Time for a time-out
IT IS not unknown to lose track of all time while using the Internet. The other
day, or maybe it was night, I was doing the following:
* Listening to 6PR on RealAudio;
* Contemplating what pizza to order online at PizzaNow;
* Firing up a RealVideo trailer of the new Austin
Powers movie;
* Reading the scoreboard and commentary of the first West Indies-Australia Test from
Trinidad while simultaneously checking the state of play in three Sheffield Shield matches
at CricInfo;
* Checking out the progress of an online chat about the seriousness of Ben Cousins' knee
injury.
The Net made all these cool pursuits possible for an old sports junkie like me,
but I had a feeling real life on the outside might be passing me by.
To get in touch with nearby geography I decided to check out the state of the
new artificial reef off Cottesloe. I did not actually leave the screen, get to my feet and
physically go there, however. I went to the Coastal Data Centre's Coastcam on the
Web. I clicked on a map and hey presto . . . it was pitch black. The Coastcam was
working fine, presenting constantly updated pictures of the reef back to my Web browser.
But it was 11 o'clock at night and the sun had long sizzled into the ocean past Rottnest.
Where had the day gone? And did it matter when I could easily hop on a virtual bike and "cycle" around Rotto anyway? Or was
time important with the next edition of the New York
Times due off the cyber presses, particularly now that it had dropped its subscription
fees and rejoined the land of free information? Besides, I could just as easily be useful
now and pay some bills through my online bank.
Time does not really matter on the Net. And despite the rapid progress of its technology
-- witness RealAudio and Video or Macromedia Flash tours of Rottnest -- its user base is
almost stuck in one place, truly timeless.
You will find after a couple of years that the majority of other people out
there have only hopped on recently. The take-up rate is phenomenal. In the UK alone, more
than 10,000 new users a day are signing up mainly through free ISPs which have decided to
drop all fees and take a percentage of the income generated by British Telecom's timed
local calls.
This flurry of new Netizens causes the wheel to be re-invented constantly. Just as you
work up the courage to repartition your hard drive to install Linux, you will be asked why
Yahoo gives so many different answers to a simple question. Or someone will demand to know
why a site no longer exists or takes so long to load. Perhaps you will be stuck in a
discussion group forever reminding new members not to post big attachments. Or certainly
not to open them in case of nasty viruses.
Such timelessness deserves some sort of solution. The people at Swatch watches in
Switzerland believe they have the answer with Internet Time which
they describe as revolutionary and based on a totally new unit of time, the beat of a
Swatch, or 1 minute 26.4 seconds. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to find out more.
Someone wants to know why their online bank won't send money through his fax machine.
All articles Copyright: © West Australian Newspapers
|
