The Economist has a fabulous “Special Report” on mobile telecoms in the April 12, 2008 issue, “Nomads at Last.”  It’s about the rise of connectivity as virtually every form of IT and communication goes mobile:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel…. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. 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.

The link above brings you to the first of seven articles in the report; you have to go through them one by one to read the entire report (note the The Economist: Web 2.o=free content).  The whole thing sounds a lot like the visions of Vernor Vinge, especially in “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” reviewed here on Ray Kurzweil’s website.  But it divides the analysis well; pay particular attention to the sixth story in, “A World of Witnesses,” on the democratic pressures that ubiquitous cameras and other digital artifacts will bring.  Great stuff.