What’s a mobile?

Ask any young person why their phone is referred to as a mobile phone and they will likely go into mental hibernation as they rack their brains. The reality is that to appreciate the term mobile you would have to have existed at a time when phones were tethered devices and mobility was limited to the extent you could extend the tightly coiled plastic cabling that connected the handset to the cradle base.

As Gartner pointed out there are the digital natives (who only know of a digital world) and digital immigrants (who were exposed to a pre-digital world). Whether we like it or not those of us who are immigrants need to integrate as best we can into the digital world and develop our ability to empathise with the natives.

And those of us who are natives need to give the immigrants some latitude when their conversation gets a little ‘industrial era’. It’s not their fault they can’t attend team meetings whilst listening to music, polling their WhatsApp feed and monitoring their financial investments and vital signals via their Google glasses.