It Is About Time (Review Part Seven)

It Is About Time (Review Part Seven) The Silent Language (Edward T. Hall) 1959

In Chapter Nine, Hall returns to his discussion of perceptions of time as he has fully revealed some of the processes and technical tools useful for analysis of this topic on a cross-cultural basis. Hall begins with an explanation of how Americans use and communicate with time. He further notes that it takes up to twelve years for children to understand time. That the internalization of cultural time details and emotional underpinnings require more than a decade to absorb.

Following his categorization of cultural patterns, Hall posits that cultural values associated with time may fall into three categories themselves. That within these exist sets and subsets, isolates, and patterns of time arrangements dependent upon culture and he defines nine different types of time patterns. For the technical, one may refer to astronomers or astrological mystics, fully dependent on a culture's prioritizing of empirical or subjective evidences in determining technical competencies. Hall gets technical himself to no reader's surprise, and defines the length of a year dependent upon which discrete/precise year is being measured.

As of 1959:

Tropical or Solar Year: 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45.51 seconds plus a fraction.

Sidereal Year: 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, 9.54 seconds.

Anomalistic year: 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, 53.1 seconds.

Hall demonstrates that the formality of time measurement is strictly dependent on variables of cultural influences, "the judgemental pickings" in particular, the measurement methods, the particular year in question, and the acceptability or the reliability of its empirical details, such as a basis in hard scientific data for some. He them moves on to explain how the day has evolved as a deeply rooted concept in the west with primarily two isolates: day and night. This is further segmented into morning, noon, and night. All of the activities thus routinely performed, much like rituals of the day, fit into these periods. Then in the western calendar there exist seven variations on the day. These are fairly obvious concepts for a layman and might appear redundant. However it takes children far longer to perceptualize minutes, hours, or seconds. For regional farmers in non-developed nations observing the stars through a pair of oxen yolks such concepts as minutes, and hours, or the emotional requirements western culture has apportioned to them, might appear strange, unfamiliar, and fairly redundant as well.

Hall demonstrates that the requirements of human awareness of smaller discrete sets of time have kept pace with technological developments, in particular the keeping of appointments, schedules or the like, intimately connected not only to the growth of production line process manufacturing and associated terms like productivity but the individualisation of timepieces which such assemby lines provided, themselves capable of running fast, slow, or "on time".

Informal isolates like urgency concerning time management have varying degrees of predominancy not only within regional cultural groups, but most often give rise to easily made cross-cultural comparisons. As Hall works his way through western concepts on discrete sets of time intervals such as five/ten/or twenty minutes, he works his way back to the seasons, large, naturally determined sets of time, those determined entirely by nature. For this reason seasons exist with duality as a formal and informal cultural set. Hall suggests that cultural variations concerning time are the hardest dynamics in cross-cultural communication especially difficult to grasp for westerners, that over three-quarters of the planet does not so heavily categorize time sets and are thus running time patterns which are decidely not determined by Swiss time pieces but are incongrous, asyncronous, not necessarily possessed of depth or historical character which may easily correspond to a western concept of time.

However, as one may observe fairly easily, those nations which have taken on export-driven economic growth models must quickly discard local cultural time sets for production cycles, demands, and deliveries which must meet customer expectations to ensure continued trade. In fact, quick assimilation of local cultural precepts concerning time is often marketed as progress. Japanese time management might be considered the best in the world in many respects precisely if one considers how completely its national culture may have been early sublimated to serve its western customers. One might suggest that the cultural matrix which existed in Japan from the 1880's period onward helped guarantee the success of Japanese time management adaptations. Furthermore, the attendant growth rates in regional export dominated economies globally grows dependent upon increasing time management efficiency in the workforce which implicates national culture as well. If one nation's total economic success depends upon trade growth, local national cultural values regarding time necessarily are sacrificed and streamlined to permit entry to a greater economic world of international competitiveness. However it all appears to implicate a tuning of regional cultural time sets, patterns, and isolates, to the western clocks.

The point at which the developing world really began to assimilate western time into their national cultural identities must be precisely and specifically noted. In particular, everyone possibly has an anecdote regarding a personal relationship to time. Mine is that my first watches were handily provided with easy to manipulate technology, such as hour and minute hands; easily rolled back on early spring or summer evenings, plainly faulty, defensible explanation for late home-comings.

My first provisioning of a digital watch was a decidely more precise measurement of time. It was one of hundreds piled up at the spring exhibition and selling for five dollars. It was difficult to adjust, and by that time, I was fully assimilated to western cultural concepts of time anyway. If I was late, I could no longer blame my watch for it. That watch was, "Made in Korea" and helped define in my mind Korea's jump from maker of cheap, easily breakable plastic toys to rudimentary electronics. I almost do not doubt that a Korean marketing frenzy for digital watches, and the object of making them pervasive at that time, was as rushed as the current market-driven pervasiveness of the latest cellular phone technology.