That was the scoutmasters' clever comeback when little me would ask for the time. I didn't get around to buying one until a couple years ago for a stint of outdoor volunteering. I guess I grew up when it was still a bit novel to whip out a smartphone instead, as if to affirm that I was a part of this new contemporary world, checking the time.
I love my watch(es), but I'm not going to pitch you some trad timepiece digital detox grift. From skimming online encyclopedias (and nabbing their pretty pictures), I’ve gathered that watches are just as modern a technology as any other digital device; they've just had a few hundred years head start. Their ubiquitous persistence has kept up with the times, though I doubt I'd be able to make any more sense of the old hairsprings and pinions than the new circuit boards and... vibrating crystals?! But I like to think watches sit somewhere else on the continuum of info-tech, somewhere that makes my body feel like they tell time "out there" rather than "in here". Let me explain.
Knowledge of time is prominently broadcast on information devices. You can probably flick your eyes off these words and come back with it without leaving the screen. The thing is you're not really looking at a screen right now. Your awareness of this panel of plastic or glass is more likely an interruption to your attention -- a glare or a smudge or a crack or an unflattering reflection. The screen is just an interface to connect you with information through modulated patterns of light. This information is abstract, nearly massless, and often kept very far away from you. Assuming you have a steady connection (which I’ll assume, given the niche we’re meeting in), you can swim rapidly through this information with almost no help from your body. The physics are all different in here, collapsing distance so much that I can't seem to understand it in the same terms as the air around me. It’s somehow ever-present yet absent, a seamless psychic slip and slide.
My watch plays by rules much closer to those of the world my body lives in. The amount of information transmitted is much less than the potential information from something like a computer, and comes encoded in much simpler patterns; A few thin hands fall across a dial as long as they can.¹ It has a single control, called a crown, used to synchronize the hands and, on some models, illuminate the dial.² ³ My brain feels no pull to an elsewhere; the watch is not tethered to an ether. It is counting the seconds on its own right next to me, and we are travelling through time and space together.
To think I might never have noticed a product sold almost everywhere, shockingly reliable, ruggedly housed, with a battery life measured in years, not hours. I’m guessing most of the money’s made selling watches as old world status symbols (and cheaper ones as imitations of old world status symbols), as if to affirm that one is above this new contemporary world, checking the time. Maybe that fashionable focus props up the ubiquity of watches, but even as that fades, I hope they keep on ticking, holding the continuum of information technology wide open, and keeping me a little more out there than in here.
¹ Paired with the sun, it can also serve as a rough compass, should you find yourself stuck in the Shimmer.
² Maybe you'll also find an alarm or calendar... bet that’ll blow your socks off.
³ A watch with a digital display doesn’t have to be much more complicated: 28 or so lines either present or missing, and a few buttons.