Starting a job can mean travelling to a new workplace. A teacher who changes school may move to an entirely different part of the country. People sometimes migrate internationally, for example a professor, a doctor or a lawyer who has been recruited by an overseas institution. Prior to digital technology, movements such as these were unavoidable for ambitious professionals seeking career advancement. A demand for labour with specific skills could only be met by flows of people moving from one place to another. Economic markets at local, national and international scales have traditionally fostered a movement of people from peripheral regions (where there is less demand for skills and labour) to core regions(where demand is greatest).
Digital infrastructure, devices and apps have developed rapidly in ways that now undermine the assumption that a particular person needs to be in a particular place to do a particular job. ICT (information and communications technology) has instead allowed for people to become remote workers or hybrid workers. ‘Teleworking’ (as it was originally called) began in the 1990s. The first generation of remote workers typically consisted of small numbers of counter-urban migrants – people who had chosen to leave city life behind and move to a rural area.
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