MT Community! TiME

HUR How Wie come Comment New Time iNTERNET TiME: The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Read more; Swatch.Com / sv-se / internet-time.html

SOURCE; listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9811a&L=archives&T=0&F=&S=&P=1800
ORiGiN; Times of London 28 October 1998

Time for the world to march to Swatch's Beat?
by Vicki Allan
is Biel Mean Time [BMT] - the new attempt to introduce a single time-zone for all iNTERNET users - destined for the same cultural dustbin as Esperanto?

BMT is the brainchild of Swiss watchmakers Swatch, and cyber-guru Nicolas Negroponte and it aims to save iNTERNET users from making complex calculations when arranging virtual meetings with their Web contacts in far-flung locations.

Key into the Net or wear a Swatch Beat watch, and you and your contacts will all be in the same virtual time-zone. Each day contains one thousand [1.000] beats, each lasting one 1min 26.4 secs. Noon in Biel Time is not only @ 500 in Switzerland, but @ 500 all over the world.

And if BMT does take off, it would represent a further step in getting the world to march to the same beat. Until the late 19th century, each town determined its own local time from solar readings. When the industrial revolution brought the railways, it seemed ridiculous to have to adjust your watch by five minutes each time you travelled between towns.

The Prime Meridian conference of 1884 should have put an end to all that, by establishing 24 time zones and Greenwich Mean Time, but as ever there was resistance. The French stuck doggedly to their own time until 1911.

The involvement of Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MiT media lab and author of Being Digital, adds weight to the Swatch BMT project.

"The Net has both asynchronous and synchronous uses," he says. 'At the Media Lab, we recently started a Junior Summit in which children from 10 to 15 years old were asked to participate in the design of the future.

'But the kids have had a problem. They didn't know how to make appointments. Someone would say, 'Let's chat at 10pm,' but that would be 10pm in France. What time is that in Saudi Arabia? BMT would solve that problem."

'The virtual world is absent of night and day," Negroponte argues. 'iNTERNET time is not driven by the Sun's position, it is driven by yours - your location in space and time."

But despite our continuing efforts, night and day and the whole of nature can't be discarded entirely, unless you choose to live in an artificial pod.

Swatch has already successfully negotiated for the Swatch Beat in coverage of the the 2000 Olympics, and, in the words of Nicholas Hayek Jr, the son of Swatch's director, 'The americans sell time, the italians have a good time and the Swiss make time." Maybe the Swiss will crack it: only time will tell.

Quotable Time Quote:
'How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe."
://Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive