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There is one place where our perspective has changed more dramatically and more consistently over the centuries than it has in mechanics, education, art or any other human occupation. Time.

The changes we have undergone in our understanding of time are enormous. And the technology that most influenced these changes is the mechanical clock. Consider how time used to be measured. You began to work with the sun came up and stopped with it went down. Artificial lighting was too expensive and too unreliable to allow people to work at other times. So the work day was the only real measure of time - not the hour or the minute. When the day was divided up into hours, it was done based on its relationship to the work day. The day was divided up into roughly the same number of hours but the length of these hours changed based on how much light there was in a day. An hour was longer in the summer because the day was longer. In urban settings, there were bells that might indicate hours worked, but no one trusted them because they thought they were being cheated by their employers. And, even if they weren't, how much time went by was anyone's guess. There was no device to keep an accurate count of equal lengths of time over the space of a day.

Greenwich clock at Greenwich, England. Zero Longitude

14th century monastic alarm clock

We are undergoing a similar change today, but in reverse. Our work day, or school day, isn't dictated by daylight, time of year or any other time requirement. Classes you might take on line don't even require a meeting time or a time at which you need to present an assignment. Time comes to mean less and less. You  have to spend it, but how long and when is up to you. At the same time, we are obsessed with time. Someone, quite possible several people, in this course will almost certainly post a discussion which will include a line like, "we are so busy these days it's hard to find the time to...," or, "it's hard to fit everything into our busy lives." But when quizzed on what everyone is so busy with, it's hard to find an answer. We produce and consume more entertainment, play more games and chase more random curiosities around the internet than anyone could ever have found time for a few decades ago.

And there is the confusion having to do with the length of time. We will spend five minutes watching a video of a cat in a dryer or spend 5 times that lobbing angry birds across a gaming screen or a few hours playing a video game or updating a profile on a social media site by liking some banal comment or publicizing a photograph we didn't take of people we don't even know. Then everyone wonders, "where has the time gone?" It's likely more than a few of you are a bit annoyed by this module of this course already because it takes too much time.

Salvidor Dali's The Persistence of Memory

Harrison's Chronometer

David Landes qupoted Lewis Mumford in his article, Clocks - Revolution in Time as saying "the clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age." But it may be that it is not the key machine of the information age. It's arguably the computer that is the key machine in today's world. The mechanical clock separated us from natural measures of time and inserted us into an entirely made-up world of seconds and minutes. Today, as we separate ourselves from mechanical time and give ourselves over to time as it is dictated to us by information technologies.  Can you image what losing this device has done to us and what the costs and benefits of adopting new understandings of reality as dictated by the information age might be?

Why does this matter? Because confusion is what causes change, or, at least, it's often the outcome of change and influences how we deal with change. Look at Harrison's solution to the longitude problem from last module. It's a mechanical solution to a problem that many thought could only be solved through astronomy, perhaps only through religion. Harrison's proposal caused plenty of confusion and not just a little bit of bitterness. And, not coincidently, the machine that solved the problem, and caused the controversy, was a mechanical clock. Soon we'll look at other places where gears and cams and pistons and all manners of mechanical innovations changed the world. Then, later in the course, we'll see how we just as readily abandon these mechanical solutions in exchange for solutions using bits of information on a wire and how we're still in the middle of that transformation.