Chronemics

Objective Time

Objective time concerns behaviors linked to our clocks, timekeeping devices, and calendars. These all deal with our comings and goings, the organization of communication events, and timing our everyday pursuits. Objective time concerns how most people reference time, times, and rates of change. Human attempts to develop timekeeping have been occurring for thousands of years. Marshall McLuhan noted that timekeeping devices are media that transform tasks and create new work and wealth by accelerating the pace of human associations or communication events. Most people do not understand that these devices have not dropped out of the sky; they developed from assumptions made long ago. The single most persistent and ongoing diffusion of innovation continuing its spread on a global scale is objective time.

Clock time was developed for use to standardize needed or valued shared experience, to regularize our meetings, our hellos and goodbyes, our work schedules, our everyday comings and goings. The first characteristic of a developed society is its temporal regularity. Without temporal signposts or objective time markers, our communication meetings would be far less in number. Without calendrical markers, days, dates, weeks, months, and years, made up of seconds, minutes, hours, and other objective markers or intervals, our lives would be very different. We often become somewhat objective in our own repetitive actions, routines, habits, and various forms of redundancies. Most of us are creatures of routine and regularity in our habitual daily schedules. We often seem to create objective time pacers to manage our daily behaviors.

Timing devices were created to produce lineally assumed equal intervals in a cyclic sequentiality. This helps people regularize and coordinate divergent personal and sociocultural time, timings, tempos, and rhythms, discussed later. Communication studies have been anchored in an objective time behaviorism that often neglects relativity theory and variable kinds of time. Many people reluctantly perform daily what Lawrence Wright has called a chronarchy, or the thoughtless regimentation of people by timekeeping. It should be understood that those who control local clocks control space or proxemics, as well as movements or kinesics though spaces. We develop many kinds of timetables and schedules in our social and work groups. Most of them have to do with expectancies, due dates, repeat activities, and how we order and structure our communication contacts.

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