Society’s greatest flaw is that it truly believes it has control over the non-existent concept of time. We try to materialize it through clocks, calendars and alarms. We want to have some sort of unity over the perception of time but it’s impossible. The day will pass slower for one and quicker for the other, regardless of when the clock hits twelve. Now John Hartley further perpetuates the notion that time is tangible through the theory of “high frequency” and “low frequency” in the media.
He explains timeless words such as “Egyptian inscription[s]” have low time frequency, whilst daily news bulletins have high time frequencies. Don’t we create the hype and emphasis placed on these words? Everything is nothing until we make it what we want it to be. So how can Hartley say that “messing with the news [is] tantamount to messing with time itself”? We created both news and the perception of time and now we have instilled within them the power of society and wait for them to lead us.
We study time from afar and speculate over how it makes us sit down to eat at a certain interval and creates a basis of sleeping and working. We have created our OWN basis of sleeping, working, eating and then placed it within our constructed idea of time. It seems like society is struggling very hard to maintain control over life and create unity amongst people through media and time. Both entities created in our conscious and agreed upon through the compliance to such things as timetables, meal time and sleeping time.
Bibliography
Hartley; J. (2004). “The Frequencies of Public Writing: Tomb, Tone and Time” In Jenkins, H. And Thorburn, D. (Eds)Democracy and New Media. MIT Press, USA, pp 247-269
