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.
Link: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950394
Click to buy from Amazon.com: “Digital Nomad”, by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners (Amazon.co.uk); “The Death of Distance”, by Frances Cairncross (Amazon.co.uk).
Frances Cairncross talks about “The Death of Distance”. Paul Saffo offers a taxonomy of mobile users. See also Manuel Castells, the Nomad Café and the International Telecommunication Union.
Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
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