The relevence of Time zones and Time

The evening of December 29, 2011 was a Thursday evening. Most of the citizens of Samoa — a mere 190,000 in total — came home from work, had their nightly meal, and went to sleep. But when they awoke, it was Saturday morning. Friday, December 30, 2011 had disappeared. More precisely, December 30 was erased from the routine progression of time. Those with December 30th anniversaries, lovers of Fridays, and people not quite ready for the next year were out of luck. The clocks had been turned forward, a full day forward. December 30, 2011 was a day no Samoan would know.

The government of Samoa had decided the previous June to move westward across the international date line, so everyone knew the lost Friday was coming. The Samoan government made this change because they wanted to better align Samoa with trading partners in the East: Australia, New Zealand, China, the rest of Asia in general.

Samoans had actually been on the Asian side of the date line before, back in the 19th century. Then, in 1892, an American business house trading in the region convinced the king of Samoa that slipping over the date line to the other side, facilitating trade with California rather than Asia and Australia, was in everyone’s best interest. At the time, it made sense to the king. San Francisco was proving to be a much more influential trading partner than Sydney, and American ships lined Samoan shores. So Samoa left its time zone, and was suddenly just three hours behind California. In a twist of diplomatic self-congratulation, Americans had Samoa perform the shift backward in time on July 4, giving Samoans the opportunity to celebrate American Independence Day twice. In her Letters from Samoa, Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson — the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, who had emigrated to Samoa with her son in 1890 — described the double Fourth of July thus:

It seems that all this time we have been counting wrong, because in former days communication was entirely with Australia, and it was simpler and in every way more natural to follow the Australian calendar; but now that so many vessels come from San Francisco, the powers that be have decided to set this right, and to adopt the date that belongs to our actual geographical position. To this end, therefore, we are ordered to keep two Mondays in this week, which will get us straight.

For 120 years, America’s trading authority has been encapsulated in the Pacific island nation of Samoa. Now, Samoa is three hours ahead of eastern Australia rather than 21 hours behind it, and 22 hours ahead of California. You could say the ever-shifting time zones in Samoa are symbolic of the ever-shifting tides of geopolitical influence: then from East to West; now from West to East.

The international date line is an imaginary line we have drawn onto the planet. The line is artificial and did not exist until we drew it. It is not a straight line, but rather snakes through the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bending this way and that around islands and atolls. It is opposite from the Prime Meridian on the planet’s other side, which helps to define Universal Time and is the meridian by which we calculate all time zones. If you could peer from one side of the date line to the other, you would see a different day. Though the globalization of time would seem to be something quite old, it is only as old as globalization itself. The date line was first proposed in 1884, at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., where the primary topic was to choose “a meridian to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the world.” The common zero chosen was Greenwich Mean Time, the national mean time of Britain, established in the 17th century mostly to aid naval navigation. So the world’s time turned British. But it wasn’t until 1929 that most major countries had adopted time zones and they still did so at their own discretion. Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, (once Greenwich Mean Time) is universal only in the sense that it is an internationally agreed upon reference point. Otherwise, local time zones are decided upon by individual nations.

A century or so later, time zones seem sacred, inviolable. And so it is disconcerting when we remember that they are not inviolable at all, that they are, rather, capricious. Time zones are suggestions. There are international overseers of time zones, like the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, creator of Greenwich Mean Time. But there is no transnational or trans-universal time zone enforcer. “There seems to be no legal reason why any country cannot declare itself to be in whatever time zone it likes,” the Royal Observatory confirmed to the New York Times around the turn of the millennium, when the tiny nation of Kiribati had caused an international stir by proposing it, too, would enact a time zone change. Taken at face value, the Royal Observatory’s statement is shocking. Could New Yorkers experience the UTC+0545 time zone of Nepal, 10 hours and 15 minutes ahead of itself, living days of nights and nights of days simply because they chose to?

The uneasy truth is that we can shift time around all we like, if we like, and countries have been playing with the malleability of time zones since their inception. But the way we mark time is as metaphysical as it is economic. As Manuel Castells wrote in The Rise of the Network Society, “We are embodied time, and so are our societies, made out of history.” The Russian Empire, for example, once observed solar time, the time of the ancients in which days are dictated by the sun, and traditional Russian society, wrote Castells, “viewed time as eternal, without beginning or end.” For hundreds of years, Russia was regularly disrupted by modern notions of organizing life around time, until Moscow Mean Time was finally introduced in the late 19th century. The country has had a fickle alliance with its time zones since, moving them about, creating and deleting as geography and politics dictated. Today, Russia has the most time zones of any nation; they totaled 11 as of 2010, but President Medvedev excised two that year, and now the country has nine. Perhaps Russia’s time zones are as restless as the Russian soul.

By contrast, there is China. The vast nation of China encompasses a citizenry speaking 292 languages and a land mass that has almost as many climates as exist on Earth. It geographically spans five times zones but observes just one — one big time zone that stretches from cosmopolitan coastal Shanghai to the rural far west. From 1912 until 1949, China did observe five time zones. But after the Chinese Civil War, the emergent Communist Party used a unified time zone as a way to consolidate the Party’s power over all the territories it claimed and to hail the existence of a unified Chinese nation.

Once, when there were no time zones, our time was told by the basic movements of the sun — daybreak, daylight, peak sun, nightfall, darkness. If you were living in Samoa, people in the United States didn’t exist in the future; regardless of what time it was, everyone was still living now. Even when we decided to split our days into 24 hours, to facilitate a common understanding of time, noon in Denver still felt a little different than noon in Los Angeles. Before the 1880s, British clocks had two minute hands, one for Greenwich Mean Time and one for local. It’s likely only businessmen and sailors were interested in the former. As the world has become more regulated, time zones represent a tension between how time is thought about and planned for, and how time is actually experienced.

If there were no time zones, would we work when we could, and sleep when we could, regardless of train schedules or cargo shipments? Would the consequences be disastrous? Would civilization as we know it collapse?

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smartset. Here

A moment : Make it your own, for time seriously, sadly runs away

Exactly one day after the Fall 2010 semester ended, a student in my technical writing class appeared at my office door to explain why he had not submitted a major assignment. He had tried to start writing it, he told me, but, for some inexplicable reason, he found he “couldn’t be in the moment.”

Be in the moment! Now, I could have lectured him on the myth of writerly inspiration, that “one fell swoop” ideology created by the 18th-century romantics whereby the entire work descends, like a tongue of fire, upon an especially sensitive soul, a mystification of the writing process designed to elevate themselves to the level of the wealthy patrons upon whom they depended and to efface the self-abjection they felt because of that dependence.

But I did not lecture him, for I found that I could not be in the moment. Be in the moment! A vision of a long-haired, bellbottomed me klieg-lit my mental sky, a me amid the boisterous uproar of the 1960s, a me who actually said, frequently and sincerely, “Man, I just want to be in the moment.” But that vision was just as suddenly eclipsed by that irrepressibly philosophical part of me, that thoroughly Kantified, Sartrefied, Heideggerized part of me, which, it seems, no mortification of the flesh can discipline. Is it possible, I wondered, to really be in the moment?

Not according to the Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, who says time is a “river of passing events,” and “no sooner is one thing brought to sight than it is swept away and another takes its place and this too will be swept away.” Not according to Job, who says time is “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” nor Andrew Marvel, who, at his back, hears “time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” nor William Butler Yeats, who says “The years like great black oxen tread the world/ And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind,” nor T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, who says there is “Time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,” nor Robert Frost, who says time “seriously, sadly, runs away.” Certainly, being in the moment would seem impossible in our culture’s time-fissioning present, our iPhoned, Facebooked, Googled, Twittered restlessness, our desperate fear of missing the latest morsel of information, our attention never more than a nanosecond from seduction — our discontinuous, du jour present, a Smithsonian so densely packed with experiential exhibits that no lingering look, no settled examination, seems permitted. No sooner do we settle into a moment than another gallops by, all dust and flashing hooves.

Then, too, having tensed time with a future, we ironically become captives to our own invention. We suffer anticipation and apprehension, both of which uproot us from the moment. If we look forward to something, if we anticipate it with pleasure, time seems to move like a severely arthritic mule. If something distasteful or painful lies ahead, it poisons all the time in between. As Brutus says in Julius Caesar, “between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ Like a phantasm or a hideous dream.” For me, the “dreadful thing” is Monday afternoon faculty meetings. Their upcomingness festers in my mind, envenoming the weekend. The English language does not contain within its 600,000+ word vocabulary, the term that adequately expresses the depth and breadth of my loathing for faculty meetings. “Odious,” perhaps, comes close. Maybe I should view them in the spirit of Yossarian, the bombardier protagonist of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 who seeks out boredom as a means of life extension, for, as anyone can attest, time slows to a crawl when one is bored.

Experience teaches me, however, that it is indeed possible to be in the moment. Often, immersed in various activities — in a classroom, woodworking, writing, reading — I have “zoned out,” have felt the so-called “flow experience,” that deep, subjective state, that almost cellular, almost mitochondrial hum of effortlessly embodied energy, where muscle experiences itself as motion, mind as mindfulness; that thrumming calm into which I descend and become other than that watchful observer standing outside myself. It is a state of honed sensibility so profound it disremembers itself, a state of wakefulness wholly entuned with the rhythm of a task, an inattentive attentiveness, a tranced alertness and focus. Cezanne captures this sense of vigilant self-forgetting when he describes painting as becoming a “sensitive plate” to the moment, so as “to paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that.” Even lowly, much maligned routine, which sent Thoreau to the garden of Walden and then expelled him with a sword of fire two years and two months later, can stop time in its passing. In its pattern of actions, recurrent and familiar, routine domesticates time, allows us to locate ourselves in it, to be on social terms with it, to dwell in it.

A moment is a small room, a closet-sized room, in the mansion of time. And while we may move, sometimes swiftly, sometimes sludgingly slow, from room to room, we cannot raise a window, cannot open the door. We pass from room to room, and in that passing we may be bruised by anxiety and regret, may be lacerated by loss and grief, may be wounded by a withering of soul or rigidity of mind. In that passing our tongue may yearn to say what we had left unsaid; may long to touch what we had left untouched; may wish to extend the hand we withheld. In that passing we may feel small and consumed and vulnerable, and create heavens or philosophies to surmount the churn of our resentment. In that passing we may love; we may nurture flourishing children; we may grow in compassion and find the empathy to imagine, wholly imagine, the lives of others; we may bud in knowledge, perhaps blossom in wisdom; we may find the language to speak our minds and our hearts; we may swerve from the path of least resistance, may remake ourselves in previously unanticipated ways; we may experience exciting turbulence, enticing disorientation, rapturous rupture.

We may be in a moment, but we cannot stay in it. We are in many moments. No matter how we use those moments, they go, and in that going time marks us, but we can mark it. We are its, but it can be ours. We can watch those moments go, we can curse their passing, call them hard names, consider them the sad algorithm of our lives, or we can acknowledge them, attend to them, listen to their whisper, look at them, really look, try to find a balance, maybe a come-out-even point, and, perhaps, make them answer to the shape of our desire. To own our lives, to make our lives our own, we must make those moments our own.

Jerry Denuccio in The Smart Set. More Here.

Al Jazeera : 21st century's best hope for an independent press.

The recent crisis in Egypt makes clear what many have known for a few years now. Al Jazeera is the best major media source. The reporting is a little more fearless, the exposés are a little more in-depth, the feature stories and interviews are a little more thoughtful than all the other guys. If you’ve got to pick just one media outlet, you’d be a stubborn mule indeed not to pick Al Jazeera. It is more serious than CNN, more genuinely global than the New York Times, and more complicated than the BBC. This is not a matter for serious debate anymore. It is a basic fact. While watching Al Jazeera’s coverage of the revolution in Egypt on live web stream, I managed also to catch an extremely good interview with the important and eloquent President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, in which he was asked tough questions about freedom of the press that American media outlets usually tiptoe around or ignore.

Al Jazeera, it turns out, keeps afloat with money from the Emir of Qatar. The Emir of Qatar keeps afloat by means of oil money, with some help from natural gas. Qatar has so much of both things that it enjoys one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world. So, there’s an economic model for you. Sustainable? Probably not. Dependent on the whims of an absolute monarchy? You got it. But the economic model upon which the previous century of good journalism was based was no less compromised. It is not the compromised position that matters so much as how you compromise. So far, Al Jazeera has taken their oil money and run straight for the utopia of journalistic integrity. It may not last. The good graces of the Emir of Qatar may sour. But all we are really looking for here is a temporary safe haven for real journalism in a time of media crisis. And it is time to give Al Jazeera the nod as the most interesting thing out there. From a tiny country in the Arabian Peninsula soaked in wealth by a global economy’s voracious need for energy comes the 21st century’s best current hope for an independent press.

From a report by Morgan Meis in The Smart Set. More Here