Nomadic Devices are for nomads

In Jacques Attali's Millennium, people are freed from the wires that bound them to industrial society, tied to a desk by telephone wires, electrical cords, fax lines, modems, cable and DSL. In this millennium, among the advanced developed information societies at least, people will become nomads again, grazing on the free flow of information, following the pasture of richest sources of information like the shepherds of old.

The hottest selling items on the market are not the kings of twentieth-century, like cars, or television, or even the recent (1982) Times Machine of the Year, the personal computer. Today, the items that everyone want are the nomadic devices like Apple's iPod and Sony's PSP. These devices focus the mind away from its surrounding environment, away from the other people in society, and isolate the nomad in a cocoon of familiarity, of songs, of games, of childhood dreams. Instead of playing with neighbourhood children, today's nomadic children play in multi-player online environments. Instead of playing hockey or soccer or football in a friendly spirit of skillful competition, today's nomadic children play in darkened mazes of alien environments shooting up enemies and steeling each other's assets. Is it any wonder that the new crimes of the millennium were unheard of a decade ago? A man was shot in a cybercafe because he stole someone's online game asset, and the victim was angry enough, and smart enough, to track down this man, to shoot him dead. Instead of playground scruffles, it was criminal.

Instead of forming treasured childhood memories, our nomadic children are not freed by nomadic devices in their developmental years, like adults are freed by their PDAs (even that freedom comes at a price, but that's another story...mmm blog). Too much of a good thing is not always better. Children, and metaphorical children of nomadic devices in the new Millennium, need to return to nature, both literally and metaphorically to find their roots and to bond with the rest of humanity. Adults and children alike, need to learn that freedom without boundaries, is just another form of slavery. Instead of being bound with wires, too much dependence on nomadic devices would enslave our minds instead of our bodies.