Why couldn't we do away with time zones?
Aug. 27th, 2011 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsA submitter on Slashdot asked, "Could we deal with the end of time zones?." There are over 400 comments there, so one more would be pointless, but as luck would have it, while we were travelling from the US west coast to the east, my girls happened to asked me the very same question: "Why don't we have just one universal time, so if it's 2 o'clock for us, it'll be 2 o'clock in Japan and England and everywhere?"
The best answer I came up with is this: the time of day communicates your current role. 9-5, work. 6-10: dinner, socializing, family. 11-7, sleep. 7-9: don't you dare call me. When being called internationally, by saying, "Do you have any idea what time it is? It's 3am here," you're communicating to the listener an expectation that they understand that 3am is sleep time. If you changed that, you'd change expectations, and you'd dismantle those expectations.
We evolved to live by the rising and setting of the sun. Our clocks track that with some degree of closeness. To take that away, to change our expectations of what "time of day" means, would destroy our chance of communicating clearly with one another those expectations of ettiquete and understanding that comes with international communications.
The best answer I came up with is this: the time of day communicates your current role. 9-5, work. 6-10: dinner, socializing, family. 11-7, sleep. 7-9: don't you dare call me. When being called internationally, by saying, "Do you have any idea what time it is? It's 3am here," you're communicating to the listener an expectation that they understand that 3am is sleep time. If you changed that, you'd change expectations, and you'd dismantle those expectations.
We evolved to live by the rising and setting of the sun. Our clocks track that with some degree of closeness. To take that away, to change our expectations of what "time of day" means, would destroy our chance of communicating clearly with one another those expectations of ettiquete and understanding that comes with international communications.
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Date: 2011-08-28 06:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-28 06:59 am (UTC)What a succinct way of putting it.
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Date: 2011-08-28 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-29 04:20 am (UTC)With time zones: "Do you have any idea what time it is? It's 3am here!"
Without time zones: "Do you have any idea what time daylight is here? 3pm is 6 hours after sunset here!"
Those of us in the Eastern Standard Time zone suffer from a minor version of what life would be like without time zones. The EST zone is too wide; it should really be 2. Sunset in Maine is a good 1.5 hrs earlier than it is in Indiana, at the other end of the EST zone. Western & Central Europe have a similar problem. And don't get me started on China.
Time zones, themselves, aren't a problem. It's the arbitrary, stupid way that we've created them.