Are you a nomad or a settler? This is the question posed by the authors of Digital Nomad, whose thesis is that the emergence of cheaper and more portable communications tools, combined with the widespread development of cheap, high-capacity digital networks, will lead to a more mobile lifestyle for business people. While this may or may not be big news to some, it is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone who would pick up a book on mobile computing in the first place. The book is already out of date. Many of the surveys used by the authors give projected figures for 1996, for example. The internet is described as awkward to access, difficult to find your way around and expensive to use. The book’s discussion of encryption techniques refer to collaborative efforts between IT companies and financial services organizations which have long since been abandoned or restructured. Worse still, Digital Nomad serves as a rather mediocre vehicle for the authors’ peculiar – and deeply flawed – brand of philosophical inquiry. This irritating posturing, characterized chiefly by extensive use of psycho babble and faulty socio- economic theorizing, accounts for the entire first chapter of the book, and reappears with tedious regularity in every following chapter. The authors ponder, if they were given a chance to establish nomadism as a mainstream human lifestyle for the first time for 10,000 years, what would people do with it? Could it, for instance, exaggerate differences between the sexes? Women have always been seen as more inclined to settle down than men – would cheap, available nomadism lead to even more disintegration of family life in the West than we are already experiencing? Neither is such contemplation confined to the issue at hand. The author’s hilarious suggestion to solving the problem of 19 million unemployed Western Europeans is to send them on holiday: We have not yet got to the point where the average Western welfare check will subsidize a life of travel, but maybe it is not over-fanciful to see it becoming possible in the next century. Readers are left wondering what the incentive of sticking to the nine-to-five grind will be in this brave new world, given the more alluring option of seeing the world at the taxpayers’ expense. It is a great shame that Makimoto and Manners do not restrict themselves to discussing the fundamental issues involved in remote access computing, such as bandwidth, microprocessing power, and the deregulation of the telecoms industry. When they do so, their explanations and examples are commendably lucid. However, their clumsy attempts at a ‘chatty’ writing style frequently comes across as rather patronizing: Mobile videoconferencing is, many think, a ‘killer app’ in the argot of the high-tech industry, meaning an application people will go crazy to buy. But just because something is demonstrated at a technology show does not mean it is about to appear in the shops. A sensible and well-written guide to the emerging world of remote computing would be most welcome. Digital Nomad is neither.
Digital Nomad, by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manner, publisher John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-97499-4.
Computer Business Review
