Crowdsourcing of Time

There are some things we consider constants: destruction, renewal, change, teenaged angst, political corruption, ignorant contentment, parental denial, fearful xenophobes, boring relatives.

No matter by what angle, or epoch they are viewed from, these constants have been recorded from the time we humans invented recording things. The biggest constant of all is time, right? Its mere passage is proof of existence. I have time to think, therefore I am. Time seems like such a constant that we view it as universally objective. My nine-minute snooze on my iPhone alarm is the same as everyone else's right? Maybe not. In mathematical terms, Einstein proved that time must be a variable with his famous equation that is often spouted and rarely understood. “Zi true constant is the speed of light, damn it!” I am paraphrasing, but that was the crux of his groundbreaking theory of relativity. Time changes depending on speed of the observer. An astronaut traveling at light speed will be able to binge watch far fewer House of Cards episodes than his terrestrial counterpart in the same amount of relative time. Even so, both astronauts are probably less tired at the end of their nine-minute iPhone snoozes than I always seem to be.

Even if it took a barberless genius to understand the mathematics, we all already knew that time is not always consistent. Time flies when I am too excited to notice it passing. Any hourly worker understands best the positive correlation between the crappiness of the job and the number of disappointing clock checks. Is time actually slowing down around us, or are our brains just distorting our perception?

David Eagleman, a neuroscience researcher, wanted to shed light on the curious phenomenon of how time slows, or seemingly slows, during life threatening events. We all have a story about a scary incident where time stood still. Most people I asked about this were able to tell me about the episode in rehearsed detail that only comes from telling a story over and over. To examine what exactly happens at that moment of the time freeze Dr Eagleman’s subjects were given a small screen that flashed numbers too fast to visualize.

Subjects were then strapped to a rollercoaster that would unexpectedly drop the rider backwards into a net. The result was that the riders would consistently over-estimate time in free fall by 36%, but would never be able to see the numbers. Proof that our perception of time changes during free-fall, but not our brains ability. So much for learning Russian during my next skydive.

Our individual perception of time not only changes depending on our immediate physical surroundings, but from our past as well. Culture plays a big part.

America is future oriented. We demand a face pace and place little significance on historical norms. I can hardly go to the bathroom without checking Twitter while streaming a podcast and sending a text. India and China are seen as past oriented. Trains can be late hours, or even days without creating undue stress to the squatting masses.

The Hopi tribe of Arizona communicated in a language with no tense. The only words they had to convey time were “sooner” and “later”. Time was relative to the Hopi due to their spiritual worldview that all life is cyclical. Speculation can be made about how hard it must have been for the Hopi to adjust to the western notion of sequential time, but the proof lies in the fact that there are no Hopi around to corroborate this hypothesis.

Technology also plays a part. Perception of the sun’s path through the sky was made a little more precise with the invention of the sundial; an ingenious way for our ancestors to know how much time they had until lunch.

Then came the clock. Perfectly round, and organized to split the day in half, presumably, before and after lunch. Then, another, not as famous Austrian named Josef Pallweber invented a clock that would change numbers every hour.

He called it the “jump hour clock”. I am sure it sounds much catchier in High German. From that point on the digital clock was born, and humans, on a mass scale, starting seeing time as a set of four numbers, read from left to right, not as a position on a circle.

Our relationship with the progression of time, on a macro-scale, has also been affected by technological and cultural forces. Round calendars were quite popular in the early stages of civilization. Tied with movements of the stars or moon, these timepieces were usually demarcated with astrological figures.

The ancient Olmec had their Meso-American version complete with a hot equatorial sun and growling jaguar. The ancient Chinese as well had their calendar divided by their important cultural objects, which mostly consist of animals that can be made into food. Then, Julius Caesar, in true megalomaniac fashion, decided to shape time into something more controllable. He implemented the Julian calendar that we use today, and of course named one of the best months after himself. He also gave up on following the moon’s cycle and started following the sun’s movement in the sky.

The languages we think in are the foundation for our thoughts. One look at the most used nouns in English is a telling example of what is important to us. Time is the number one most used noun, year is the second and day is the fifth.

The direction of our written word must have an impact on our construct of the future as well. Western languages tell a story from left to right, where-as middle eastern languages go from right to left. So does western style music annotation. Certain Asian writings are written from top to bottom, Middle Eastern ones like Arabic and Hebrew right to left. Human perception of the direction of time is divided into three camps. What direction do you think in? Personally I am a left to right guy.

Now, the camps are shifting and it has everything to do with technology.

Apple presents you your newest text on the bottom to the top. Facebook “feeds” you your friends’ corny engagement photos from the top to the bottom. The next generations will have whole new constructs of time. But the importance of chronology in the tech world, and thus the world at large, is waning. Innovative companies, in their desire to give us everything we want, now, have reexamined the value of when.

In order to arrange news feeds to weight “likeability” over order of appearance Facebook introduced the like button in 2006. Quickly, engineers noticed and users complained about the proliferation of like bait articles. Post and articles with provocative or even misleading titles were getting priority over post that were seen as valuable to the social media masses. A distant aunt’s Farmland score was outranking more important news about kittens sneezing. Something had to be done.

So, in the last few years Facebook and it’s competitors/subsidiaries have been using more sophisticated metrics. They started building a top secret algorithm that would track things like time away from the site after clicking an article (the thought being the longer, the more likely that post was enjoyed). The number of users allowed Facebook to track changes to the algorithm in different subsets of its user base. At any given time there are thousands of versions of Facebook competing for the best user interaction rate.

The modern technological world, for better or worse, has allowed us to jettison certain detail once viewed as necessary. Phone numbers, addresses, directions, spelling, schedules; all outsourced to our code based companions. I smile when the receptionist at my dentist office tries to write me a reminder card. “No need”, I say. I have already put the appointment in my calendar and promptly forgot about it.

With so much importance placed on our electronic devices ability to tell us where to be, there must be tons of innovation into our calendar technology. Wrong. “Nobody loves their calendar. Nobody would stick up for it” says Dante Orpila, co-founder of Dials App. He and his team have decided to take a fresh look at the way we organize our future.

Dials App boasts a circular dial that has color-coded appointments. It imports photos for contacts and map views for locations. “There is a productivity hack that we leaned towards [when building dials], basically you take your activities throughout the day and categorize them into three things: meeting (places you have to be physically), your calls or communications and your tasks.”

They have decided to go back to the ancient, circular view of the day that gives the user the ability to see the day in a glance. Even the most sophisticated airplanes use dials instead of numbers for this very reason. The simplicity of the dial quickens the speed in which a pilot is able to ingest the information.

Dante admits that he has always had a unique view of time. “We are the type of people that need to get slapped in our faces with our schedule…almost hourly. I get distracted by butterflies,” he told me in an interview recently. His unique view of time no doubt stems from his unique story. Dante started his entrepreneurial career in prison, a place where time is abundant, but can also be one’s greatest obstacle.

While incarcerated Dante would take request for his artwork through a liaison and post them on a budding digital community called Reddit. He created a group of prison artists and fans that would continue connecting long after his prison stint was served. Now he has found new purpose: changing the way we use the calendar.

Dante and his team at Dials are predicting a further shakeup to our time paradigm. This change will be driven by the expanding functionality of an old timekeeping friend.

Watches used to be the height of technology, now they are a fashion accessory that has little more utility than saving us a few seconds by not having to get our phones from our pockets. But this is changing. Wearables are the new handhelds, or so the electronic companies are telling us, and if this comes to pass, everything that we know about computing will have to happen on a smaller screen. Suddenly, our calendar doesn’t fit our necessity because the two-inch screen on our wrists can’t be cut up into 31 days. If Dials App is our timekeeping future, then technology is bringing us closer to the sundial, not farther away from it.