The humble laptop: Heaven or Hell?

Being a Digital Nomad pretty much dictates your laptop as your most valuable possession. We have little time for software updates, bugs or (if you’re faint-hearted avert your eyes now), breakages. As for theft… don’t even make us contemplate that! …Except do, because if we don’t think about it most of the time then the chances are it’ll happen sooner or later.

If you’re travelling with a community, you can be fairly confident that if anything untoward happens someone will *probably* have a backup that you can borrow until you find the nearest Apple or HP dealer // dodgy fake Apple maintenance store // anyone who has any knowledge whatsoever of laptops // someone to mule you a new one from another country.

Joking aside, if you don’t have a working laptop (or someone to lend you one), not only can you not work, you can’t support your team // colleagues // clients, and ultimately you are not going to get paid, and that leads to all sorts of other ‘inconveniences’.

This is serious business.

But this ascension of the humble laptop in the eyes of the Digital Nomad has another, maybe less obvious impact on our lives, too. It’s a feeling that you and your laptop have melded; think 2-become-1, but a little less passionate lovers and a little more life revolves around a piece of hardware that will never need you the way that you need them.

This is not a good thing. It is not what we would call a healthy relationship.

What tends to happen after travelling and working remotely for a while is that it becomes genuinely difficult – if not almost impossible - to close the laptop, step away, and enjoy even just one day without work // admin // business development // 13” screen interactions.

I tried to explain this concept to my current co-workers (most of whom are office-based) and they found it a bizarre concept; ‘Why don’t you just have a holiday?’ or… ‘Just don’t take your laptop with you!’ These are both very logical points of view, but they don’t take into account three things about being a Digital Nomad:

1.     How attached you become to your laptop

2.     How you find yourself constantly defending your lifestyle to people who think that you’re on an extended holiday (and therefore feeling like you have to over-deliver on your work to prove you’re working)

3.     How the concept of not being ‘always’ on becomes foreign after a while because of client demands, different timezones or personal projects

In fact, the only way to really down tools is to go somewhere where you have no option but to leave the laptop behind. I recall a discussion that continued over a few weeks in the lead up to a group of nine of us trekking the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, where we were deciding whether or not to bring our laptops. The reality was that we weren’t going to use them, but being separated from them for a whole week caused unfathomable anxiety.

‘What happens if a client wants to get in touch with me?’

‘What if someone needs something from me?’

‘I might miss out on some work!’

‘I might miss out on…something!’

In the end we made a collective decision NOT to take our laptops 4000m up into the Andes (mainly through fear of not having anywhere secure to leave them), but it was a good decision and we didn’t regret it. It meant we were able to reset and recharge our own batteries, do a little internal software update and come back refreshed and ready.

Truly taking time away from work is healthy, and as the lines between our work and personal lives blur we need to get better at doing it. Being away from home used to mean being away from work, but now that the two are no longer mutually exclusive we need to redefine ‘time off’.

Who would have thought that the humble laptop would become such a force for freedom but also captivity in our lives?

The semiotics of Remote

Real world journalist Vs. desk-bound theorist

Remote. Remote. Remote. Remote. Remote.

Barely an hour goes by where I don’t hear this word being uttered, read it on a Slack post or see it somewhere in my immediate vicinity. I’m so used to hearing it that I almost don’t hear it anymore. Does that make sense?

Recently though, I’ve started hearing it again. And listening. I mean really listening. And what I’m hearing has started to clarify some things in my mind.

This past year I’ve heard many different people’s experiences of their remote working lives. It’s disappointing, but not altogether surprising that a significant proportion of employers have serious reservations about allowing their staff to work remotely. Some reject the idea outright and others find obstacles to place in the way.

I’ve tried to unpack this the best I can, with the help of the Remotes that I’m travelling with and others I’ve met along the way, and I hear the same concerns raised again and again:

As those who have followed my journey know, I’m currently 11 months into conducting a year-long ethnographical study into Digital Nomadism (working title: MyLifeAsADigitalNomad), and these are all themes that I’ll be reporting on in detail in 2018, so they are not going to be the focus of this piece, but what I do want to look at is what semiotic cues can be taken from the word Remote itself and how this can affect people’s perceptions and therefore their actions.

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First off, here’s a snippet from the Oxford English Dictionary definition of Remote: 

Adjective: (of a place) situated far from the main centres of population; distant - Having very little connection with or relationship to.

 …and some synonyms from a brief Google search just to hammer the point home:

 Irrelevant to, unrelated to, unconnected to, unconcerned with, not pertinent to, inapposite to, immaterial to, unassociated with, inappropriate to.

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I think it’s fair to say that our residual definition of (and associations with) Remote sit at the core of people’s apprehension, and while there is positive evidence to show that the word is being used increasingly in our everyday lives, I feel that this is an issue that needs to be tackled head-on and I for one am willing to take up this gauntlet and run with it.

Before starting to write this piece, I sought the opinions of an experienced Semiotician who is a former colleague and current friend, and whose mind I admire greatly. He suggested that I “consider what the positive signifiers are of remoteness in the context of work, but what the negative associations are in terms of our cultural understanding…”, but in truth I struggled to find any historical references to the former.

On the whole, his thoughts and mine were pretty well aligned; “…the myths about slobbing around in pyjamas, not engaging fully with work, productivity dropping, too many (homely) distractions etc, and how we might signify pro-activity to offset that assumption with activity signifiers…. greater use of email to declare work in progress and checking in for reviews etc. The stuff we habitually do to make sure nobody thinks we’re slacking off.”

Interestingly, his immediate associations are around working from home, whereas mine are generally intertwined with travel; clearly a product of him being a dedicated partner and father living outside of London, and me being a little more footloose and fancy-free (and currently in Colombia)!

The issue as I see it is that these negative perceptions are barriers to individuals and employers considering remote work as a positive step forward. Not only does this create resistance to a movement that is growing in popularity and momentum, but it also holds people back from exploring their full potential and becoming their best selves.

My experience of living as a Digital Nomad fully contradicts the dominant/residual semiotic cues of Remote. Of course, every individual is different, but on the whole I see only good things coming from those who are free to live a more integrated work and personal life. A life full of richness, cultural immersion, flexibility, opportunity, gratitude and positivity. The world and how we connect with it and each other is changing, and that to me is exciting.

When all is said and done my friend and I agreed that it feels like there is a battle of opposing perceptions… one dominant/residual that focuses in on the negatives, and the other emergent/dominant that tries to articulate the positives. The challenge is that the negative signifiers are well established and understood, whilst the newer, less formalised positive signifiers are still evolving and coalescing to create a new set of semiotic codes. And so we are left with a question in our heads and in our hearts:

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How do we neutralise the negative perceptions of ‘remoteness’ with powerful signifiers of ‘remote action’?

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With thanks to Tim Spencer, Semiotician extraordinaire.