Time’s a funny little thing. When you’re rushing through school, you refuse to think about it.
With adolescence, you think you control it. Then, one morning after you hit 50, you wake
up and realise how wrong you’ve been all those years.
As for me, time is what a watch says it is: nothing more, nothing less. That’s what I
thought, rather, before I went online. The Internet is one of those places where you can go
in order to suddenly feel left out, when half the planet starts discussing things you consider
inconsequential: like the Backstreet Boys, for example. But, I digress.
The word on the cyberstreet, for now, is time. Internet time.
Reading about it all over the place prompted me to hit the books and get my basics right.
An authority could help, I thought, turning to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for support. It
said: ‘Time: a measured or measurable period, a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions.
Time is of philosophical interest and is also the subject of mathematical and scientific
investigation.’ I realised, then, that I knew less about time after reading the explanation,
than I did before.
Leaving my questions aside, the face of time is currently being altered even while I type
this, as virtual reality slowly takes bigger bites out of our collective consciousness. ‘Internet
time’ is fast becoming the only way of measuring time online. Geographical neutrality is in;
current world time zones, out.
The concept of Internet time arose to enable people perform the tasks they do online:
everything from synchronising chats to getting information about when a mail was sent, to
commercial conferencing, to scheduling events. Needless to say, the concept can help
tremendously, as far as global events are concerned.
Since the Internet itself is unaffected by geography, proponents of Internet time question
the use of time shown on it. The people at NewEarthTime (http://newearthtime.net/) are
among the pioneers of this concept. ‘Why do time zones exist?,’ they ask, before replying,
‘Because people in a community need a common time to harmonise their interaction.’ The
logical thing to do, therefore -- considering the Net is a place and one with its own
community -- was create a unique measure of time for the Net alone. Voila! New Earth
Time, the time zone for the Internet.
While our planet turns 360 degrees daily, New Earth Time is 360 degrees of time. Each Net
day begins at 0o longitude, each degree lasting four minutes, and with 15 degrees in every
hour. Confusing? I’ve only just begun.
There’s the Swatch (http://www.swatch.com/internettime/internettime.php3) company, as a
second example, that created its own time and called it the Swatch Beat. It meant no time
zones and no geographical borders.
This involves dividing a virtual and real day into 1000 beats, where each Swatch beat is the
equivalent of 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. So, 12 noon in our current time system becomes
@500 Swatch beats. That’s not all. The Swatch guys went to the extent of creating a whole
new meridian, in Biel, Switzerland, and called it Biel Mean Time (BMT) -- the universal
reference for Internet Time. Each day in Internet Time begins at midnight BMT (@000
Swatch Beats), and is the same all over the world, night or day.
Those who desperately want it on their PCs can download the Internet Time applet and
converter on to a desktop, homepage or even a PDA device. Between you and I, what this
also means is huge marketing mileage, but that’s not talked about in these ‘propah’ circles.
Confession time (pun unintended): I’m lost. While everyone raves about how Internet time
will end the separation that comes with our current time zones, there’s that little issue of
how these systems are anything but commercially neutral. Also, what am I supposed to do
if I can’t divide my time into less than 1 minute and 26.4 seconds? Add to that my
weakness with anything involving numbers over ten, and you’ve got trouble.
Plus points: It lets you chat online, play games, transfer money, and more, whenever
convenient for you in real time. Ecommerce will undoubtedly benefit, but how exactly is
difficult to quantify. Will it catch on in a country like India where the number of people online
is limited? With most people accustomed to time zones, will it really make a difference?
For those unaccustomed to the difference, does it really take a genius to figure it all out?
Honestly, is it really that difficult to remember that Indiana is five and a half hours behind
us?
For the moment, there are still takers, and a lot of them. Ericsson put Internet Time as a
feature on its T20 phone, CNN.com used it on its site, the Apple site offers a software
download, and Sega uses it to coordinate online games and chats. As for Swatch, at the
forefront of starting it all, the company has reportedly sold over a million watches with
Internet Time, while its converter between Internet and regular time has been downloaded
four million times from its site.
Marketing ploy? No kidding.
If all of this wasn’t enough, January 1, 2000 saw Tony Blair launching the Greenwich
Electronic Time (GeT), a collaboration between the UK government and e-retailing industry
group. Using a network of servers around the world, GeT is calibrated to nuclear clocks
based in London that constantly keep computers ticking together.
And there I was, naïve, thinking of time as an uncomplicated little entity.
Having run the gamut of reality and cyber-reality, physical and virtual, I have to agree with
St. Augustine who, in Book II of his ‘Confessions’ wrote: "What then, is time? If no one
asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not."
Ditto.
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