The decline of the public clock

Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory"

This might surprise people (though it shouldn’t) but I take every opportunity I can to not use my phone if I don’t need to.

Whenever I go out, I try to leave my phone at home. Unless my kids are at school, I usually leave my phone at home. My phone after a day in a park has a parade of messages from friends asking me where I am in the park, whether or not I’m still in the park, and so on.

While I have a very good sense of time (I can tell you when we’ve been sitting in a park for 40 minutes, an hour or two hours), I don’t wear a watch and so I’m never really sure what time it is. Because of this, I rely on public time pieces: digital clocks on parking metres (always right), clocks on store fronts (always wrong), church bells (at 16h and 18h) and spotting time from someone’s wrist as it flashes by me.

Hmm writing this out, it sounds a but nuts.

But this is what I do. If I’m on the road, I’m always on the hunt for the time. If I’m at home, I know which clocks work and which do not. Kind of like I know where to go to the bathroom if the moment strikes.

Regardless of if I’m away or at home, there’s no question — public clocks are vanishing. Rather than telling all people the time, we are expected to have the time on us. Time is not a public piece of informationm anymore — it’s beamed to us from a satellite owned by our cellphone company and is now the personal domain of our pockets. That time is mine.

This, of course, sucks for many reasons. If I’m biking, I have to pull over, open my backpack and pull out my phone to see what time it might be. If I’m walking, my head is sometimes cocked to get a good look at the guy’s phone in front of me. I can’t just see the time; I have to look for it.

I could buy a watch. I could have something on my wrist that’s analogue. I could have something on my wrist that records my respiratory frequency and my heart rate and whether or not I get anxiety at 9:23 PM or if I’m in REM sleep at 4:45 AM. I could send all this data to Google and not think about it but still be mad that Google is blocking Canadian news sites — as if their ownership of my biometric information is not a far bigger problem. I could get a watch that has email, that counts how many times my legs went forward and backwards today or that reminds me to take Omega 3. I could do these things.

But I refuse to be forced even deeper into my phone. I don’t want to bury my face into a screen to see what time it is when I can look up to a marquee or out across a downtown street. When I check the time, I don’t want to also have to check my messages, check Twitter and my email. I want it to be the same time that everyone else sees. I want the clock that used to hang on the classroon wall.

Pulling ourselves out of the online world is a matter of our collective survival. We need real-life touchstones to keep us … sane. There’s a reason for why “go touch grass” has emerged as the most common way to tell someone that they’re being too online. Getting outside, going into public, doing something analogue — these are all critical to our health and wellbeing. And I think that a society is better if it tells people the time rather than assuming they’ll pull out their phone to check while driving a bike.

But of course, here’s the inherant assumption — time only matters if you matter. And one of the ways to determine who matters is if they have the money to have that phone in their pocket all the time. We’ve privatized so much of public life that the people who have nothing have even less than ever before. Because whether it’s to tell time (or make a phone call or read the news or take a break or go to the bathroom), we’re more on our own than ever before in the history of human life.