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06763_Field_TCUM T328.txt
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1996-04-10
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887b
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Writing on Communication in Africa , Leonard Doob
observes: “The turban, the sword and nowadays the alarm
clock are worn or carried to signify high rank.” Presumably it will
be rather long before the African will watch the clock in order to
be punctual.
Just as a great revolution in mathematics came when
positional, tandem numbers were discovered (302 instead of
32, and so on), so great cultural changes occurred in the West
when it was found possible to fix time as something that
happens between two points. From this application of visual,
abstract, and uniform units came our Western feeling for time
as duration. From our division of time into uniform, visualizable
units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we
cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of
impatience, or of time as duration, is unknown among