Digital Watches and Smart Watches: Everyone’s Monitored

Abstract

This chapter, on digital watches and smart watches considers different attitudes toward time and discusses the writing of Mircea Eliade, who explained, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, that there are two different kinds of time: profane time, which passes and doesn’t return, and sacred time, which is cyclical and sees past events as returning—as in some religious ceremonies. This is followed by six hypotheses on the meaning and cultural significance of digital watches, such as: they reflect the growth of alienation in contemporary societies and the triumph of the digital over the mechanical. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various functions of smart watches and the creation of the Apple Watch.