Daylight saving: A modest proposal

Time was that the time only mattered locally. Once upon a time, it didn’t matter that Zurich was a few minutes behind Milan because nothing happened in Zurich that needed to be synchronised exactly in Milan. But the advent of the railway and the telegraph changed all that. Suddenly it made sense for Zurich and Milan to be on the same time. (photo by Glutnix)

As the dominant power of the era, Britain was first to realise the benefit of a single national time. The country adopted Greenwich Mean Time in 1847 and it was set in concrete once the railways adopted it a year later. Their convention was adopted by the world in the International Meridian Conference of 1884. Its governance is still remarkably extant. Australia did not exist as a political entity at the time was represented by Britain to ensure the sun never went down on its empire.

But because Australia did exist as a reality, it is mentioned in the 1884 conference notes. It noted the 150th, 135th, and 120th meridians of east longitude which were “admirably located for governing” represented the eastern, central, and western divisions of that continent. With admirable simplicity, it recommended Eastern Australia to be 10 hours ahead of the motherland. (The time in the West is not specified).

But that simplicity is not what exists today. Overnight, a partial delivery of daylight saving has seen Australia transform itself into a blancmange of time zones and all-round national stupidity. As I write this now it is 8:38pm here in Queensland, it is 9:38pm in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. It is 8:08pm in Darwin, It is 9:08pm in Adelaide. It is 6:38pm in Perth. It is a mess everywhere.

This is an indictment of how we manage time as a nation. How much of the growing national conversation is wiped out because of these inconsistencies? How much business?

This is not a Daylight Savings argument, this is about consistency across the region. Even in winter, Adelaide and Darwin are still a somewhat pointless half hour out of synch.

So here is my modest proposal, a modification of the 1884 argument: All states and territories (except WA) should go on the one time zone, the one now used by Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart.

This would mean all of Eastern Australia would have the same time. Given that time zones are based around populations as much as geography, it makes sense that the standard time should be that of NSW and Victoria, still Australia’s two biggest states.

If this were the case, Eastern Australia would now be on Australian Eastern Summer Time (AEST). As I write this the time would now be 10:10pm here in Queensland 10:10pm in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT, 10:10pm in Darwin and 10:10pm in Adelaide. A situation everyone would find it easy to remember and manage.

The southern states and territories should have no problem dealing with my proposal as their times don’t change.

The proposal would be far harder for SA which would jump another half hour and NT which would jump by 90 minutes in summer. It is certainly a difficult proposal for them given their position in the centre of the country. But it might not be impossible to sell. Many in urban areas may appreciate the extra half hour daylight saving all year round. More might agree that 30 minutes is a small price to pay for synchronisation with the East Coast. The NT might need further convincing but should not stop the proposal by themselves.

Queensland is more problematic. It would be unaffected in winter but would pick up an hour of daylight saving in summer. The state is currently split down the middle on this issue and Anna Bligh will not hold a referendum on the issue because she knows she cannot control the outcome. If the issue could be re-shaped as one of national interest, it may be less divisive. If South Australia which is further west could be convinced to say yes then there is no reason for Queensland to reject it.

Time should be a federal matter and Queensland should not be allowed to make a decision of this importance on its own. Australia should be making the decision not the states because the problem of time zones affects the country as a whole, not just the states. It is an economic problem of communicating across the nation in real time. And it will only get worse.

I will admit here and now to this being a personal preference based on my own location.

The South-East of Queensland is a peculiarly anomalous zone of timekeeping. Brisbane is the most easterly city in Australia but lags an hour behind Sydney and Melbourne for six months. The fact that even Adelaide is half hour ahead of Brisbane for that period is completely absurd as a casual glance at a map will confirm.

Hopefully in a hundred years or so, this lack of standardisation will look as idiotic as the lack of common gauge rail system. China is bigger than Australia but has just one time zone. The curvature of the earth imposes limits but I expect the pressure of global 24 x 7 communication will only inspire further consolidation.

Synchonising Eastern Australia would be a good start.

Of Time and Twitter

Overnight the Scotland media industry site allmediascotland announced that a local journalist has set up the world’s first Twitter newspaper. The idea of the "All Tweet Journal" is that a collection of tweets will be published as a PDF file with a newspaper feel. It will be an online twitter newspaper where the editor will publish the best of the tweets he receives. The plan is to bring out the newspaper once a week but it could expand to a daily publication.

This curious mix of old and new technology is the brainchild of James McIvor. McIvor is a former chief sub-editor of the Scottish Sun who operating as Scooped has produced spoof newspaper front pages as novelty gifts. He has also been a Twitter user for over a year. His new “all tweet journal” will initially follow the Scooped model be a one page “splash” of whatever news he can glean from the Twitterverse. His hope is that it will attract enough eyeballs to get the attention of advertisers. His first edition (pdf) released yesterday had a trashy tabloid look that shows McIver’s Scottish Sun background. However the idea is promising if only visitors can be bothered to wait around until Adobe loads up.

Whether they wait or not is a matter of time. Speed is of the essence in Twitter. Its growing popularity is in many ways a product of its almost instantaneous ability to get the news out. Though it may unleash complex viral actions, Twitter itself is deceptively simple. You have 140 characters or less to say something. The idea is that your friends or admirers will sign up to receive your Twitter updates and they can tweet back to you. Twitter is erroneously called micro-blogging but it communication patterns are far more erratic than the traditional blog with its header-post-comment format. Twitter has a flatter structure that allows for quicker and more anarchic feedback. Today's Telegraph.co.uk called Twitter users “all little birds in the same tree of ‘real-time status communication’”.

Australian media writer and Twitterer Stilgherrian prefers to use imagery of fins rather than feathers. As he put it “the Twitter-river flows on 24/7 but you don’t stop to watch every fish”. His profile soared after news.com.au named him in a list of ten of Australia’s most interesting Twitter users earlier this week. The article was tongue-in-cheek aimed at sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Stilgherrian himself is a withering judge of chaff: he gives potential followees just three to five seconds to prove themselves worthy of watching.

His strategy shows exactly how time sensitive Twitter is. But his list of what factors he considers in those five seconds is also impressive. Alice Rawsthorn says this is because we’ve become more efficient at navigating the daily blizzard of information. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, she says we do this by ignoring “flotsam” to make sense out of the things that matter. The age of the Internet has honed our skills in piecing puzzles of information together. In other words she says, “we've trained ourselves to synthesise”. Rawsthorn (whose article also contains an intriguing method of differentiating those under 30 from those over) listed Twitter among the vast array of tools we’ve become comfortable with in the digital age. She notes that there are more technological innovations in our lives than at any other period of history and we keep increasing them at astonishing speed.

Twitter is growing faster than most. Founded in mid 2006, Time magazine was reporting 100,000 users by March the following year. By September 2008, there were five million. It is likely that number has since increased dramatically given the high profile publicity Twitter has had since then. There was the climax to Obama’s online campaign which was followed by the plane crash twitterer, and the plane landing twitterer. Then both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the Gaza war took to the tweets. Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson says the site is attracting 10,000 new users every day which would suggest there are now over six million users. Yesterday Forbes pushed it on further with its list of top Twitter celebrities “taking over the web, 140 characters at a time.”

Twitter may or may not be taking over the web, but the company’s accelerated growth has made it an attractive takeover prospect. In November, the three owners Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams turned down a $500 million, mostly paper-based, offer from Facebook. This seemed an outlandish amount for site which has no subscriptions or advertising. This week the owners settled for a more modest valuation of $250 million signing a term sheet (letter of intent) with an unnamed venture fund.

This valuation will difficult to judge as Twitter is morphing into new uses almost by the hour. It is attracting the serious interest of journalists both internationally and locally. The product is attracting a bewildering array of tools, widgets, and user interfaces. It seems highly likely given the speed of technological development and commercial intent, Twitter will look radically different by the time it becomes endemic. And given a faster adobe interface, then perhaps the all tweet journal may be onto something.

You eye

Question: what do Lindbergh, Ghandi, Hitler, Stalin, Queen Elizabeth II, Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeini, George W Bush and you all have in common?

Answer: They, and you, have all been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Time has been giving the title for the last 50 years to the person who they believe had the greatest impact on the year's events. It aims to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill". You, though you may not have realised, are the current incumbent having been awarded the title in 2006. Time magazine deemed your impact greater than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chinese leader Hu Jintao and North Korea's Kim Jong-il who were all deemed 2006 runners-up.

You, in Time’s context, are the second person plural that includes everyone on the Internet. More precisely the title recognises the impact of Web 2.0 and the growing online democracy. In Time’s own words, 2006 has been “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” In particular they cited bloggers, podcasters, social networkers and video makers who they described as “millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy”. It also extolled the contribution of such tools as Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace.

The title dates back to a slow news week at end of 1927. The editors came up with a concept of “Man of the Year” and the initial award was given to Charles Lindbergh in honour of the first solo trans-Atlantic flight earlier that year. Lindbergh was the first real 20th century hero America so desperately needed in the twenties. It was also the chance to remedy the embarrassment of Time’s failure to put him on the magazine cover at the time of the historic flight.

Although the name remained Man of the Year until 1998, several women have received Time’s gong. The Queen was anointed in 1952, the year she acceded to the throne. Before her, a more controversial British royal Wallis Simpson was the first woman to take the award in the abdication year of 1936. Other "non-men" to take the title were the Hungarian Freedom Fighters for the uprising of 1956, US scientists in 1960, “twenty five and under” (what we now call Baby Boomers) in 1966, the “middle Americans” in 1959, “American Women” in 1975 and “the American Soldier” in 2003 (the year of the Iraqi invasion). In 1982 the Man of the Year wasn’t even a person at all, it was “the Computer”.

The title has attracted much controversy over the years. The fact that the impact can be “for better or worse” has seen Hitler, Stalin and the Ayatollah take out the “honour”. Khomeini was named Man of the Year in 1979, the year of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the start of the American embassy hostage crisis. Time received immense criticism in the US for naming Khomeini as Man of the Year. As a result of the backlash, Time has shied away from naming unpopular figures ever since. Although the criteria for the choice is “the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news", the magazine editors ignored this in 2001. In the wake of 9/11, they named Rudolph Giuliani as Man of the Year over the more obvious choice of Osama Bin Laden.

2006’s choice has critics divided again. “You” is not universal. According to Internet World Stats internet penetration is far from ubiquitous. Whereas 70% of North Americans are connected, barely 3% have Internet access in Africa. And although there are over one billion people online world-wide, 87% of the world’s population still does not have access.

Optimists hail the social transformation of web 2.0 and the active engagement medium of the Internet. These people hail user-driven content and see it as a portent for the arrival of the “participatory Panopticon”. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century ideal jail where all prisoners could be constantly observed. But in the world of the participatory panopticon, this constant surveillance is done by the citizens themselves out of choice. The main tool will be high resolution camera phones creating internet moblogs in a form of “sousveillance” (or watching from below).

However others remind us that the panopticon metaphor is a prison model and that those in power will seek to maintain their great advantages in the 21st century. The harshest critics of “You” were the mainstream media who see participatory journalism as amateur interference on their profitable patch.