Dancing to the rhythm of a new .beat?
I think I’m probably behind the times on this one (just a tad, considering it was invented in 1998!). One of the small bits of slightly useless trivia I’ve learned on one of the current Open University courses I’m doing (T175) is that in 1998, the Swiss watch makers, Swatch, re-invented time, in the form of “internet time”.
On Swatch’sofficial website, right up at the top, next to the breadcrumb navigation, is a little line that reads “@[insert relevant number here] .beats” WTF?! you’re probably thinking. What’s a .beat? Well…
Swatch has reinvented time with INTERNET TIME. Today’s lifestyle which demands simultaneous communication with different parts of the world via phones, Internet, e-mail, video-conferencing, and a host of other tools requires a truly revolutionary way of looking at and managing time. Hence, a completely new global concept of time that eliminates time zones and geographical differences was created.
That’s so true. A while back the inhabitants of one of my forums decided to try and break the record for the number of forum members simultaneously online, and so an arrangement was made that at 9pm on Friday everyone would make sure they were online. Naturally this was met with a chorus of “Hold on…”s from the US contingent, and “Uh?” from the Australian brigade, followed by much scurrying about to try and work out what time that was in their local time. Here’s something that sounds like it could do with being arranged in “internet time”, but what is “internet time”?
INTERNET TIME, an innovative, new unit of time, measured in units called “.beats” was founded on the 23rd of October 1998. On that day, Biel Mean Time (BMT) was inaugurated in a ceremony marked by the presence of N.G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd. and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Lab at M.I.T.
Hmmmm….still a bit light on details isn’t it? Apart from Biel now appears to be the centre of the universe. So off to Wikipedia we go in search of further information on this strange new thing (except that it’s not that new) called “internet time”. Wikipedia is a little more
forthcoming on the details of what this “internet time” malarkey is all about. Apparently,
- instead of hours and minutes, the day is divided up into 1000 parts called “beats”
- each beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds
- there are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company’s headquarters in Biel, Switzerland (equivalent to Central European Time)
- in it’s notation; for example, “@248″ indicates a time 248 beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 4:57:07.2 UTC
- Swatch doesn’t specify units smaller than one beat, but others have extended the standard by adding “centibeats” or “sub-beats” as a decimal fraction, for extended precision: @248.00
- like UTC, Internet time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo
I have to admit that I like the idea of .beats. There’s something somehow kind of appealing about the idea of using something “underground” that the world outside the geeky confines of the internet doesn’t understand – hell, .beats even sounds kinda cool and geeky, and having one universal time rather than saying, “Well we’ll meet at 6pm…that’s 4pm in your time, and 2am in your time over there…” sound much better. “Meetcha @650 .beats” sounds infinitely more geeky and cool in comparison.
Now a debate on the T175 course forum a while back was on what was the most important ICT invention – ever? My contribution to the discussion? Well I was torn between the humble microchip and the internet. Now of course the basis of the internet and the HTTP protocol was already in place when the web went and got itself invented – wouldn’t have really worked without it, and fabulous though the HTTP protocol is, if you’re of a geeky bent, without the invention of the web to sit on top of it, and the hyperlink and other hypermedia, it would all be a bit dull. I’m guessing that when people said the greatest ICT invention was the internet, they probably meant the web, and of course in everyday usage the two terms tend to be used interchangeably.
The web has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate, turning the world into a global village, and changed how we interact with so many things from banking and shopping online, to finding information, finding friends, and of course boring the whole world to death with our mundane ramblings on many millions of blogs 
Of course with good, always comes evil, and into that category falls MySpace, link farms, and Bebo (just three random picks from my list of web annoyances). Of course I was arguing the case for the humble microchip on the grounds that without the microchip and reasonably priced and sized computing power, computers would still be the size of small houses and the play things of scientists and academics.
Now apart from MySpace, there are obviously other disadvantages, or things that aren’t so good about the web. There’s online fraud for a start (I too have started getting inundated with emails from banks I don’t even have accounts with warning me my account’s been locked until I click on this special link and hand over all my personal details and passwords to some Lithuanian con artist). Communicating with anyone, anywhere in the world is probably one of the greatest parts of the web, though putting yourself in ‘Skype Me’ mode is just asking for trouble, and you might as well change all your online avatars to a sign reading “Skype Me – I like talking to perverts from Brazil” or some such like!
Now this is just a wild shot in he dark here, but I guessing that with the invention of “internet time”, Swatch’s marketing people imagined all of those people making arrangements to chat with their new Brazilian friend who’s just taken up their invitation to “Skype them” would be falling over themselves to adopt this new “internet time”, and would of course need a watch capable of displaying said “internet time”, rush out and buy this terrific new invention, and in the process make another few squillion francs for those clever little Swiss. The fact is though that “internet time” never really took off in a big way, and have never really been adopted by geeks en masse.
Why? The answer though I suspect is far simpler than no-one being interested in an “internet time”, but as we discovered from the chorus of “Hold on…”s and “Uh?”s when a few of us tried to arrange a global meeting. The fact is that simply whether you call them .beats, .dots, .nets, or anything else with a ‘.’ in front of it, though you can arrange a meet-up with your new Brazilian friend @640 .beat, though it may be @640 .beat for everyone with a clever little Swiss watch, somewhere in the world @640 .beat is still going to be stupid o’clock. That’s the fundamental flaw of web communication.
Now if those clever little Swiss marketeers could come up with a time machine, then I suspect they’d be really onto something.
