On the March of Time and the Meaning of Days

Abstract

As of this issue, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems marks its 50th year of publication. We are minded to introspect, then, on what it means to have been here for 50 years. For some, it means that this journal came to be in the year that astronauts first landed on the moon; that sounds like a very modern occurrence, but having transpired in 1969, it was literally a half century ago. That is 18,250 days, or 2,607 weeks, or 599 months, or, of course, one half of a century. Century - the Latin root of which connotes groups of 100; half of 100 being fifty, and that being a darned large number in some respects, but in others very small. It depends on point of view, as the physicist Einstein (1921) would have put it. When you are moving at great speeds, time seems to pass more slowly (as compared to the perceptions of a less-fast moving observer). Time and its passage are a subjective perception of the perceiver, even outside of the physics of relativity (Evans, 2005). As Carol Saunders once speculated in a closing essay during her time at MIS Quarterly, it only seems like yesterday that we came to be a field of inquiry in Management Information Systems, and we could consider ourselves in the geological scheme of time to be very young indeed (Saunders, 2007). On the other hand, for those busily engaged in the fast-moving activities of publishing a journal like ours, time flies in different ways when we consider how long significant landmarks of the field of Management Information Systems have been in place (as has this journal, for a similar period of time). It was just yesterday, and it has been forever. We only just took Volume 48, Number 1 to press, it seems, and here we are at 50(1)! Time is in the Einsteinian details.