Retorts

Why Switch for Swatch?

Swiss watch-maker Swatch recently announced its proposal for a new Internet Time. It boasts "No Time Zones" and "No Geographical Borders". CNN was quick to add Internet Time to its Web page, alongside Eastern and Greenwich times. Their reporter, Rick Lockridge, was shown asking people if they could tell him the Greenwich Mean Time, the current global standard. Most couldn't. Apparently that should be proof of simplicity for the three-digit Internet Time and its use of the Web-trendy "@" symbol e.g. @666.

Believe me, if you can't figure out GMT, in your head, you'll run screaming from the calculations needed for Internet Time!

First, you can't convert your local time to Internet Time without using the GMT system. Internet Time is based on Central European Wintertime, as used in Biel, Switzerland (home of Swatch) -- which is one time-zone east of Greenwich, England -- so where do the "No Time Zones" and "No Geographical Borders" jingles come from?

Second, Internet Time is based on 1000 "beats" per day, 000 to 999; each beat is 86.4 seconds. Internet Time aligns exactly with regular time only once in every 7 minutes and 12 seconds, and can differ by almost one-and-a-half minutes; e.g. 11:59:59 PM converts to @999, yet @999 converts back to 11:58:33 PM creating an 87-second void for the Twilight Zone!

Third, claiming that Internet Time is "the same all over the world" is misleading. It implies that GMT isn't constant, worldwide. In fact, GMT is equally independent of where you're standing. Internet Time just moves the reference meridian from Greenwich to Biel.

Internet Time stands on the shoulders of GMT, and thus inherits all of the nags of that system -- time zones, geographical borders, daylight savings time, etc. -- plus its own quirks.

Does this describe a "completely new global concept of time," or a "revolutionary new unit of time," as quoted by Swatch? Newsweek (11/01/99) online said this...

Swatch entered the digital age last week with a line of watches that keep Swatch Internet Time. They can't access the Net, but models like the Webmaster, Download and Net-time will divide the day into 1,000 time-zone-free Swatch Beats, purportedly to help coordinate international chat sessions. "Cyberspace has no seasons," MIT Media Lab founder and Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte opined at the Internet Time launch last year. Neither, it seems, do marketing schemes.

My conclusion: Walking to the "beat" of a different drummer doesn't always mean that you're keeping in step with the times.

Gregory S. Vigneault, Canada