Time as a Social Protocol

History

Saffron Huang:

"Timekeeping is a device-mediated social protocol—various forms of timekeeping, supported by different tools, dictate how one may mark or tell time. In ancient times, shadows commonly denoted temporality: Aristophanes’ play Assembly of Women features a woman who asks her husband to return when his shadow reaches ten feet. Today, our timekeeping is based mostly on constructed standards of seconds, minutes, and hours, not accessible natural phenomena. Our modern infrastructure of precise clockware based on the oscillations of atoms and crystals enables people to show up for work at the same time, give directions, align on temporal measurements, and coordinate distributed software systems.

How does timekeeping affect our lives and are some forms of timekeeping better than others? All protocols constrain—the Catania sundial made this fact obvious to the Roman citizens.

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When Roman war hero Valerius Maximus Messalla brought back a sundial from Catania after capturing the city in 263 BC, the crowds cheered—but this symbolic triumph over the Sicilian city soon became an ironic triumph over the lives of Roman citizens. The foreign timekeeping device, installed in the Roman Forum, heralded many more that were soon erected across Rome. People resisted the new technology—criticizing them, as the playwright Plautus did with reference to the superior timekeeping of his stomach, and calling for them to be torn down with crowbars. According to David Rooney—a horologist who shows how timekeeping has shaped our lives and society in the book About Time—the sundials stood for Rome’s ruling classes."

(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)