The 24 Hour Society

  • Leon Kreitzman
Profile: 1999. 176 pp. £16.99
Dali on time: we take a more flexible view of the clock than did previous generations. Credit: CORBIS/DAVID LEES

The moment that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humankind's first steps on the Moon, 30 years ago, characterizes one of the peaks of human technological progress. The event concerned everyone from an intellectual and moral point of view, but the technological impact on our everyday lives appeared minimal. In those days we had no fax, e-mail, Internet or mobile phones. Although we had the capacity to send men walking on the Moon, we were still very slow and inaccurate in establishing long-distance contacts around our own planet. The revolution in communication and computing is a phenomenon of the past few decades. There have been so many dramatic changes in the way we communicate and travel world-wide that modern life has been profoundly affected.

The impetus behind the changes has been ‘globalization’; a society has emerged which has an increasing need to communicate throughout the world, at any time of day or night; this is a society that can no longer operate on a 8am–5pm day. By enabling this society to be online 24 hours a day, says Leon Kreitzman, time has been expanded.

Scientists know this only too well. Trying to collaborate with a colleague based in California while in Europe, or arguing back and forth across the Atlantic with a scornful editor over a manuscript were difficult tasks only a few years ago. Time is even more pertinent to the business world, in which ignoring a 24-hour timescale would be financial suicide.

People adjust immediately to new devices, sometimes becoming conditioned to them without even knowing it. We have almost no recollection of how we functioned before faxes and e-mail, and contemporary society would clearly have a hard time functioning without these gadgets.

This is the core of Kreitzman's book, which is entertaining and easy to read, but also refined and comprehensive. Kreitzman ranges from business to informatics, from circadian biology to social science and working regulations. The 24-hour society is most obviously represented by cities in Europe and the United States, but shopping and leisure are also available around the clock in Asia. The demand for flexible timing for these activities has developed in a growing proportion of the population. Of course, this is distinctive of a certain type of social economy, as Karl Marx (cited by Kreitzman) rightly reasoned: “labour during 24 hours of the day is the inherent tendency of the capitalist production.”

Working mothers are a particularly apposite case, as most of them need to have a more stringent organization of their time because a high proportion of partners still do not help with housekeeping and child care. They are a group of people who can greatly benefit from a society that allows flexible use of facilities and services.

Another interesting example is the tourism industry, which has grown dramatically in the past couple of decades. Today tourism is global; in the 1980s it took over from oil as the world's largest industry, and now today it accounts for 10 per cent of the world's gross national product. People like to travel far afield, and as their time is limited, they want to have services, tourist attractions, museums, shopping and dining available at all times, everywhere they go.

Humans, distinct from all other animals, have had their circadian rhythms modified by social habits, electric light, television and international travel. Our natural sleep/wake cycle, as well as our endogenous biological clock, are continuously challenged by external stimuli that have nothing to do with the natural day/night astronomical cycle. Kreitzman gives a remarkably simple but clear (and correct) synthesis of our present knowledge of the biological clock. His hope is that “once we can control our rhythms many of the objections to shift-working and to the 24 Hour Society will fall away”. The intrinsic danger of such thoughts is the possibility of biological control over people by society. But Kreitzman is careful to emphasize that advantages of the 24-hour society should not be “achieved by the exploitation of the health and safety of groups in the population”.

So, is the 24-hour society some kind of present/future positive condition, or just a nightmare in which the Western world is caught up? Our parents say that it was so much better in their day, when the pace of life was slower and they had more time to enjoy valuable moments. Today it is difficult to have a normal conversation with a friend or colleague without being interrupted by a beep or a ring, and it does seem to many that enjoyable moments are becoming rarer. But I feel that Kreitzman is right; it is just a matter of getting adjusted to new rules and redefining temporal relationships. Then we will gradually, but continuously, learn to enjoy a different timing for the important things in our lives, and by the same token possibly gain time.