Concerned that you - or indeed your company - are falling behind in the race to be noticed in the digital age? It may be because you are operating according to an industrial concept of time.
In the railway age - an age when trains apaprently did run on schedule - timings were far more rigid, and the importance of abiding by them was paramount. Now our sense of time is more 'fluid', meaning we feel less willing to making temporal commitments because of the ease of breaking them - by making a call on the mobile or sending a text.
So, anyway, says FutureRealWorld - a research company which tracks consumer behaviour and trends. "The most obvious expression of this is in media consumption, where we've witnessed the end of prime time because of the advent of PVRs [personal video recorders]," said Tamar Kasriel, FutureReal's director, warming to her 'time' theme in a speech at Internet World in London. "But it's influencing social patterns too. Rather than arranging a meeting now, people schedule a 'proxy-meeting'. You'll say Friday. Then in the middle of the week - you might specify Friday afternoon, and then as time gets closer, you gradually nail down when and where you'll meet. There's a sense that you can bend time, and for some people that provides a great sense of empowerment."
Those starved of the vocabulary of digital marketing and consumer trends were also feeling empowered after Ms Kasriel's speech. Featured in her 30-minute talk were a raft of creative - and sometimes slightly bamboozling - phrases which sounded nothing if not very 2.0. Among them: "the half-life of data is much shorter than it used to be", the "world wild web" - a reference to the perceived unlawfulness of many activities on the internet, and "the tyranny of immediacy", which has something to do with the fact that we and many of the services we use are "always on". Still with us?