Ask not for whom the watch beeps
I’m at a conference in Philadelphia today with about 100 people in an auditorium. Around two in the afternoon, someone’s watch made a “beep beep” sound, and it took me a minute to realize that this was a sound marking the hour and one that I hadn’t heard in years.
Do you remember in the 1980s and 90s when a chorus of digital wristwatches emitted perfunctory peels every hour on the hour? I realized today that this seems to have completely disappeared. Why is this? A few hypotheses, ranging from the blindingly obvious to the more subtle (and therefore less likely correct):
- People are less likely to wear watches. This is the most obvious theory. Some estimates show that watch sales have fallen off over the last few years, but not by the order of magnitude that would be required for the virtual elimination of the hourly watch chime. Even if 50 percent fewer watches were sold this decade, and stipulating for the moment that watches are not durable goods, that still doesn’t explain it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that cell phones and iPods have rendered the wristwatch obsolete (at least as a method for telling time), but they haven’t gone the way of the buggy whip yet.
- Preferences have changed towards analog wristwatches. This makes some sense; since we have the time in our pocket (plus calculators, contacts, appointments, memos, and all the other snazzy things our watches used to do before PDAs and cell phones), watches perform only two functions: telling the time and signaling status.
- People no longer want to be told when the hour strikes. What explains this change in preferences, however? Why would this have changed?
- People never wanted hourly chimes to begin with but watches came with them turned on by default. Call this the Sunstein and Thaler theory.
- People still want hourly chimes but don’t want to wear watches to get them. This makes little sense since presumably cell phones could be made to chime hourly, or developers would create an app. (Oh wait, they did.)
- My sample has changed. I’m in a professional environment now rather than school and college. Since I graduated from college about the time that cell phones became ubiquitous, I have a difficult time disaggregating a number of social trends from this other revolution.
Granted, this is a completely pedestrian observation. But it is remarkable that, at least from my perspective, something as ubiquitous as the hourly watch chime seems to have disappeared overnight, and without much fanfare.
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