I'm a Watch Wearer Now, pt. 1: Metaphysical Reasons for Wearing a Watch

The Hidden Potential of Television and Video in VIDEODROME

A watch is a source that one can tap, whenever necessary, of information. It provides a very basic kind of information in a form that is immediately tangible and available to the perception of our senses. Thus, this worn object becomes evidence of physical, temporal, and conscious existence, and helps to materialize the reality it occupies. The wristwatch is in this way a grounding comfort.

Humans, and likely most other species, crave sensory feedback. People uniquely desire information that can be interpreted in a cerebral and preferably cultural way. A watch provides an array of visual configurations. It can be read in the intended semiotic manner of numbers and time units, or, to those without the foreknowledge of its language, an abstract collection of lines, shapes, and squiggles in two and three dimensions.

In nature, the texture and composition of plants, the infinitely variable and complex gaseous structure of clouds, and the activities of animals are a few examples of things around us us that provide the individual with rich sensory stimuli even in the absence of fellow humans. The witness of such perceptual data naturally tries to make sense of it using analysis through memory. It hence becomes knowledge. Humans are not merely content with taking in pure form nor aesthetic pleasure, they tend to shape what they witness into something relevant to their condition as conscious, intellectually active beings. "Culture", for lack of a better word exists even in an individual who has never seen other humans.

In the modern world, our lives are filled, sometimes to the point of excess, with information. Think of an opposite situation: a room with white walls, a comfortable though immovable white chair made entirely of molded plastic, no clothes allowed. This kind of sensory isolation (when undertaken for a significant amount of time) would be torture for most, if not practically all people. Wearing a wristwatch in such a room would be a comfort not because it tracks time, but because it provides a constant source of information. It is like having a book, although an extremely short one and written in numbers and abstract geometric forms, not letters: an "abstract book".

The output of a watch is confined to an obvious pattern, and the information is acutely finite, but there is also significant change as the hands move or the digital numbers flicker. In a basic analog watch, there are usually three hands multiplied by 360 degrees of variety. If one becomes very desperate in an isolation situation, he can re-set the watch to different times, play with the hands or digital functions, and set the mechanism in motion again. A book is more desirable than a watch in an isolation situation because of the higher level at which it engages us. Books, in contrast to watches, contain naturalistic, human oriented content. That said, to someone who is illiterate, a book is more abstruse than a watch dial, even if they have never seen a watch before. The reason is the intuitiveness and openness to interpretation of a watch. Upon seeing a watch, one can immediately assign some meaning to the parts and its activity, even if this interpretation is creative and unique and completely removed from the act of keeping time. The simplicity of the design of a watch can, in this context prove, be an asset. Assigning meaning requires much more ingenuity when dealing with letters of the alphabet. It's important to note that for the purposes of this article, a "book" is only text, there are no illustrations.

One special characteristic of a watch, an an advantage it has over a book is that it is an object that works on its own. A broken watch loses most of its ideological power and becomes, at best, a piece of jewelry. It's the watch's independent movement that reassures the owner of temporal reality with its every tick or LCD flicker. A watch with a "seconds" function is therefore much better in this context since the minute function reveals information too slowly to naturally be an object of sole attention-to-change in nature. There are sources of constant perceptual stimuli on our own bodies, such as hairs and skin, and this is analogous to the previously mentioned "abstract book". A heartbeat is closer to a watch. Bodily secretions and excretions of all sorts are the intermediate between the lifeless book, and the autonomic heartbeat. Ancient oracles "read" animal entrails as a source of data. The equally gross act of "reading" bodily secretions and excretions is possible and has undoubtedly been attempted in history. Such a source of data has an advantage over looking at skin because it is a more dynamic, temporal thing, the reasons why I'll leave to the reader's imagination.

Of course, the watch also has the advantage of greater tactile interest when compared with a book. Even the simplest watch is made of a variety of materials, each with a different texture when touched. The smoothness of a given watch's glass face is a contrast to the rough underside of its leather band, for example. The paper leaves and cover of a book are not as full of tactile possibility as the parts of a watch. Indeed, a watch that ticks, has digital beeps, or an alarm also engages the sense of hearing, something a book cannot do without purposeful manipulation like drumming. In a sensory deprivation situation, a watch provides a multi-sensory and automatic experience compared to the passive and aesthetically uninteresting book of text.

The watch is technology, so unlike our bodies, it is a connection to what humanity does best: adapt by making things and changing the environment. Body modification is this human industriousness applied to the only thing that is truly ours from birth, our physical selves. A tattoo, brand, or piercing, etc. reminds us of our humanity, of our unique ability to alter our bodies creatively using technology. A watch, worn almost as a cybernetic attachment of supplementary function on our bodies, though not true body modification, can have similar conceptual understanding. A book, is also technological in origin, but it can never be incorporated as a part of the body like a watch can.

The watch would not save the victim from isolation-induced insanity for long; it's simply not enough, and that's not the point. The isolation chamber argument illustrates through an extreme scenario that the comfort it provides in that setting, in the ways mentioned previously, is a comfort that still exists in ordinary, every day wear. The watch, when thought of in this sense, transcends its utilitarian function and becomes an existentially charged object. It can function as a worn symbol of the power and nature of the human mind.