Jotting Number 85, by Joe Podolsky:
From: joe_podolsky@hp.com
Date: September 9, 1999
Some analogies are useful for conveying at least some information about new things. After all, one way of learning is to relate new things to things we know about. But, as we all know, analogies can lead us astray. For example, "Airplanes are just like trains except they fly." The picture I get from that is this string of railroad cars wriggling through the air with the engine in front and a caboose in back. Not too useful.
The Internet and the Worldwide Web almost demand explanations by analogy or metaphor. "The Internet is like the telephone except you can send pictures and data and jump around from place to place, and it's all free."
Huh?
"Search engines send spiders crawling through cyberspace to find new and useful web sites."
Really? Do cyberspace spiders have eight legs like the ones in my garden?
In fact, the concept of cyberspace itself is a metaphor. It's a useful metaphor, helping us understand the concept of a virtual "location." We can have a bookstore in cyberspace, a shopping mall, a chat room. All these are familiar physical places that take on interesting and powerful characteristics when we release them from their physical and temporal structures. But doing that reminds me of the early electric lights that were put in walls right next to the gaslights, because "that's where lights belong." The electric companies said, "These new lights are just like gaslights, except they run on electricity." It wasn't until years later that lights were put in the center of rooms and recessed into ceilings and put behind shades and baffles, locations that were inappropriate for gas, but which took advantage of the unique properties of electric lighting.
How are we limiting our uses of the Internet by thinking of cyberspace in terms of physical analogies?
To paraphrase the famous quote: All analogies and metaphors are wrong; some are useful.
Given all these complaints about analogies and metaphors, you know, of course, what I'm going to do next. Right! I'm going to use an analogy. I think that the changes wrought by the Internet are just like those that came about, albeit comparatively slowly, by the invention and pervasive use of personal timepieces.
Public time is ancient. Not limited by the reflections of city lights nor the atmospheric smog and not having prime time television to distract them, our ancestors on all continents built amazingly accurate calendars based on what they saw in the sky. The huge columns at Stonehenge, the temples of the Incas and their predecessors, all show an understanding of earth time, the seasons of the planet. These "time pieces" were great for farming and for religious ceremonies, but not much good for knowing when to go for lunch.
Public clocks started marking the daily passage of the sun as far back as 1500 BCE in China. Ancient Babylonians are given credit for dividing the days into 24 hours, probably because the scientists of those days estimated a year at 360 days, so dividing things into units of 12 and 24 made both logical and religious sense. The Romans added their bit of standardization by defining midnight as the zero hour, the start of the new day.
Mechanical clocks were found in China in the 11th century CE and showed up in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Spring clocks were invented in Italy in the 15th century. These were all large affairs, appropriate for the church or for the town square. Accuracy was improving. The first mechanical clocks varied up to 1000 seconds per day. The invention of the pendulum clock and the balance spring brought accuracy down to a very respectable 1 second per day by the mid 17th century.
In 1759, John Harrison invented the chronometer, and clocks became not only accurate but portable. Sailors could accurately calculate longitude, and people could begin to manage their days by the hour. By the end of the 17th century, the well-dressed technogeek wore a pocket watch, and workers could be paid by the hour as well as by the day or by piecework. Wristwatches were made for women in the late 1800s; it wasn't until World War I that wristwatches became common for men.
All that was fine for local time. We didn't care what time it was somewhere else, because it usually took days to get there. The railroad changed that. Now we needed schedules, something that coordinated activities among towns along a track. Until 1883, each railroad had its own coordination system; there were about 100 different implementations of "railroad time." In 1883, Congress passed a law specifying the four U.S. time zones that we're familiar with today, and, in 1884, the world was divided into 23 full zones and 2 half zones that straddle the International Date Line. All this was enabled by the telegraph. Western Union was the distributor of the official time, and, when we in San Francisco sent a telegram to our senator in Washington D.C., we'd know if he'd be awake to read it immediately.
Today, time and its global coordinating powers are pervasive; we take them for granted. We can set a time for a phone conference across any number of time zones and expect that everyone will be there at "the same time." We're scheduled to a fault. Thanks to the miracle of the coordination of time, my clock radio goes off every day exactly when the radio station broadcasts its traffic and weather report. We set our VCRs with great confidence that we'll record the right program.
When we plan to catch our plane, we may consider the vagaries of traffic, but we never worry that our airline's departure clock may be five minutes faster than ours. We put our schedules in books or personal digital assistants, almost as a holy rite, metering our days by the minute. The geniuses who built Stonehenge would have been completely bewildered, yet what we are doing is a linear descendent of their innovation. We pay for services, phone calls, computer services, power usage by the minute, the second, the microsecond without (usually) worrying that we're being cheated by inaccurate time calculations.
Because we can, we are doing things faster and faster, measuring in smaller and smaller increments, focusing more on the speed of our activity than the human value of the result. The time clock enabled the assembly line. The clock speed on our computer has enabled the fully wired, always accessible, always on-line knowledge worker. Mary Shelley would laugh; we have fulfilled her vision and built the machines that now we serve.
I'm probably being overdramatic and overoptimistic, but I think that e-services might be the concept that breaks the relentless shackles of speed. E-services make the network work for us. Our e-agents and e-brokers create the services that we need on the fly, without our having to know more and more specific addresses. We don't have to run to our computers, even to our laptops, to get to the e-services we need. Portals will literally walk with us, be with us in our cars, be there to help as we live our lives.
If we will it, e-services can race while we relish. Time in cyberspace can continue its relentless push to the smaller and faster, while we reverse the trend and enjoy our existence by the days and the seasons.
The measurement of time is indeed the metaphor for our work. Time is always here. We harness it with our astrological temples, our sundials, our chronometers, our quartz watches, our microprocessors. Our ability to serve is also always here. We harness it by hunting, by farming, by building structures, by inventing machines, and now by inventing electronic surrogates that serve us and others. Time measurement was once only local; our ability to serve was similarly constrained. Now both are boundless.
We in information technology have a special role. As long as we build e-services instead of using them, we are still galloping to that speeding metronome. We can free ourselves only by helping our customers use e-services that don't need our constant care, by guiding our customers to the marketplace for e-services so that they can do their work directly without our constant intervention and support.
What are you doing now to help guide your customers to e-services? What are you doing to prepare your department for using e-services? What are you doing so that you can use e-services yourself?
Regards,
Joe
Reference: Anthony Aveni; Empires of Time; Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures; New York: Kodansha America; 1995