mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m-trends.org

The term has been coined by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, himself a “kinetic elite”, to describe a certain kind of population on the move, the new aristocrats of the mobile world, these who earn bonus points and airport privileges (like going faster through the customs) because also they travel extensively…

I have my students read excerpts of Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintered Urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), a book which examines the territorial divides engendered by technological mobilities.

I wrote many times that examples like the $100 laptop express a consistent belief in technology and its inexorable spread. Surely, the chairman’s brother is the director of National Intelligence of the GWB administration (fact that prompts to question the underlying objectives of these green objects, hence the territoriality at play).

I also read in Courrier International that in Osaka, the homeless wanted to provide cellphone carriers with an address which was that of the park they slept in… because having a cellphone is essential to get a job. Taxi drivers commuting between Abu Dhabi to Dubai rely heavily on their cellphones. These people are not “kinetic elites”. But again we are talking about places where the infrastructure for roaming exists.

With non-profit organizations like NYCwireless which “advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless Internet access in New York City and surrounding areas”, we may then hope a decline of territorial divides defined according to whom has access, better access or no access to the technologies of information and communication.