I have often thought that I’m an analog guy in a digital
world. I haven’t really been sure what
that meant but I expected to figure it out.
I’m still learning and growing and I am increasingly convinced that
everything unfolds on exactly the right schedule.
I have been wearing inexpensive digital watches to work for
a few years. The alarm and stopwatch are
good tools to have. At the same time,
though, these watches are disposable, something that I have strongly
disliked. Even if I could replace the
battery on a $25 watch, the battery alone would be half the cost of a new
watch. That is by the manufacturer’s
design.
That was part of why I bought the last one, with its promise
of a ten-year battery. If you are close
to my age then you can see where this is going.
After two years, the band broke, creating the same predicament. There’s something spooky about imagining this
watch keeping time in a landfill for eight years but that’s where it is going.
Rather than lurch to the next throw-away digital, I looked
for my analog watches. I have three of
them, nothing fancy or high-end, but water-resistant and with a date
feature. That’s good enough. I needed a jeweler to replace all of the
batteries and two of the bands and for about $100, they are up and running
again, with just a bit of frayed cotton and cracked leather in a landfill.
These watches will confuse the students with whom I
work. There are few persons under 18
years old, maybe older, who can read an analog watch. I’m not sure when, in analog sort of way, we
started to teach digital-only timekeeping.
The jeweler’s jaw dropped when I told her that I probably don’t work
with any students who can read any of the time pieces in her shop.
I suppose that fact alone is an answer to what I meant by
being an analog guy in a digital world.
There seems to be more to it, though.
Analog time is human time.
What time is it? In digital time,
9:47 is the same as analog time’s quarter-of.
Do those two minutes, give or take, matter? They do in a digital world, where deadlines
happen at times that are called, in analog terms, sharp, but not so much
in a human world, where time is an extra pause, a breath, a glance or gesture,
a heartbeat. Do I have time to use the
bathroom and be comfortable before a big event, or time to gather my thoughts
before I answer? In a world of
quarter-of, I probably do, but in a world of 9:47, I probably do not.
There are some moments in life that come with a sharp
distinction, the kind of thing that in movies are set to dramatic background
music. In one instant, life is a certain
way, and in the next, life is different and cannot go back to how it was two
instants ago, but even that term instant is an analog term. In digital time, you were, say, still single,
or unemployed, or a student, at, say 1:03:25 PM, and then suddenly married, or
employed, or a graduate, at 1:03:26 PM.
It happens like that sometimes.
More often changes happen gradually. We learn and grow, we love, we move, we
marvel at life, in terms that are real, but fuzzier. At the end of his movie The
Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin gave a speech in which cautioned against
machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. He talked about life being “a wonderful
adventure.” I don’t know. Chaplin was talking about something much
bigger than I am here, and he was smarter and more accomplished than I will
ever be, but maybe there is a tiny bit of a connection between machine minds
and digital time.
More than that, analog time is humble. When we both tell time according to a set of
mechanical gears, it’s understood that your measurement and mine, your
experience and mine, will vary a bit.
Your watch can say 9:47 and mine can say 9:48 and we can both be right,
or wrong, and it’s OK. Those
measurements have overlapping confidence intervals. When you tell time according to a pocket
computer that is in constant communication with satellites, that always “knows”
where and when it is, there are only right and wrong, and I suggest, again,
that this does not feel human to me.
I’m not knocking punctuality, or precision, or
confidence. These are certainly
worthwhile goals and sometimes essential.
Speaking as Just One Analog Guy in a Digital World, I find that I feel a
bit more comfortable, a bit more human, glancing at my wrist to see the time,
give or take, to make a plan for what happens next, give or take.
Comments
Post a Comment