A New Wrinkle in Time

Who wears a wristwatch anymore? Although luxury mechanical watches remain status symbols, time may be running out for the clock you wear. For a generation with smart phones and other networked devices readily at hand, the utility of the classic timepiece is unclear. “The Beloit College Mindset List,” a much-cited annual index of the rapid pace of cultural drift in the digital age, observes that members of the college class of 2014 are so unfamiliar with the wristwatch that “they’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” Yup, that’s your wrist, old-timer. Touch of arthritis?

Westerners have long been keenly interested in horology, as David Landes, an economic historian, points out in Revolution in Time, his landmark study of the development of timekeeping technology. It wasn’t the advent of clocks that forced us to fret over the hours; our obsession with time was fully in force when monks first began to say their matins, keeping track of the hours out of strict religious obligation. By the 18th century, secular time had acquired the pressure of routine that would rule its modern mode. Tristram Shandy’s father, waiting interminably for the birth of his son, bemoans the “computations of time” that segment life into “minutes, hours, weeks, and months” and despairs “of clocks (I wish there were not a clock in the kingdom).” Shandy’s father fretted that, by their constant tolling of the hours, clocks would overshadow the personal, innate sense of time—ever flexible, ever dependent upon mood and sociability.

His worries notwithstanding, generations chose to indenture themselves to the clock’s efficient mastery, welcoming centuries of development of chrono-mechanical technology: from verge-and-foliot escapements to balance wheels and tourbillons, stackfreeds and fusees to jewel bearings and the piezoelectric effect. The miniaturization of the clock into the watch was key to early globalization’s navigational and communication infrastructure. The watch was not just jewelry, but a marker of the early 20th century’s obsession with making sure that everything—from steamships to infantry charges—ran on time.

Now, in turning to mobile electronic devices and the networked time they keep, perhaps we seek a retooling of the messy, unsegmented sense of time celebrated in Laurence Sterne’s novel. In the 1900s, we told time using a device dedicated to the simple display of the hour, minute, and second. Not so with the watch’s networked offspring. Hundreds of time-related apps are available for the iPhone, from old-fashioned clock emulators to kitchen timers to tools to help keep meetings from running over.

LookBackMaps, a San Francisco Web development company, has created an iPhone mapping app that lets the user overlay historical photographs of places onto the iPhone’s camera view, combining past and present in a single picture—crowding wagons and horses, cobblestones and ghostly pedestrians into modern cityscapes. Everywhere online, time comes loose from its moorings: Google combines books from all eras into one big book; YouTube brings motion pictures from the early 20th century into dialogue with today’s viral videos.

Such displays of time on mobile devices go beyond the ticktock of the grandfather clock and the insistent pulse of the wristwatch, no longer pointing at one moment but indicating all the hours at once. Our lives, too, are more fluid now; our careers move in fits and starts; our childhoods and twilight years are of indeterminate length. As Tristram Shandy’s father knew, it is experience—of tools, of society, of kids growing up—that ultimately governs our perception of time. For us, the smart phone’s broad spectrum of time apps seems apropos.

Watchmakers will continue to develop new “complications,” the term used to describe “apps” on mechanical timepieces. (One $625,000 model will play you Tchaikovsky on a built-in drum set and keyboards.) But matched against the almost infinite possibilities of the smart phone, the watch seems likely to slowly go the way of the sundial, the factory whistle, and other quaint measures. And with it, the particular conception of time as a stream implacably flowing toward some end may well become just one temporal computation among many.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”