Running Late

Posted by Mike Walsh

8/17/09 4:41 AM

describe the imageSometime ago, I lost my watch. I came home, and it simply wasn't on my wrist. Since then I learned one rather curious fact about time. Like switching off your mobile phone, not having a watch mainly causes inconvenience to other people. Time as it turns out, is not the domain of astrophysicists and Nobel laureates but rather a clunky construct of social co-ordination.

It's not hard to run late. Time is a more fluid concept that you might think. And I'm not talking about relativity. Before time became enslaved to an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world, it was tied to an official chronometer in Greenwich kept in synch to assist maritime navigation. This accounts for those references to GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time that turn up in those odd little meeting request messages dispatched by Outlook. Not that I paid much attention. Even when I owned a watch, I had little concept of a universal constant. Periodically when I turned up to get my hair cut, the clock in the salon was always five minutes fast. So naturally that meant I was always late and my hairdresser always yelled at me. I seriously considered synching my clocks to his one. His mean time was considerably meaner than that of Greenwich.

But my hairdresser had a point. Whatever the universal time might say, it is irrelevant unless the people meeting up have the same basis of measurement. Consider what happened during the French Revolution. On November 24, 1793, a decree of the Convention Nationale introduced a decimal division of time. After that point, if you were to ask a fellow revolutionary in Paris what the time was, they might have answered seventy five minutes past six. Naturally confusion abounded. Many watches created during that period had a double display of both classical and revolutionary time. Unfortunately like the Revolution itself, the temporal schizophrenia was also shortlived. After 18 months, clocks went back to normal. And the French found other things to be uniquely French about.

Francophiles were not the last to meddle with clockwork. Despite what you might think - the word Swatch was not originally intended as a contraction of Swiss (Made) Watch, but rather Second Watch - a fun, casual accessory to your main time keeping device. In the late nineties, right after the first Internet boom - the Swatch company decided to re-invigorate some of the spirit of the decimal revolution and introduce Swatch Internet Time or Beat Time. Beat Time divided the day into 1000 .beats with @000 being midnight and @500 being noon. Controversy abounded, not least because being very European about the whole thing - the Swiss chose Central European Time rather than Coordinated Universal Time as the basis of the system. But the bigger problem was, just like in the French Revolution, no one could be bothered to learn a new system just to hang out with each other more effectively.

In a way I wished they had. As someone who lives nomadically in the cracks between timezones - my calendars and conference calls are always in a state of constant confusion. It finally made me think - if time is the primary tool we rely on for organising our interactions with other members of society - how can we make clocks more social? Should a clock not be a social network, or a social network not be a clock? I pondered the thought as I watched the Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo's human clock and quirky calendar. With it's crazy Pachinko sound track, here was a clock that gave you a sense of the life behind the minutes and seconds that ruled us.

So what if your watch instead of just telling you it was 3pm, also informed you what your work colleagues had planned for the next few hours, or what your friends were planning on doing at 8pm when you all finished work. We all have a forward light cone of things that we might do. Sharing this information makes more sense from the perspective of social co-ordination, than simply adhering to a systema of standardised timekeeping. At the The Long Now Foundation, they are making plans to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. Like the monks in Neal Stephenson's Anathem - it is a clock designed to give us a deeper perspective of historical time extending far beyond our impressions of the immediate moment. I like the romance of the idea, but for me - a clock is only useful if it can give me a sense of possible futures not extended pasts.

Whoever said there was no time like the present was quite mistaken. There is no time in the present. Like a garden of forking paths, it would be nice to know what I could do with the next minute rather than simply be aware of it's passing. Rather than historical time, it would be social time. Time enough, you would hope, for me also to think about buying a new watch.


Topics: Philosophy

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