previous page), so the internet at last standards that make her connection possi- sonal-computer era entered the main- looks set to change the whole world. ble. It is the human connections that now stream only in the 1980s with Apple’s com- To people in early-adopter countries take over. Since humans, as Sigmund mercialisation of the graphical user such as South Korea and Japan this will Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work interface , the mobile era arguably began come as no surprise. (Five of the ten best- and love, in order to nd ful lment, this re- only last summer when the same rm selling novels in Japan last year were writ- port will start o by examining how they launched the iPhone, with its radically ten on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as will work. 7 Labour movement
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere
HREE years ago Pip Coburn left his job Eight months later, with seven employ- his suburb of Westchester. When he goes Tas an analyst at UBS, a global bank, in ees now, Mr Coburn brought up the issue into Manhattan, it is for speci c meetings order to start his own investment consul- again, at another breakfast meeting in a and at o -peak times. He also works from tancy, Coburn Ventures. At his rst sta café. He asked if anybody still wanted an his second home in Maine and uses the meeting, in a Manhattan café, he and his o ce at all. One thirtysomething woman, ve-hour drive for wonderful, free con- ve colleagues drew up their to-do list. The with two kids and a nanny at home, felt versations on his earpiece. most urgent item, everybody agreed, was that she might like a quiet o ce as an op- Nomadism works, he says, because to get BlackBerries. Then they needed to tion. But the others all in their 30s except everybody on his team is conscientious start contacting clients. And at some point for two fortysomethings, including Mr Co- and self-motivated . But it did take some they should probably nd some o ce burn were now against it. We had adjusting. At rst the team’s communica- space, ideally in the chic area around New learned to love the freedom and auton- tions became more transactional e - York’s Union Square. omy, says Mr Coburn. So Coburn Ven- cient but impersonal. Once a terse e-mail Within three days they had their Black- tures remains a virtual rm . led to an awkward misunderstanding. Berries and were pitching their o erings to That changes the way its employees And without the proverbial water cooler, fund managers. That went well and kept live. While at UBS, Mr Coburn got up at there was no space for casual serendipi- everybody busy. All six were roaming precisely 5.08am on weekdays in order to ty , says Mr Coburn. But these drawbacks around the city and country, working catch a commuter train into Manhattan were easy to x. His team now gets to- from wherever they pleased and meeting that would allow him to be at his cubicle gether regularly for fun, as if they were a clients either virtually via e-mail, phone by 6.45 and in a conference room at 7.00. I clique of college friends. The group has be- or instant messaging or physically wher- never saw my kids in the morning, he re- come closer than any he has ever been part ever the clients preferred. No client ever calls. Now he wakes up at 6.15, does half of, says Mr Coburn, and everybody has a even asked me whether we had an o ce, an hour of yoga, kisses his three children deeper connection to the organisation . says Mr Coburn, so the o ce space never and then turns on his BlackBerry. Usually James Ware, a co-founder of the Work rose to the top of the agenda. he works at home or in cafés with Wi-Fi in Design Collaborative, a small think-tank,1 4 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
2 says that nomadic work styles are fast be- Wi-Fi hotspots have been equally cru- coming the norm for knowledge work- cial, as have many relatively obscure inno- ers . His research shows that in America vations, such as IMAP, the internet mes- such people spend less than a third of their sage access protocol . It synchronises working time in traditional corporate of- e-mail across mobile phones, computers ces, about a third in their home o ces and web mail so that the user encounters and the remaining third working from the same in-box no matter which device third places such as cafés, public librar- he uses. PDF, the portable-document for- ies or parks. And it is not only the young mat , became a universal standard for pro- and digitally savvy. At 64, Mr Ware consid- ducing, sharing and archiving anything proves the quality of their work, he says. ers himself a nomad, and accesses the les that used to require paper. Cloud comput- Con icts arise only when both models, on his home computer from wherever he ing increasingly lets people keep their the old culture and the new, collide or happens to be. documents online rather than on one par- overlap, he says. This usually happens in Today’s work nomadism descends ticular computer. Washington, DC, where Mr Boyd has a lot from, but otherwise bears little resem- of business. In the government bureaucra- blance to, the older model of telecom- O ce politics cies he visits, workers still have assistants muting , says Mr Ware. That earlier con- With the old technological hassles thus who structure their time so that it can cept became popular in the 1990s thanks mostly conquered, the new questions tend take a week to arrange a meeting to resolve to cheap but stationary telecommunica- to be sociological. Wes Boyd has worked a mundane detail. Yet these same workers tions technologies the landline phone, nomadically for the entire decade since he are now also expected to do ad-hoc exi- the fax and dial-up internet. Because it still co-founded MoveOn.org, a leftish orga- ble scheduling , which tears them apart. tied workers to a place the home o ce nisation for political activism in America, In physical meetings, they are the ones telecommuting implicitly had people co- and attributes his great family life to this looking at their BlackBerries under the ta- cooning at home ve days a week , he style of work. But as MoveOn.org grew to ble, says Mr Boyd. says. But people do not want that: instead, about 20 sta , thousands of consultants Larger organisations often do not have they want to mingle with others and to and millions of volunteers, he also real- the option of dispensing with o ces en- collaborate, though not necessarily under ised that there can’t be any clumps of peo- tirely, as Coburn Ventures and MoveOn uorescent lights in a cubicle farm an ple in physical o ces because they might did. So they need to manage a mixed sys- hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial turn into cliques or power centres . In an tem of work cultures. At Sun Microsys- di erence between telecommuting and e ective organisation, there mustn’t be tems, a company that makes hardware nomadism, he says, is that nomadism insiders and outsiders, he says. So he and software for corporate datacentres, combines the autonomy of telecommut- made it a rule that no two people any- more than half of the workforce is now of- ing with the mobility that allows a gregari- where may share a physical o ce. cially nomadic, as part of a programme ous and exible work style. Instead, all of his colleagues are virtu- called open work in which employees This new model of nomadic work has ally co-present throughout the day, says have no dedicated desk but work from any become technologically feasible only very Mr Boyd, pointing to the instant-messag- that is available (called hotdesking ), or recently. Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Re- ing buddy list on his computer screen, do not come into the o ce at all. search In Motion and inventor of the which shows who is available and who That has not, however, created the cote- BlackBerry, the rm’s main product, says would rather not be disturbed. Instead of ries that Mr Boyd fears. It’s naive to think that his device freed you from your desk wasting time in pointless physical meet- that the physical infrastructure has any- just when globalisation seemed to require ings, he gets most issues resolved with con- thing to do with power, says Jonathan many o ce workers to put in 24 hours, stant and quick electronic communica- Schwartz, Sun’s chief executive. His experi- seven days a week. The BlackBerry didn’t tions, arranged ad hoc rather than ence with nomadism is entirely positive. cause globalisation, but it helps you man- scheduled in advance. As a result his sta Sun’s workers love the exibility, stay with age the reality of it. We wanted you to have are more purpose-driven and less ob- the rm longer and are more productive. a life, he says. sessed with relationships, which im- Mr Schwartz himself leads by example.1 The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 5
2 He usually carries only his BlackBerry and place o ce. BlackBerries and their kin ductivity and now there are not. Today works from anywhere that has Wi-Fi . He have already caused marital problems for people judge what they should achieve has an assistant who manages his diary many couples, who must negotiate by what they could achieve, says Mr Katz, ( she recently put her foot down and has whether the gadget is allowed, say, in the and with our new technologies we can al- forbidden me to modify what she puts in ) bedroom or on the beach while on holi- ways theoretically achieve more. People so that 150% of my time is structured. day. Severe addicts pretend to go to the lav- thus feel inadequate compared with the The di erence is that he now rarely sees atory at home just to check their e-mail. An enormous opportunity they have . her, and that the venues for his scheduled o ce worker’s day used to stop when he The optimists counter that all it takes is meetings are exible. He conducts many left the o ce. When does a nomad’s work- a bit of self-discipline and perspective to on Skype, a free internet-telephone ser- ing day stop? overcome that anxiety. Mr Ware advises vice, or in person at cafés. Time provides James Katz, a professor at Rutgers Uni- his clients to draw clear boundaries of eti- the structure, location takes care of itself, versity who leads a research centre on the quette. He has an agreement with his own he says. He is now planning to get rid of his sociology of mobile technologies, says business partner in another time zone that physical o ce entirely; Sun’s top lawyer that the shift amounts to a historical re- they not bother each other out of hours. has already done so. integration of our productive and social Sun’s Mr Schwartz has an iron rule that he Mr Schwartz, like Messrs Boyd and Co- spheres. In the hunter-gatherer, agricul- spends two hours after work rolling burn, has also noticed that he is having tural and pre-industrial artisan eras people around on the oor with his two sons be- fewer esh meetings . This runs counter did not separate the physical space de- fore returning to his gadgets. Mr Coburn to the conventional wisdom of the past voted to work, family and play. Black- admits that work and family are all one few decades, which held that improve- smiths, say, worked from their homes, big blur but likes it that way. Mr Sa o and ments in telecommunications always lead with family and village life all around. It his wife ban all gadgets during dinner by to more physical travel, rather than less. Mr was only with the capital-intensive work candlelight. Schwartz used to spend two weeks a of the industrial era that a separation of Almost all the sociologists and psychol- month travelling to meet customers; that homes and factories became necessary, ogists in academia, however, take a more has come down to less than one week a because workers had to be co-located in pessimistic view. Sherry Turkle, a profes- month. With more than 100,000 custom- order to work e ciently. This also applied sor at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- ers, he nds that he communicates far to bureaucracies before the digital era. nology (MIT) who studies the psychology more e ciently through his blog, which is Now, however, the di erent spheres of life of gadget use, believes that the addicts, of- translated into ten languages and on a are merging again. ten called CrackBerries , are watching good day reaches 50,000 people. When This leads to more pressure, says Mr their lives on that little screen and can’t he travels, it is now largely for cultural rea- Katz. The di erence between the integra- keep up with it , leaving them perma- sons his Asian customers, in particular, tion of work and family in pre-industrial nently anxious. still nd physical meetings reassuring. But times and today is that in the old days Rutgers’ Mr Katz argues that the frenzy in general he nds that face-to-face is there were clear limits on personal pro- is only going to get worse. This is, rst, be- overrated; I care more about the frequency cause of random reinforcement , the des- and delity of the communication. ultory pattern of rewards that comes with Still, nomadic work requires other big addictive behaviours such as gambling. A adjustments in the culture of an organisa- CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail tion and the behaviour of its individuals, throughout the day, knowing full well that says Mr Ware of the Work Design Collabo- most of it is cha , but cannot help himself rative. He nds that older and more tradi- because of that occasional grain. The sec- tional supervisors usually oppose the idea ond reason, says Mr Katz, is that most peo- because they fear that they cannot manage ple su er from the illusion that more in- people whom they cannot see. With time, formation always leads to better decisions, they usually change their minds, says Mr and there is always more information Ware; but this requires management by available on our phones and laptops. The objectives rather than face time . Not all third reason is that people today need to workers thrive in such a culture; some do constant impression-management, prefer the structure of the traditional o ce. because the mere ability to stay connected But anyone who did well at college can during weekends, vacations or sabbaticals work well this way, he thinks. The prof means that going o ine risks reminding said ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t care others that we are expendable. where you did it; it’s the same now. The exibility, freedom and productiv- ity of mobile work thus have a cost. No- Death of a road warrior mads are constantly juggling the social The bigger problem is stress. Nomadic rights of colleagues, relatives and friends, work means more autonomy, but any- as well as their own right to downtime. All body who works for himself has a tyrant of this, moreover, now tends to happen in as a boss, says Paul Sa o, the Silicon Val- public places that were not built speci - ley trend-watcher. The danger is that the cally for work, in the way o ces were. The anytime, anyplace o ce will lure us into next article looks at how that a ects those the tiger cage that is the everytime, every- kinds of places. 7 6 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and tra c
RANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, Flikes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute 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 angles and windows, it has become a new Cam- bridge landmark. But the building’s most radical innovation is on the inside. The en- tire structure was conceived with the no- madic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitch- ell, a professor of architecture and com- puter science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry 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 twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dot- ted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and tional . This means that 21st-century aes- mean that o ce space will drop by 60%. lounges are interspersed with work desks thetics will probably be the exact opposite But it does mean that o ce designers are and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi of the sci- chic that 20th-century futurists thinking about using space better. everywhere. Students, teachers and visi- once imagined. Architects are instead There will be more on-demand tors are cramming for exams, irting, nap- thinking about light, air, trees and gardens, spaces and drop-in centres , says Ms Mo- ping, instant-messaging, researching, read- all in the service of human connections. ritz, with exible layouts that facilitate ing and discussing. No part of the student Buildings will have much more varied collaboration. Within a typical o ce street is physically specialised for any of shapes than before. For instance, people building, the area devoted to solitary these activities. Instead, every bit of it can working on laptops nd it comforting to work, such as the cubicles immortalised in instantaneously become the venue for a have their backs to a wall, so hybrid spaces Dilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internal seminar, a snack or romance. may become curvier, with more nooks, in walls and furniture are becoming mov- The fact that people are no longer tied order to maximise the surface area of their able. More space is given to communal ar- to speci c places for functions such as inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is eas, some of which are distinguished not studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, becoming a ordable because computer- by their function but by their etiquette means that there is a huge drop in de- aided design and new materials make loud or quiet, say as in libraries. mand for traditional, private, enclosed non-repetitive forms cheaper to build. A particularly striking example, border- spaces such as o ces or classrooms, and ing on caricature, is the so-called Google- simultaneously a huge rise in demand for Who needs a desk? plex, the headquarters of Google in Moun- semi-public spaces that can be informally The e ect already reaches far beyond uni- tain View, California. Naturally it has appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces . This versity campuses and is causing upheaval Wi-Fi coverage. But the Googleplex is fam- shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest in the commercial-property industry. De- ous for its good and free victuals, doled out change in architecture in this century. In bra Moritz, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle, at food courts throughout the sprawling the 20th century architecture was about a rm that helps companies to manage campus, and for the casual mixture of play specialised structures o ces for working, their o ce buildings and consults on prop- and work. Over here a software engineer is cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was erty investments, says that the total area writing some code on his laptop, sweaty in necessary because workers needed to be devoted to traditional o ce space has be- his workout clothes from the volleyball near things such as landline phones, fax gun to decline, although slowly. This is be- game in progress on the lawn. Over there machines and ling cabinets, and because cause ine ciency is more obvious as another one is zipping along on a scooter, the economics of building materials fa- workers become mobile, she says. Ac- heading for a massage or going to pick up voured repetitive and simple structures, cording to Jones Lang LaSalle’s research, his laundry from the onsite service. Goo- such as grid patterns for cubicles. workers are at their desks, on average, less gle even extends this workspace, virtually, The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, than 40% of their time (Ms Moritz ditched throughout the entire San Francisco Bay will make spaces intentionally multifunc- her own desk long ago). This does not Area by running a eet of commuter shut-1 The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 7
2 tles, all of which have Wi-Fi on board to al- evacuated , says Mr Katz, which leaves low uninterrupted coding. people feeling more isolated than they Some traditional property developers would be if the café were merely empty . are drawing inspiration from this sort of That is because the physical presence of thing. Nomadism is not good for the o ce other human beings is psychologically industry as such, concedes Robert Dyks- and neurologically arousing but now pro- tra, who has been developing commercial duces no reward. Quite simply, he says, we property for 27 years. He, however, has have not evolved biologically to be happy spotted an opportunity. His new o ce in these situations. park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dilapi- Many café-owners are trying to deal dated city that hopes to take some service- with this problem. Christopher Waters, the sector jobs from nearby Chicago and De- owner of the Nomad Café in Oakland, reg- troit, is unlike any traditional o ce and ularly hosts live jazz and poetry readings, more like a community centre . Instead and actually turns o the Wi-Fi router at of renting to corporate tenants, says Mr those times so that people mingle more. Dykstra, he plans to sell memberships as a He is also planning to turn his café into an club does by the hour, week or month to online social network so that patrons nomads dropping by. Mobile workers opening their browsers to connect en- come in, nd all the services they might where everybody knows your name , is counter a welcome page that asks them to need from tech support to copying and an example. ll out a short pro le as they would on satisfy their needs for work, love and Mr Oldenburg’s thesis was that third Facebook, say and then see information play as well, with the aid of tness stu- places were in general decline. More and about the people at the other tables. dios, restaurants, cooking classes and mu- more people, especially in suburban soci- Most nomads are very open to this sort sic rooms. eties such as America’s, were moving only of thing. Technology aside, there is not This exibility is what separates suc- between their rst and second places, such a big di erence between a geek with cessful spaces and cities from unsuccessful making extra stops only at alienating and earphones and a laptop today and a Paris ones, says Anthony Townsend, an urban anonymous locations such as malls, existentialist watching the world go by at planner at the Institute for the Future, a which in Mr Oldenburg’s opinion fail as the café Les Deux Magots in the 1950s. The think-tank. Almost any public space can third places. Society, Mr Oldenburg feared, rst might be simultaneously instant-mes- assume some of the features of a Google- was at risk of coming unstuck without saging, listening to music and e-mailing, plex or a Stata Centre. For example, a not- these venues for spreading ideas and the other pu ng a Gitane and jotting for-pro t organisation in New York has forming bonds. down notes about being and nothingness. turned Bryant Park, a once-derelict but No sooner was the term coined than But as soon as an attractive new customer charming garden in front of the city’s pub- big business queued up to claim that it was breezes in, both will instantaneously re- lic library, into a hybrid space popular building new third places. The most prom- align their focus of interest. with o ce workers. The park’s managers inent was Starbucks, a chain of co ee As more third places pop up and noticed that a lot of visitors were using houses that started in Seattle and is now spread, they also change entire cities. Just mobile phones and laptops in the park, so hard to avoid anywhere. Starbucks admits as buildings during the 20th century were they installed Wi-Fi and added some that as it went global it lost its ambiance of specialised by function, towns were as chairs with foldable lecture desks. The a home away from home . However, it well, says Mr Mitchell. Suburbs were for idea was not to distract people from the has also spotted a new opportunity in ca- living, downtowns for working and other owers but to let them customise their lit- tering to nomads. Its branches o er not areas for playing. But urban nomadism tle bit of the park. only sofas but also desks with convenient makes districts, like buildings, multifunc- electricity sockets. These days Starbucks tional. Parts of town that were monocul- Third places makes bigger news when it switches Wi-Fi tures, he says, gradually become ne- The academic name for such spaces is providers it dropped T-Mobile for AT&T grained mixed-use neighbourhoods third places , a term originally coined by in February than when it sells a new type more akin in human terms to pre-indus- the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 of co ee bean. Bookshops such as Barnes trial villages than to modern suburbs. book, The Great, Good Place . At the time, & Noble are also o ering more co ee and Ms Moritz at Jones Lang LaSalle is al- long before mobile technologies became crumbs , as Mr Oldenburg puts it, as are ready counting more o ces leaving sub- widespread, Mr Oldenburg wanted to dis- churches, YMCAs and public libraries. urbs entirely and moving back into down- tinguish between the sociological func- But do these oases for nomads actually towns, which tend to be younger and tions of people’s rst places (their homes), play the social role of third places? James hipper. This helps to revitalise city centres. their second places (o ces) and the public Katz at Rutgers fears that cyber-nomads are Paul Sa o, the forecaster, sees a simulta- spaces that serve as safe, neutral and infor- hollowing them out . It is becoming com- neous movement to charismatic exurbs , mal meeting points. As Mr Oldenburg saw monplace for a café to be full of people such as Mendocino on the Californian it, a good third place makes admission free with headphones on, speaking on their coast or Cape Cod in Massachusetts, or cheap the price of a cup of co ee, say mobile phones or laptops and hacking where incoming nomads are building o ers creature comforts, is within walking away at their keyboards, more engaged consensual communities with lifestyles distance for a particular neighbourhood with their e-mail in-box than with the peo- reminiscent of the Utopia movements of and draws a group of regulars. The epony- ple touching their elbows. These places are earlier times. The big losers, Mr Sa o mous bar in the television series Cheers , physically inhabited but psychologically thinks, are the suburbs that were built for1 8 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
2 speci c functions in a previous era but are his 2006 book. Younger workers were now ting worse. Car-pooling, which green now blighted. joining the baby-boomers in the work- city governments are still encouraging, is The same trend is also changing tra c force. Car trips had stopped increasing and declining sharply as commuting times and patterns. Alan Pisarski has been research- were even declining in cities such as Seat- directions are becoming more diverse and ing urban movement for three decades tle, Atlanta and Portland. Tra c was still more complex. and has written a series of three books heavy but now spread out over much lon- Indeed, even though there are as many called Commuting in America the rst ger periods, starting at 5am and lasting till cars on the roads as ever, they are now in 1986, the others one and two decades noon, say. Bizarre new patterns were crop- making very di erent journeys. In the pre- later. He is now working on the fourth. ping up, such as a reverse commute in vious decade trips followed a radial pat- Thanks to the ten-year intervals, Mr Pisar- Seattle as lots of male computer scientists tern , says Mr Pisarski, as both o ce work- ski claims he has been able to capture the at Microsoft in the suburb of Redmond ers and telecommuters ran errands away biggest trends. In 1986, before the era of raced downtown to nd females a week- from their workplace and back again in or- mobility and at the dawn of the PC era, he day ritual called the running of the pro- der to check their voice messages and still observed the classic diurnal ow of grammers . faxes. Now people are making trips in a the post-war commuting pattern, which The current data, for use in the next daisy-chain pattern, he says. Nomads set had baby-boomers sitting in tra c jams at book, are telling Mr Pisarski something o in the morning to drop o the kids at 8am and 5pm between the suburbs and else again. The baby-boomers are starting school and then spend all day hopping the downtowns. In 1996 he saw a new cir- to retire, forcing employers to compete for from one third place to another, with stops cumferential pattern as jobs shifted to the new talent by letting younger employees at the gym, the post o ce and so on. suburbs, so the baby-boomers were now work wherever they please. Even the older Throughout the day they remain con- sitting in jams on the beltways . At the workers are becoming nomadic (Mr Pisar- nected to colleagues and family members same time he already noticed that the fast- ski himself is 70 and works from his Black- who are elsewhere, and increasingly their est-growing group was telecommuters. Berry and laptop). Tra c congestion, movements form no discernible collective Things started looking very di erent in though still bad, is for the rst time not get- pattern at all. 7 Family ties
Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers
N AUGUST 2006, the wife of an Israeli plumber took Mr Ling and his guests aback First, mobile technology pitted the Isoldier on duty in the Lebanon war gave by walking right past them and into the plumber’s interaction with a stranger (Mr birth to a boy. The army granted the father house, where he took o his shoes and Ling) against that with his own wife on the a brief leave, but he had to return to the headed for the kitchen, chattering into his phone. The plumber, to use the technical front before his son’s bris, the ritual cir- handset all the while. term, had a weak tie to Mr Ling but a cumcision on the eighth day of his life. So It was the sort of thing that perhaps ex- strong tie to his wife which easily pre- the family did the next best thing. As the cites only sociologists. Here was an exam- vailed over the weak one, leaving a few sandak held the baby and the mohel made ple of two big tensions in nomadic society. Norwegians feeling temporarily awkward the cut, a relative lmed the entire event on and pondering the fate of their society. a mobile phone so that the father on the Second, the plumber gave precedence Lebanese border could watch, live, on his to what Mr Ling calls the mediated inter- own mobile phone and sing and dance action with the person at the other with his comrades. end of the phone, at the expense The tools of nomadism clearly bring of his co-present communi- families closer by allowing them to stay cation with Mr Ling who was connected when physically separated. But standing right next to him. In there are unexpected side e ects in many other words, the person who everyday situations, as the following anec- was physically more distant dote shows. Richard Ling, a sociologist at was nonetheless psychologi- Telenor, the largest Norwegian telephone cally closer. So out went so- company, and author of New Tech, New cial norms and rituals (hand- Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Re- shakes, greetings) that Norway shaping Social Cohesion , was standing and other societies accumulated on his porch in Oslo one day, saying fare- during a past of exclusively co-present in- well to a few guests, when a plumber teractions. The plumber’s only nod to rit- walked around the corner, talking on his ual was to take o his shoes. mobile phone to what appeared to be his Sociologists are always arguing about wife. Mr Ling, who had a leak in the the precise role of ritual in society and the kitchen, was expecting him. But the relative importance of the individual, fam-1 The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 9
tells, the sociologist at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that mobile tech- nology a ects children the most. On one hand, adolescents today become socially 2 ily and community. Emile Durkheim, the autonomous earlier than their parents did, earliest, kicked o the debate more than a building their own communities from the century ago when he studied Australian bottom up through constant text-messag- aborigines and found that they used ritu- ing and photo-sharing among their clique, als to create and maintain solidarity and even if this circumvents the wishes of their cohesion among a group. In the 1950s Er- parents. On the other hand, they also have ving Go man broadened the de nition of nology, far from isolating people, brings their parents on speed-dial, and are only rituals to ordinary interactions of daily them closer to their families, friends and one button away from help if they get into American life, such as jokes. lovers their strong ties. But they still dis- trouble. Mr Castells calls this a safe auton- In the 1970s Mark Granovetter became agree on what that means for weak ties omy pattern . one of the most in uential sociologists of with strangers, and thus society at large. This has some sociologists concerned. that decade with a paper titled The Nomadic technology deepens family James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile Strength of Weak Ties . Mr Granovetter ar- ties because, as another sociologist, Chris- phone a new sort of umbilical cord be- gued that society needs not only healthy tian Licoppe, puts it, it enables connected tween children and their parents and won- strong ties between relatives and friends presence , which is new in history. In the ders whether this might in some cases re- but also ample and uid weak ties be- era of stationary communications tech- tard maturation . Sherry Turkle, the tween casual acquaintances. Far from tri- nology, people used landline phones that psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gad- vial, these weak ties are the bridges be- belonged to a place rather than a person. In gets are, ironically, a tethering technol- tween densely knit clumps of close that communication culture people talked ogy and create new dependencies that friends and thus the conduits for ideas, infrequently and viewed a conversation as delay the important Huck Finn moment fads and trends. Social systems lacking in an occasion. Typically, they would plan in young lives when adolescents rst real- weak ties will be fragmented and incoher- the call for an appropriate time, such as a ise that they are alone on the urban equiv- ent, Mr Granovetter argued. Any erosion Sunday. Both sides would introduce them- alent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk and of weak ties is therefore to be deplored. selves with a greeting ie, a ritual and lost after a party is di erent when one then take time to catch up. push of a button summons the parental The more dismal science With mobile phones, on the other chau eur. In 2005 a psychology professor In the 1990s, as the internet came into hand, people call, text or e-mail one an- at Middlebury College in Vermont found widespread use, sociologists, never an up- other constantly throughout the day. Since that undergraduates were communicating beat bunch to begin with, became de- they are always, in e ect, contacting a per- with their parents, on average, more than cidedly pessimistic. Some observed a loss son rather than a place, and since the re- ten times a week. of social capital as people spent their time ceiver can see the caller’s name, and prob- trans xed by screens rather than other ably his picture, they often dispense with Love in cyberspace people. Others saw the (real-world, as op- greetings altogether. The exchanges now Mobile technology also tethers couples, posed to online) social networks of Ameri- tend to be frequent and short. People ex- especially young ones, but in a di erent cans shrinking, with ever more people pect less content but instead a feeling of way. Mimi Ito, an anthropologist who feeling that they were intimate with no- permanent connection, as though they studies the e ects of mobile technology on body at all. Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mel- were in fact together during the entire time youth culture in Japan and America, has lon University argued that the internet between their physical meetings. found that Japanese lovers send constant causes social isolation and depression. Mr Ling, using data from Norway, has text messages to avoid parental rules and Norman Nie at Stanford University be- found that about half of all mobile-phone to stay connected emotionally when they lieved that internet use at home has a calls and text messages go to the same are physically separated. Every nomadic strong negative impact on time spent with three or four people, typically within ten culture has its idiosyncrasies, and the Japa- friends and family as well as time spent on kilometres of the caller. A lot of this is nese speciality is a rich vocabulary of social activities. what he calls micro-co-ordination , as emoticons : I really want to see you But most of these observations, made family members are out about town and (>_<) ; I feel like I am going to be sick (; _;) . in a rich country at the height of the PC era, check in with each other to plan their next This steady stream of emoticons and focused on the wired and stationary kind stop or errand. Dad might call from the su- photos in between physical esh meets of communications technology rather permarket’s dairy aisle to nd out which amounts to tele-nesting , says Ms Ito. It than the wireless and mobile sort. Now, as brand of yogurt to buy; mum might text also spices up and prolongs the esh mobile communications are becoming the that she is running late and that dad needs meets. Young people in Tokyo, she has ob- norm, a new generation of sociologists is to pick up the kids. served, will start their date by exchanging scrambling to update all these theories. So But such communications go far be- text messages all afternoon as they do far, most of them agree that nomadic tech- yond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Cas- homework or take the train to the rendez-1 10 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
2 vous. At night, on their journey home after the actual date, they use messages again as fading embers of conversation , some- Location, location, location times continuing for days and turning little memories into the couple’s lore . Often entire cliques do this sort of thing, creating, in e ect, their own tribal It matters medium and narrative. Ms Ito has noticed a new genre of photography on the rise as ICHAEL HALBHERR was driving set-maker. Not letting things such as Aus- young people use their phones to snap Mfrom Berlin to Budapest the other terlitz slip by unnoticed is exactly what photos of everyday situations the view day when he passed what looked like an LBS is in business for. Some people think from the escalator on the way to school, empty eld. The fact that his mobile it is the next big thing . It was Nokia’s say which mean a lot to their friends and phone stayed quiet annoyed him. Here reason for spending $8.1 billion to buy nothing to anybody else. They especially he was, speeding by the site of Napo- Navteq, a rm that collects map data love photos that capture dumb things leon’s great victory at Austerlitz, and around the world. that their friends do , such as getting nothing even vibrated. One advantage that mobile phones drunk and falling into puddles, which col- Mr Halbherr, admittedly, had profes- have over PCs is that they increasingly lectively amount to everyday, casual sional reasons to ponder this shortcom- know and care where they are. Some use documentaries for a circle of friends. ing. He runs location-based services the global positioning system (GPS), (LBS) for Nokia, the world’s largest hand- which uses satellites, others a slightly less Out with the out crowd accurate method that calculates the dis- The potential problem with connected tances of nearby cellular towers and presence is that it usually excludes other Wi-Fi hotspots. people who may be physically present. In This is a huge advance, says Stephen situations that might once have been an Johnson, one of Nokia’s strategists, be- opportunity to talk to a stranger waiting cause it adds the third element ( where ) for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say required to understand a person’s con- people now ll the time with a few mes- text, the other two being who and when. sages to parents, lovers or friends. This Most obviously, this means that the idea strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, of being lost will be unheard of , he says. or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In More interestingly, it allows people to be- some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to come more immersed in the real world bounded solidarity , when cliques be- around them . Within a few years, for ex- come so turned in on themselves that they ample, phones will know where you are all but stop interacting with the wider soci- at what time, and where you are going ety around them. next, based on your electronic diary. The The rst casualty is usually etiquette. phone may also know, from your ad- Noise pollution is only one kind of viola- dress book, that you have a friend in the tion. In an American survey conducted in building whose diary says that he is go- 2005, 62% of the people polled and 74% of ing to the same place. Your two phones those over 60 felt that using a cellphone will alert you so that you can share a taxi. in public is a major irritation for other peo- If you have been sleeping with his wife, ple, but only 32% of those between 18 and or are just not feeling very sociable that 27 shared that opinion. That divergence day, you can always claim that your bat- makes for a combustible social cocktail tery died at that very instant. whenever the generations mix. It is routine nowadays for people to answer calls in cinemas, restaurants and public toilets, for the presidency. As he was up on his po- Usually the situation is subtler and the even at weddings and funerals. The vol- dium and in mid-sentence addressing the incongruence has more to do with atten- ume of these transgressions varies with National Ri e Association (NRA), a crucial tion. This can be true even during silent the culture Americans and Italians, say, constituency for a Republican candidate, mobile communications. It is now routine are louder than Swedes or Japanese. And his mobile rang and, to gasps in the huge for university students to text, e-mail and some societies are beginning to adjust. audience, he decided to answer it. What instant-message during lectures. Mr Ling, Some countries now have quiet cars on followed, captured on microphone, is whose job includes loitering in public trains where patrons cannot talk on their worth repeating in its banality: Hello, places for observation, watched a woman mobiles but must text instead. dear. I’m talking, I’m talking to the mem- at an Oslo underground station who Trickier etiquette problems arise when bers of the NRA right now. Would you like texted as she walked. She was wholly fo- the issue is not so much noise as context. to say hello? I love you, and I’ll give you a cused on her text message but had to look One example that will enter the history call as soon as I’m nished. OK? OK, have a up occasionally to weave through the books occurred last September when safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I crowds on the platform. Other people Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New love you. When he hung up, the audience were doing the same. It was an atomised York, was still waging a vigorous campaign had turned to stone. and individualised scene, says Mr Ling: a1 The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 11
2 new form of the proverbial lonely crowd. conversation or negotiation and one of But at least this particular Norwegian them gets, and answers, a call. The other woman was signalling through her body co-present people must now keep them- language to all around her that she wanted selves busy while seeming nonchalant. to be left alone. The spread of hands-free What is more, they must pretend not to be Bluetooth devices, with hidden earplugs eavesdropping even though they are only seemingly attached to nothing, is remov- a few feet away from the mediated con- ing even those clues. Steve Love, a psychol- versation, ideally by assuming a pose of ogist, was travelling on a train from Edin- concentration on some other object, such burgh to Glasgow once when a girl as their ngernails or their own phone. As standing next to him started talking to him. soon as the intervening call ends, every- She asked him how he was and how his body must try to re-enter the co-present day had been, and Mr Love, though a bit context as gracefully as possible. much larger groups of people than has shy, politely told her how much he was So there is evidence that nomadism is ever been feasible before. It is not uncom- looking forward to watching Scotland play good for in-groups, but at the expense of mon for adolescents to add several football that evening. As he spoke, the girl strangers. If that is true, Mr Granovetter friends a day to their social graph on looked at him in horror, then turned away. would consider it bad for society. Fortu- Facebook or to the buddy list of their in- Only then did Mr Love hear her say OK, nately, however, the last chapter has not stant-messaging service. I’ll call you later. Not a word or gesture yet been written. Since the outburst of pes- As mobile devices now become, in ef- was exchanged for the remainder of the simism about the internet among sociolo- fect, computers for accessing the wider (suddenly uncomfortable) journey. gists in the 1990s, the web has recently be- web, these online services are also moving Probably the single most common eti- come an intensely social medium, thanks from stationary to mobile use. Whether quette con ict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, in large part to proliferating online social that could reinvigorate the weak ties in when mediated communication inter- networks such as Facebook and MySpace. society along with the strong ties remains rupts co-present communication, as when Young people have been using these web- to be seen. But etiquette, both online and two or more people are sitting at a table in sites on their PCs to keep in touch with o ine, remains a work in progress. 7 A world of witnesses
When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor
NTIL a couple of years ago election through text messages but quickly re- word. Howard Rheingold, the author of Umonitoring was a ddly, exhausting turned to order when some 500 observers Smart Mobs , saw in such events a sign of and often thankless business. Non-gov- at the various polling stations sent text much more to come, as people discover ernmental organisations (NGOs) such as messages to the central system saying that ever more ingenious ways of organising America’s National Democratic Institute the rumours were false. groups of people on the y and of collabo- (NDI) would send idealistic student volun- The sheer ubiquity of mobile phones rating towards any sort of collective goal. teers to complicated places such as Nigeria amounts to the biggest leap in history, Those goals range from the uplifting, as to observe the balloting, write down data bigger than the printing press, which, after in the Philippines, to the repellent. The ter- on pieces of paper and then carry or fax all, stayed in the hands of very few peo- rorists who bombed three suburban trains the forms somewhere for manual input ple, says Katrin Verclas, who runs Mo- in Madrid in 2004, killing 191 people and into a computer system. The process was bileActive.org, a website and community injuring nearly 2,000, used their mobile slow and unreliable. Fraud or violence, if it of about 3,000 activists and NGOs all over phones to detonate the explosives. But a broke out, spread far faster than credible the world. Even quite basic features such mobile phone then became the clue that information. as text messaging, she says, have already uncovered the plot. Then, in 2006, a penny dropped. NDI, allowed countless people everywhere to Mobile phones also became the tool for working with an organisation in Montene- get more involved in areas traditionally re- organising the huge spontaneous demon- gro, realised that practically everybody in served for activists . The snazzy new fea- strations in the following days. Thus, like that country already had the perfect tool to tures and internet access now coming to every other technology human beings monitor, in all but real time, its election mobile phones will expand the possibil- have ever invented, says Ms Verclas, the that May. That tool was the mobile phone ities yet again. tools of nomadism arm both sides in the and its ability to send text messages di- An early and classic example of this eternal tug-of-war between good and evil. rectly to a computer. The new approach new opportunity for citizens to participate But there is room for optimism, she thinks, worked so well that it instantly became the in society occurred in 2001 when Filipinos, because the side with good intentions is standard for monitoring other precarious the world’s most avid texters at the time, more numerous and so far, at least has elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last Au- overthrew their president, Joseph Estrada, proved more imaginative. gust brie y threatened to disintegrate by mobilising enormous crowds at short Three big categories in particular lend amid rumours of violence also spread notice, using text messages to spread the themselves to mobile activism. First, no-1 12 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
2 madic technology can expose human- capture it when and as they experience it. tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, fam- rights abuses as honest citizens use tech- At the mundane end of the spectrum, they ily album and many other things. nology to monitor and expose crimes and record cars speeding on roads near schools The third category is environmental co-ordinate the response. The best or snap photos of derelict public parks, monitoring. The humble text message has weapon against abuses has always been to then upload them to their community already changed consumer behaviour in confront the public with video evidence. website. At the extreme end, as in Albania many places. Shoppers in South Africa can This became clear in 1991 when four po- and Egypt recently, they lm police brutal- text the name of a sh to a service called licemen in Los Angeles pulled over a black ity, or government outrages such as the FishMS and receive an instantaneous re- man, Rodney King, for speeding and then crackdown by Myanmar’s junta on its Bud- commendation to tuck in , to think beat him brutally, with other policemen dhist monks. twice or to avoid completely , based on watching. A bystander, George Holliday, The second area where mobile technol- how the sh was caught and whether the recorded this abuse on his camcorder and ogy is beginning to have a big impact is species is endangered. Londoners can text soon the images were playing all over health care, especially in poor countries. In a service called AirTEXT to get information America’s mainstream media, sparking South Africa people can text their location on air quality, and subscribers receive race riots in Los Angeles. to a number and get an instant reply with alerts when pollution is forecast to spike. That event inspired an initial wave of the nearest clinic testing for HIV. Healthy- attempts to support grassroots video testi- Toys.org, founded by a parental advocacy Scents and sensability monies by amateurs. In 1992 Peter Gabriel, group and two American organisations, The real fun begins when phones start ob- a British rock musician, started WITNESS, lets concerned parents text in the name of serving and reporting problems automati- a not-for-pro t group, to try to train and a toy they are considering buying in a shop cally. This is now on the horizon. In Janu- equip activists all over the world to use and instantly reports back with informa- ary researchers at America’s Purdue video to document abuses. But little of tion about lead or other toxins that may University reported that they are building consequence followed. It was a pure coin- have been found in it. Soon mobile tech- a system for the state of Indiana designed cidence that Mr Holliday happened to nology could play a large role in detecting, to use a network of mobile phones to de- have a camcorder with him when he saw mapping and responding to epidemics. A tect and track radiation. In the event of a Mr King being beaten, and most of the lot of information about a recent polio out- nuclear leak or a dirty bomb , the sensors world’s population was not about to start break in Kenya became available because of large numbers of phones, all identifying walking around lugging cameras. Even if health workers were using hand-held de- their location through the global-position- they had, there was no easy and automatic vices to collect data that used to be re- ing system (GPS), would point authorities outlet in the media for such clips. corded on paper forms. to the source of the radiation. All this has changed in the past couple The software on those devices, called Such tracking systems rely on the col- of years. Websites such as YouTube that al- EpiSurveyor and made by a not-for-pro t lective information from large numbers of low any amateur to upload video have be- organisation called DataDyne, is also used phones, whose owners may not even be come all the rage, and Mr Gabriel’s WIT- by health workers in Sierra Leone and aware of the part they are playing in this. NESS has just launched a site called the Zambia. The World Health Organisation If, say, a car is carrying a dirty bomb and Hub that is dedicated entirely to human- has now declared it to be the technological driving down a street, it passes others cars. rights clips. Simultaneously, mobile standard, and DataDyne is in the process The mobile phones inside those passing phones have become still cameras and are of loading it onto ordinary mobile phones cars would send information to a data- increasingly turning into video cameras as for use in poor countries everywhere, says base. The signal would grow weaker as the well. This means that all the tools of testi- Joel Selanikio, a doctor who co-founded distance from the source increases, mony are now both mobile and ubi- the organisation. For most people in poor whereas the signal from phones in ap- quitous. People no longer need to plan to countries, he thinks, mobile phones are proaching cars would grow stronger. The document wrongdoing, but are able to fast becoming the main communications software would then use the sum of this1 The Economist April 12th 2008 A special report on mobility 13
2 information to pinpoint the bomb. ducted a study in Ghana, where he at- eryday mobility of ordinary people could The idea that phones should have sen- tached tiny pollution sensors to the lead to grassroots citizen science . sors is far from outlandish. Phones already phones of 15 taxi drivers. Using the data Does this trend give any cause for con- incorporate primitive versions, including the amount of pollution at speci c times cern? To some people it suggests a coming the sensor that picks up the cellular signal, of day in places where the taxis went Mr surveillance state, as all sorts of titbits light sensors that dim the keyboard and Paulos’s team drew up a pollution map of about people’s personal lives that used to acceleration sensors that notice when the the city which revealed surprising patterns be private become input for new services user lifts the phone to his ear. Today, in particular roads. Some of the taxi driv- such as tra c maps, health warnings or se- everybody can look at his phone and say ers changed their routes as a result. curity alerts. Those worries, evoking an how many signal bars he has, says Eric Carbon monoxide, ozone, pollen, sun earlier era of top-down control by a Big Paulos, a researcher at Intel, the world’s intensity and temperature are among the Brother, are mostly misplaced, claims Mr largest chipmaker. In a few years, every- things that Mr Paulos considers particu- Verclas. A neighbourhood-watch commu- body will look at his phone and see what larly easy to measure by tweaking mobile nity with global reach is a better metaphor. the pollen count is. phones in ways that consumers would not Instead of surveillance, watching from Mr Paulos runs a project on participa- even notice. Any such data would need to above, society will rely on a new and op- tory urbanism for Intel, which explores be collected in a discreet way to assure the posite concept, sousveillance, watching exactly how sensors inside mobile phones privacy of consumers. But eventually, from below. Such arguments may make might improve society. He recently con- thinks Mr Paulos, this new twist to the ev- more sense in California than in China. 7 Homo mobilis
As language goes, so does thought
HERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at guage, and by implication thought and S MIT who studies the nexus between feeling. That major linguistic change is people and gadgets, believes that the tools afoot is clear to anybody who has been of mobility are leading to the emergence around young people almost anywhere in of a new type of person . In the distant, the world. Entire subcultures now de ne landline-dominated past, she says, people themselves primarily or exclusively thought: I have a feeling so I want to make through their chosen text-messaging or in- a call. Young people today, including Ms stant-messaging argot. Turkle’s teenage daughter, seem to be Richard Ling, for instance, has studied a thinking instead: I want to have a feeling, teenage fad in Norway that had kids sub- so I need to make a call. What she means stituting the letter z for s in Norwegian is that there is something inorganic, deriv- words, yielding spellings such as koz or ative and inauthentic about a lot of mobile klemz , both meaning hug . This sub- communication. As a species, Ms Turkle stitution de ned, as Mr Ling puts it, mid- thinks, we run the risk of letting the per- dle-class teenyboppers until a rap band manent wireless social clouds that sur- ridiculed the trend, thus killing it o . The round us steal part of our nature. teens immediately took to writing their Is that a bit rich? Certainly, tools have text messages and e-mails in pidgin Swed- spelling matter, and that rules have to be always played a big part in de ning hu- ish. Among this group of Norwegians, a observed. That consensus now appears to man nature. Homo habilis, handy man , Swedish word such a kramar (again, be at risk. is considered the rst species in our genus, hugs) became krämmar . Both the z In all electronic media, especially surviving until about 1.6m years ago, be- endings and the pidgin Swedish showed when typed on the small screens of mo- cause he used primitive tools made from up only in electronic media, never in spo- bile handsets, absolutely anything, lin- stone or bone. Homo erectus, upright ken language. guistically speaking, seems to go. Apostro- man , got his name from his stature, but So far, that suggests nothing more than phes that once distinguished between his crucial innovation was to tame re for a new variant of traditional in-group its and it’s seem quaint and arbitrary. his use. And whether or not Homo sapiens, markers such as tattoos or Ivy-League class Entire words and sentences now compose wise man , entirely lives up to his name, rings. But Naomi Baron, a linguist at Amer- themselves with the ever-present auto- he has achieved astonishing break- ican University in Washington, DC, and ll and spell-check features, which ad- throughs both in hardware (eg, the wheel) author of Always On: Language in an On- olescents increasingly regard as a virtual and software (eg, language). line and Mobile World , sees more worry- Samuel Johnson or Konrad Duden. If researchers in ivory towers now de- ing trends. Society’s attitude towards lan- The academically and politically cor- bate the arrival of Homo mobilis, their ton- guage has changed, she thinks. For about rect response is to welcome this trend with gue is only partially in their cheek. Once 250 years, the consensus in Western soci- open arms. Language, after all, appears again the biggest shift seems to involve lan- eties has been that grammar, syntax and only to be returning to its natural and1 14 A special report on mobility The Economist April 12th 2008
2 healthy state of ux. When Geo rey Chau- cer was writing in the 14th century there were no set spelling rules, but he managed to 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. Spelling is in decline today, she thinks, not because of the rich diversity of dialects, as in Chau- cer’s day, but because the dominant mind- set of nomadic culture is that language does not matter. We are entering, as she puts is, an age of linguistic whateverism . One reason is that people today are writ- ing vastly larger amounts of text than ever before, and the more we write online, the worse writers we become. In the eras of parts of human interaction, especially the ism. Even if young people today read the Il- quills, pens or even manual typewriters it awkward subjects of rowing and separat- iad and Shakespeare only in snippets, if at was hard to write a lot, so people took time ing, can now be relegated to virtual, as op- all, says Manuel Castells at the University and care in clarifying their thoughts. Many posed to physical, interaction. A worrying of Southern California, they are also creat- nomads today are convinced that they trend in recent years has been adolescents’ ing an artistic culture more vibrant and don’t have the time to think and care, so practice of dumping their lovers by text imaginative than arguably any that has they concentrate on speed alone. message or, worse, by changing the status preceded it. The common name for this Because language is the primary vehi- of their Facebook pro le from in a rela- genre is mash-up culture , but that does cle for thought, this has consequences. Al- tionship to single . This is e cient and not do it justice. Today’s creative types do ready, Ms Baron detects a new and wide- instantaneous, but potentially traumatic. more than stitch together ( mash up ) spread intellectual torpor among her snippets. They forge new combinations al- students. Young Americans used to cut Oh evolve! most as neurons form synapses to create corners before an exam on Hamlet by Much of this pessimism is probably over- new thoughts. reading the Cli sNotes. Teachers hated blown. Homo sapiens has been creating As for the things that can come be- them, but they were pedagogic wonders technological curses throughout history, tween people, technology is certainly one compared with today’s method of Goog- and has so far managed to cope with every of them. So it has been since a spear ling the passage in question, then using the challenge thrown up. Only a few decades missed the mammoth and hit a tribesman. computer’s nd function to get to the ex- ago the prevailing worry was that televi- Every technology has created new excess act snippet. Ms Baron thinks that these sion, the reigning medium at the time, was and silliness. In time, each silliness has days her students even think in snippets, creating a generation of unimaginative produced its own backlash and subse- which is to say incoherently. And that is couch potatoes, if not intellectual vegeta- quent adjustment. At the simplest level, it how they write essays. Having internal- bles. That description is quite the opposite is reasonable to assume that Homo sapi- ised the new whateverism, they launch in of what youth culture has in fact become ens, having invented the on button, will and stumble through, with nary a thought in today’s era of the internet and nomad- discover the o button as well. 7 for what they actually want to say. This criticism dovetails strikingly with O er to readers Future special reports what other sociologists and psychologists Reprints of this special report are available at a Countries and regions are observing in the interpersonal behav- price of £3.50 plus postage and packing. Vietnam April 26th iour of some nomads. Older people use A minimum order of ve copies is required. EU enlargement May 31st their mobile phones to micro-co-ordi- Corporate o er nate with partners during the day in order Customisation options on corporate orders of 100 Business, nance, economics and ideas to run their errands more e ciently and or more are available. Please contact us to discuss International banking May 17th perhaps to spend more time together as a your requirements. The future of energy June 21st result. But many younger people, who Terrorism July 19th Send all orders to: have never known paper diaries or an un- The business of sport August 2nd connected world, micro-co-ordinate in or- The Rights and Syndication Department der to avoid committing themselves to any 26 Red Lion Square London WC1r 4HQ xed meeting time, location or person at Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8000 all. After all, a better opportunity might yet Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 present itself. e-mail: [email protected] The concern, therefore, is that young Previous special reports and a list of Please visit our website nomads not only write without thinking forthcoming ones can be found online www.economist.com/rights or leave home in the morning without for more information and to order special reports planning but also enter relationships and reprints online www.economist.com/specialreports without tying themselves down. Large