The first episode of the final season of Mad Men opens right in the middle of an intense monologue about business meetings: the boredom they induce, the necessity of making an impression and what it nonetheless takes to start a productive exchange. Cleverly enough, however, the monologue quickly reveals itself as an advertising pitch prepared for, yes, a business meeting. The item the team at advertising firm Sterling Cooper & Partners needs to help a client sell? Bulova Accutron watches. The tagline they cook up? “It’s not a timepiece. It’s a conversation piece.”
The release of the Apple Watch should drive a great deal of conversation over the next weeks and months. We should understand the gadget as much more than either a flashy bit of tech bling — though the highest-end version of the thing runs to $17,000 — or yet another wearable computational device among a vast landscape of wearables. The Apple Watch should make us talk about our relationship to that thing watches were first meant to measure: time. (There’s good evidence that Apple wants to subsume all watches and timekeeping under its own banner simply because the most natural short form of its product name is the Watch — as if it were the One Watch to Rule Them All.)
The great status watches — Switzerland’s Rolex and Patek Philippe and Germany’s A. Lange & Söhne — each had their various connotations: old money, new money, industrial money, army service and so on. Nonetheless, the modern wristwatch was, very generally speaking, the mark of a titan of commerce, of the man who made his money on the exchange, where the numbers flowed over ticker tape and value boards. The industrialist, too, needed to know the time, as it was parceled out into a working day less dependent on the amount of available daylight and more dependent on artificially drawn schedules — on the shared temporal structures that allowed for the coordination of resources and machine processes.
U.S.-based Bulova introduced the Accutron in 1960; its name suggests that accurately measured time is vital to the very busy modern businessman. (This is why we still say “sync up” to mean “sit down together and talk.”) According to the smartphone appmaker Locket and to studies by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an average user checks his or her smartphone more than 100 times a day, meaning that we are more aware of what time it is than any iteration of human society ever, period. And our expectation that something will have happened in our absence is also high. Changes in the digital world — updates, news, messages and so forth — occur much more quickly and with greater simultaneity. Time is both more important, because we operate at high speed, and less important, in that we measure its contours with less thought and effort.
Whether the Apple Watch will make anyone buy watches — that is, whether any industry, subindustry or company will experience a lift from its much-heralded release — remains an open question. The Apple Watch may eventually replace the smartphone, to make it less necessary to carry a handset around, which means that all those phone checks will be converted to watch checks. Among other luxury brands, Swiss-based TAG Heuer has teamed up with technology companies — in this case, Google and Intel — to create tech-enhanced wristwatches. Women’s fashion company Tory Burch has created a bracelet designed to disguise Fitbit bands, in an example of the meeting of tech with high fashion. Commentators in the New York Times Style section have also batted around the question of whether or not anyone will ever care about the wristwatch again.
At the end of the Mad Men monologue, a colleague suggests to the monologist that he make his tagline shorter, more finished, more acceptable for the modern attention span. They talk about it in a series of meetings and can’t decide; eventually the decision is made for them by a higher-up. In some similar way, perhaps the most we can say decisively is that horology, the science of measuring time, has been a perennial topic of conversation for, well, a very long time. In the 16th century Shakespeare’s Hamlet first said, very quotably, that in Elsinore time was “out of joint.” As societies evolve, the fundamental concepts that help us know and shape our destinies — time, for instance, and the tools that are used to measure it — change also. What should we think of the Apple Watch? We should wonder what it says about us that we always want to know what time it is.
