Mobile working is a myth

The Economist's latest tech quarterly makes for some interesting reading – especially a myth-busting piece about how we actually interact with communications technology. Although technology means that we have the infrastructure to work anywhere, anytime – it doesn't actually follow that people will actually do it. The technology for video-calls exists but so far it's had little to no uptake at all. And the same goes for the "hyper mobility myth" according to Stefana Broadbent, the academic cited in the Economist piece:

"…Ms Broadbent found that there is not, in fact, much appetite for working while on the move. Indeed, she calls this “the hypermobility myth”. After studying workers who spend more than half their time out of the office—salesmen, consultants, pilots, journalists and photographers—she found that they generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks. Hotel rooms and airports are, she says, “not seen as an appropriate environment for substantive work” and are mainly used for e-mail."