When a thing is current…

The New Scientist recently released word that 2008 would be extended by one second to adjust for a small slow down in the earth’s rotation.

UTC time is counted by atomic clocks, but it is adjusted occasionally to accommodate changes in the length of the Earth’s day. Tugs from the Sun and Moon are gradually slowing the Earth’s spin and causing its days to get longer. But this deceleration occurs unevenly.

The speed of the Earth’s rotation sometimes gets a subtle boost due to a complex coupling between the Earth’s mantle and core, which are thought to spin at somewhat different rates. To accommodate the unevenness of this slow-down, leap seconds can be added twice a year - at the end of June and at the end of the December.

This recent bit of news re-piqued my longstanding interest in time as a measurement. In this case, it reawakened my fascination with how fixated we are on regimented time, time as a distance, and time as a container we can “fill” with appointments and to-dos. It seems that the need to “tinker,” if you will, with our precise system is proff in itself that the rest of the universe has no regard for our coordinated universal time system. (It is, after all, odd enough that time does not resolve to our beloved metric system.)

Back in college, I attempted to bring light to this awkward system by creating an audio “clock” of sorts. In a 60 minute audio file, simple beats were synced with key demarcations of time. Thus, a tom drum would sound every second, a snare every 10, a chime every minute, gong every hour, and so forth. The idea was to (1) demonstrate how awkward and unnatural the rhythm of time was and (2) to attempt to subconsciously align our natural rhythm with the mechanical rhythm of time. The result was awkward, slightly alarming, and even drew parallels to shamanic drumming and other induced trance-like states, although this experiment was driving towards more of a military march than a higher consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan goes into depth on the top in his excellent essay from Understanding Media (MIT Press, 1964) where he writes:

As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe… Time measured not by uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense of life, much as does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs. As the pattern of arbitrary and uniform measurement of time extended itself across society, even clothing began to undergo annual alteration in a way convenient for industry. At that point, of course, mechanical measurement of time as a principle of applied knowledge joined forces with printing and assembly line as means of uniform fragmentation of processes.

Here, again, we are touching upon the awkward “fragmentation” of the organic human experience in exchange for efficiency and organization. Or, as McLuhan puts it “When a thing is current, it creates currency.”

Triple Nine Clock, pictured above, available here.