Had a rather strange but thought-provoking conversation with a gentleman who came into my frameshop today. He hadn’t been in for a while, so we talked a bit to catch up and naturally, my new media course came up in the natural cycle of "what are you doing lately, what are you going to school for, where do you want to go from there, etc., etc."
Actually I find most people can relate to the topic, and it usually becomes a part of the quickly changing world that we find and acknowledge to each other in hopes, perhaps, of insuring no loss of memory of the old way of things.
But what Bob brought up was time; in particular, the measurement of time in its digital form versus the analog clockface with it’s sweeping hands and steady motion. A clock physically moves within its own space in a continual stream, moving the space of time and displaying it visually. With an hour hand, three o’clock looks nothing like four. The minute hand at 3:30 is in a different place at 3:31. With the bonus of a second hand, the space changes along the lines of cinematic film or the flip card system of animation, though not quite as quickly of course. And while digital three o’clock is different than four as well, there is no ease of transition, no continual movement, just a change in a flash. For most digital clocks, 3:31:10 looks exactly the same as 3:31:40. As a matter of fact, 60 full seconds of each minute look exactly alike and do not move with the movement of time. How ridiculous! With so much going on every nanosecond, the digital clock is behind by 59 seconds from the rest of the world, then with a flash of light that changes only the placement of lines, it hops in a hope to catch up.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology