OK, I’m hooked.
Yes, to this blog community. But that’s not what I mean. I’m addicted to the digital mesh. The growing ubiquity of free Internet access. The “cloud.” It occurred to me that I used to love my hardware and tolerate the Internet access (slow and spotty if even available). The mobile Web was a plus – and a promise – that I was perfectly happy without.
No more. In a recent search to evolve from a GPS mobile (voice) and an old PDA (contacts / calendar) and a laptop (e-mail & Google) I have found a Smartphone that I truly love. But, while I was extolling its virtues to my patient wife, it occurred to me: it’s not the phone itself that I love, it’s the availability of services that makes the phone, that makes the experience. It is that experience that I have fallen for, to which I have become addicted, so to speak.
While many of us have been schlepping laptops around for almost 20 years and can recall the joys of using dial-up modems in hotels, today’s wireless digital mesh really enables practically everyone to become a Digital Nomad. While the hardware has certainly evolved in such a way to facilitate this, it’s the availability of services that really counts.
Parents who text with their teens to confirm whereabouts are Digital Nomads. Farmers who use GPS to know where they are in a 2,000-square-acre field, and have that information fed to a laptop for terrain analysis, are Digital Nomads. Even if you have made a conscious choice to sit in a cubicle, you might still be one if you take a cameraphone photo and “text it” to a friend. This is because Digital Nomads, by definition, use available services. As these services become more and more available, we hard-core nomads rejoice, less tech-infused people participate, the portfolio of available services grows to meet demand and we all win.
Even better, our respective operating systems now no longer represent silos, where information and applications can “only work” on certain systems. Certainly there are Windows and Apple applications and ne’er the twain shall meet. But these musings are written using one word processing application, and sent to someone who opens it using an entirely different OS and application. No problem. And Google knows no limitations. Neither does Facebook, MySpace, Salesforce, etc., etc. If a cubicle was the interpersonal silo that helped create us Digital Nomads, the wide availability of the cloud has helped dismantle the silos that restricted us on a machine-by-machine basis.
So, love your smartphone. Be an acolyte of your preferred system. And rejoice that the “cloud” keeps making it all better.
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