The dawn of clockwatcher

Part resting place, part sounding board, clockwatcher is my online repository for thoughts on time -- mine and others'.

My interest in time encompasses topics such as marine chronometers, monasteries, railroads, newspapers, vaudeville, still photography, the Futurists, splitting the atom, stopwatches, the labor movement, the Industrial Revolution, the microwave oven, TiVo, cell phones, alarm clocks, efficiency experts and the Slow Food/Slow Cities movement.

Through this blog, I hope to explore these ideas and more, and get your input along the way.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

-- Carl Sandburg

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Read all about it

"An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity." -- Benedict Anderson, " Imagined Communities ," 1983 When Anderson wrote about the origins of modern nationalism, he selected the newspaper and the novel as cultural touchstones that exemplified man's ability to visualize himself as part of a unified mass of people who share a common understanding and experience of the world they inhabit. This "imagined linkage" of "print-capitalism ... made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and relate themselves to others, in profoundly news ways." Today, of course, we need no literary devices to lend the impression of simultaneous experience; thanks to the Internet, we are instead having simultaneous experiences all ov

Dipping into the stream of media

From The Daily Star : After writing last week about my secret longing to stumble upon the occasional Christmas program, I started thinking about intentional versus unintentional consumption. I don't mean "unintentional consumption" like realizing you've eaten an entire box of Girl Scout cookies in one sitting. I mean leaving the TV on after your favorite program is over and watching whatever comes next, or putting the radio on just to have a little background noise. This is the cultural experience I still associate with TV and radio: an ongoing stream of content I can dip into at will. My current experiment with on-demand viewing has made me realize, however, that this is an increasingly archaic idea. Thanks to the Internet and devices such as digital video recorders, fewer people are dipping into this ongoing stream of content. Instead, like myself, they are siphoning off their own selective streams that contain only the content that interests them. I can't deny

When a clock falls silent

With the shuttering of Big Ben for the next few years, commentators have tied the distress over the great clock's silence to the fact that it is coinciding with Brexit . But is it more than that? What does this historic clock that is so vividly seen and heard really mean to Londoners and the tourists who flock to it? The silencing of Big Ben — and the attendant hand-wringing over it — is an object lesson in the extent to which the visual and auditory symbols of timekeeping insinuate themselves into our lives. (Leaving aside for the moment that Big Ben is the bell, not the clock.) "No one needs Big Ben to tell the time," wrote Anne Perkins in The Guardian . "It depends what you value."

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