Reading Time at HSNY: See You In The Chat Room

In 1999 Swatch launched a satellite into orbit around the planet Earth. Sputnik 99 (or “Beatnik”) carried a radio transmitter designed to synchronize the time for Swatch’s “.beat” line of watches. These watches could tell the time using conventional hours, minutes, and seconds, but their selling point was that they could also display the time using Internet Time, a Swatch initiative backed by MIT that divided the day into 1,000 beats. The director of MIT’s Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, channeling the argot of the dot-com era, said, “Cyberspace has no seasons and no night and day. Internet Time is absolute time for everybody. Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.”