Getting Closer to The Point: Hall On Time and Proxemics

Getting Closer to The Point: Hall On Time and Proxemics (Review Part Nine)

"No matter who you are, no matter how good an athlete you are, we're creatures of habit. The better your habits are, the better they'll be in pressure situations." - Wayne Gretzky

Trailing through "Time Talks: American Accents", a reader may note that all this talking about time and habits has foisted Hall into a natural extension of his organisational arguments regarding cultural influences on time concepts and time keeping to what appears no accidental ruddy path of thought easily extended to proxemics theories. This is an example of how cultural values discussed under the terms of logical categorizations may then be interpreted themselves out of the purely ideological and into the physically measured realms of empirical science, yard sticks, slide rules, and calculations data. Proxemics is observable and easily exemplified. Hall was one of the first to ever key such concepts into readable print.

However Hall ends his discussions on time recapping that informal time patterns most easily attributed to Americans through time exist intrinsically buried isolates in the workings levels of urgency, number of multi-tasking events taking place, state of being busy or not, with degrees of variety thrown into the ticking dark, stew on cultural time patterns. He notes that informal time isolates form easily overlooked aspects to time keeping as they are so deeply tuned, that it is impossible to participate in two time sets at the same time. Thus cultural time clashes.

This would illustrate one of the challenges of cross-cultural experience, or the considerably misinterpreted term "cocooning" in contemporary Korean culture. Cocooning is considered indicative of negative individualism in a communalist-based society. However foreigners immersed daily in foreign cultures of a communalist context often need "time-out" and for some this may involve quiet weekends alone with books, hiking trails, shopping, or with small groups of closely guarded friends. Humans are creatures of comfort, and pattern, the last thing most foreigners living in foreign countries require are verbal sparring attacks, or outright hostility for their own cultural values or quizzical questioning of their perspectives on individuality, time keeping patterns, or perspectives on what constitutes leisure. Probably the last thing an expatriate needs is to be reminded that their very idea of individualism may simply be a culturally filtered communal value itself.

Incidentally, the longer one exists as a foreigner or expatriate, perhaps the greater the need for individualist cocooning-type activities, if merely to maintain a sense of one's own cultural values. Individuals often become fairly shy of others as a result, a limited diversity of often illogically based opinions (the black or white variety) can induce horrendously slanderous, libelous displays of expatriate gossip, all often isolating such possible expatriate communities even further from discovering logic-based concepts to explain their issues surrounding what constitutes community and individual, those experiencing similar cross-cultural challenges, but resolving them in diversely different ways.

Expatriates are often the least prepared to perceive the infinite shades of gray between being part of a culture and partially understanding what culture is as a result. While I enjoy the company of some foreigners, I need my personal head space to process real ideas, sourced from real thinkers, I am not paid to entertain whiners and complainers table number five. As in, I footed the bill to up my appreciation for this area of human experience through reading and the result is writing about it, often coincidentally fairly isolating. As in, increasing your education is often the same result as getting a new used trailer. Some of your neighbours will just stop talking with you regardless if you actually learned something or not. Particularly I would hope women might understand men move through these proxemical distances and consider some women worthy of infinite intimacy, while others must remain at a discretely "not close" or public distances often simply based on feelings.

Thus Hall closes his discussions on informal time patterns to remind the reader that they are never explicit, that they are probably the most deeply wired and the earliest cultural patterns acquistions each individual possesses and that they are felt to be either safe, familiar, and comfortable or wrong, and unfamiliar. Thus, educating oneself to learn more about them may even be perceived as wrong, or unfamiliar, even to your supposed peers. That concepts on time are held tightly, righly or wrongly they are as the mind's first rattle held with a vice-like grip by most. Furthermore, as Hall begins to exentuate that time patterns, systems, and organisational isolates are only conservatively flexible or stretchable, he begins to lead the reader into one of his other pioneering theoretical determinacies of observable, cultural contrasts. Notably that the fields of physical interactions among individuals are themselves culturally variable, and particularly determinant. Concepts of inflexibility in time isolates explains rather fully some other fairly rigid concepts in terms of proxemics, individual, communal, and architectural.

Regional time and proxemical variations exist in every nation and culture. Hall says these differences display themselves through comparative and contrastive scales infinitely measurable in hierarchical organisations between communities, between men and women, between families, occupational differences, status differences, et cetera. He goes so far as to categorize in American society the presence of two general time keeping principles at work as of 1959. These consisted of "displaced point" and "diffused point" time patterns relating to appointment keeping.

Displaced time keepers were apt to arrive ahead of schedule by as much as 30 minutes or as little as five minutes before an appointment. Diffused pointers were considered to arrive from five minutes before to up to twenty or twenty-five minutes late. In recent decades, it may be easy to surmise which group has been voluntarily sacrificed and excised from the payroll i n the interests of perceived productivity gains. Thus variety in much of western business is not the spice of profits. One proported area which strangely handled time in the 1950's according to Hall is the north-west which apparently scheduled appointments thirty minutes earlier than actual start time to accomodate diffused time keepers.

If such a trend extended itself to California over the last forty five years or so then it might be one more hidden reason why that state has increased its population girth so successfully in recent decades. Perhaps California is simply a mecca for Hall's "perpetually late every where else" diffused time keepers.