What is Time?

Due to some difficulties last week finding the nonfiction book I intended to read, I ended up reading Age of Distraction by Robert Hassan. It's one of those books which gets more interesting as you get further into it. Perhaps that was because I was better able to focus on what he was saying after a while. But even though it got easier to understand, I started to get rather irritated with some of the implied ideologies.

His most interesting theme is the nature of time. According to him, time is a socially constructed phenomena to help us make sense of the world around us. "Clock and script were developed as immediate expressions of immediate bodily capacities and immediate material surroundings" (34). If you accept time as being a social construct, then you can accept the idea that the new media is compressing time and space. "If time is the number of movement, as Aristotle argued, then through the mobile phone we take the measure of the distance and reduce it to the fantastical in terms of natural human capacities" (24).
  
Other definitions of time--Time was early in history found in the rhythms of the seasons. Newtonian time is time measured by the clock. The traditional Christian teachings say time is eternal. Skeptics prefer to look at "lived time" which is how much time people have to live and do things. In a capitalistic society, time is money.


There were some other interesting points that I might come back and talk about later, but I think I'll end this post with a quote that he borrowed from Herbert Simon:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971, 40– 41)