Home > Forum > TermWiki > Featured Term Discussion

Beat time. Just one of the many attempts that people have made to move away from the traditional time system and into something decimalised. It's actually happened in the past, in France and China, but they've both reverted back to the 24 hour clock. As Swatch invented the system, they were hoping they could get out their range of beat time watches and be the first to capitalise on the trend of people switching to their decimal time. Obviously, this change never happened. To be honest, my first exposure to beat time was when playing the game Phantasy Star Online on the dreamcast in the year 2,000. I remember opening up the menu and seeing a bar at the bottom listed as "internet time", with @xxx listed besides it. That was the only explanation given, even the instruction manual for the game had nothing. This was one of the first online console games, so when I hopped online I inquisitively asked about what this "internet time" thing was. Naturally, nobody knew. It took about 6 months of playing before I finally found somebody who could explain it to me, that Swatch had made it as a universal time system. In theory it could've worked well for such an international game, where people from America, Europe, Japan and Australia were all playing together, but everyone ignored it and used the 24h system anyway, mentally adjusting for timezones. That raises the question then - people eventually moved away from archaic measurement systems for things like money and lengths, so why are we so reluctant to move away from the unintuitive system of 24 hours a day, 60 minutes in an hour? Do you think we ever will, perhaps when there's no corporate interest in making us do so as there was with Swatch and beats? If you're interested, you can still buy beat time watches from Swatch themselves. It's kind of impractical really, but it's cooler if you can get a beat time display on your smartphone. It's a good talking point if somebody sees it and asks about it! I guess it wouldn't be possible for iPhones, outside of a dedicated app, so maybe someone knows of a way to display it on android phones?

Hi all, I write a lot of the featured terms here at TermWiki, which you can find over at the Discover section of the site. I spend a lot of time thinking about what to write about, because my main goal when I write every one of these is to bring to you something that people will find genuinely interesting, regardless of its subject, industry, or origin. I sum up this interesting thing in just a few short paragraphs, which often is not enough to fully convey why I found that particular subject interesting, so I'm going to use this topic to sometimes expound upon these terms, and provide a space for all of you guys to talk about them :) You're all more than welcome to add some featured terms yourself by the way, as long as you think the term you are adding will be very interesting to all our users around the world. Just head to this link http://www.termwiki.com/TWSpecial:Add_a_new_featured_term to get started, and remember that you need to add a picture with every one.