The Timezone Endgame
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5007987 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E L Mccallum (0000-0002-5192-7450, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 141-173 |
| Publication date | 2001-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | CR The New Centennial Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-687X • E-ISSN: 1539-6630 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/ncr.2003.0041 |
| OpenAlex | W1993976174 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
YOU'VE SEEN THEM IN TRAVEL AGENCIES, NEWS BUREAUS, AND LOBBIES OF multinational businesses: the row of clocks lined up with names of cities under them, each face showing a different time. New York: noon; Paris: 6 P.M.; Tel Aviv: 7 P.M.; Moscow: 8 P.M.; New Delhi: 10:30 P.M.; Kuala Lumpur: 1 A.M.; Tokyo: 2 A.M.; Sydney: 3 A.M.; Honolulu: 6 A.M.; San Francisco: 9 A.M. Which particular cities are listed is a matter of indifference, really, though there are always the usual suspects—the point is that they all are both collected and differentiated by time. While the display is no doubt intended to function as a reminder of the company's global reach, it has another effect: that is, to transform distance into time, and even to slow speed into an interval. Tokyo is not simply 11 hours away from San Francisco, but 17 hours ahead. 1 The difference between Tokyo and Sydney is defined not as a difference of language, culture, or politics, but an hour. And if this array of clocks was initially used in railway stations for travelers to discern the moment of their arrival by local time, it may be all the more remarkable that airports are singularly without this temporal figure, resolutely situating their travelers in the perpetual present of nowhere. As if reinforcing the transformation [End Page 141] of distance into interval, space into time, these airline travelers are now called customers, in a perhaps unintended play on the traversal of national boundaries through customs checkpoints that nonetheless erodes the sense of mobility connoted by "travelers" and "passengers."
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| Highly cited | No |
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