About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (W.W. Norton), by David Rooney

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Image via David Rooney/Twitter

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

Timekeeping is pervasive. We seldom think about how clocks control our lives or how those devices dominate our society and economy. In About Time, David Rooney reminds us of the power they hold over us

Rooney approaches the dozen timekeeping devices at the heart of About Time with more than antiquarian interest (although he was curator at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich). Instead, he interrogates how clock towers or their sun dial predecessors projected “a message of power and order” as far back as ancient Rome and China. This obsession with cutting time into precise, tiny units has only grown and led to today’s pathologically short attention spans.

“Technology is never neutral, because objects are made by people with an agenda of some sort,” he explains.

Sweeping across 3,000 years of history, About Time gets sketchy at the edges and stretches a few points until they snap. However, his main theses hold. Clocks not only made the Industrial Revolution possible (by dictating the workers’ time) but were among its earliest products as machines produced clocks in unprecedented number. Before long watches hung to us like balls and chains. More recently, the precision of atomic clocks hooked to the internet enables timestamps to every millionth of a second—vital in today’s stock market trading with profit and loss measured in nano-time.

What worries Rooney most are the clocks orbiting the Earth on global navigation satellites. They enable other technologies whose reach extends “into all aspects of our lives” including our location and our actions and allow unseen actors to guess (and market) our desires. “We are inviting them, uncritically it seems, into our lives.”

He concludes: “Who can fight back against the relentless beat of the clock? Perhaps we should try a little harder.”