Indeed, even time is a social construction. This point is well-illustrated by our bi-yearly clock-switching ritual in the name of “daylight savings.” Writes Economist Nick Rowe at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative:
I’ve heard stories about people who set their watches 10 minutes fast, so they won’t be late for meetings. It’s hard to understand how it could work. Do they forget they set their watches 10 minutes fast? Because if they remember, they should be able to figure out they’ve got an extra 10 minutes, so there’s still plenty of time to grab a quick coffee before the meeting starts. If it works, they must be fooling themselves.
This weekend the government will tell us all to put our watches back one hour. They want us all to do everything one hour later. It’s hard to understand how it will work. Do they think we will all forget we’ve set our watches one hour slow? What’s more, they can’t even force us to change our watches.
But I know it will work. We will (almost) all set our watches one hour slow, and we will (almost) all start doing (almost) everything one hour later, by the sun, compared to what we would have done if we hadn’t changed our watches. But why?
Why? Because, as I’m sure Rowe’s well aware, collective agreements matter. In this case, you’ll be early! For everything! Doctor’s appointments, classes, meetings, dates… you’ll show up for lunch and the restaurant will still be closed… you’ll drop off your kid and the school won’t be open… you’ll arrive at happy hour and the drinks will be full price! Tragedy! You’ll get fired for leaving work early everyday and piss off your spouse with an alarm clock that goes off an hour before it needs to. There are real consequences, in other words, for deviating from the norm… even when it is a total fabrication.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 41
Legolewdite — November 6, 2011
Yeah, that's the thing about our fabricatons - they tend to materialize. It's like what starts as a mere idea for a road ends up, quite literally, concrete.
I like to use the subject of time much the same way when talking about cultural capital. Without the unspoken "collective agreements," how does one ever learn to show up to a job interview early or to always show up a little late to an evening party?
Elena — November 6, 2011
Please, change "Indeed, even time is a social construction" to "Indeed, even the measure of time is a social construction." The measure of distances is also a convention, but we don't go calling physical dimensions social constructions because that's the kind of postmodernist sillyness that Alain Sokal sporked so well.
Ape — November 6, 2011
Of course, daylight saving (no s) time is the adjusted time; standard time is the standard. We would never change from standard time without the government's involvement.
Danielle — November 6, 2011
This is a weird idea for me to hear. At least in Canada, daylight savings time serves a practical purpose. I wake up at 6:30 in the morning and for the past month at least it's pitch black until about 7:30. Now I'll be waking up at 6:30 and will at least see some light. Not sure where this construction of 'set your clocks back to be..early..' came from, but I appreciate the ability to leave my house with some light!
Sally — November 6, 2011
Uh, what? Does nobody on this blog (including the writers) understand what the purpose of daylight savings time is? It's not a fabrication used to exercise arbitrary government control over people's lives. It serves an important purpose in keeping society coherent across large countries (like the U.S. and Canada) and across the world. Reading this post was ridiculous to me, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming.
Anonymous — November 6, 2011
I do the 'extra minutes on the watch' thing too, but it rarely fools me -- however, it does shock me into speeding up when I see "10:00" and I know I need to be somewhere at 10:00, even if I'm actually aware that I have another 8-ish minutes. So, there's still a motivational benefit to it. (Plus, a little frantic speed-walking now and then is good for the constitution!)
However, it works well with alarm clocks, because I'm so out of it when I first wake up that I'll believe anything the clock tells me. :-p
Landen — November 6, 2011
I change my clock to be five minutes fast because in the morning (before I'm thinking clearly), seeing it scares the crap out of me and I rush to get to the bus stop on time.
Michael De Land — November 6, 2011
food for thought on the social construction of time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Q3imVqBEk&feature=related
Fetters Sv — November 6, 2011
All this DST business fosters is a semi-yearly bitch session from both arm-chair philosophers and pseudo-scientists alike.
Patrick — November 6, 2011
I happened to spend the summer in Indiana in 2006- the first year they observed daylight saving time. We were at the western part of that time zone, so it stayed light until pretty late. I remember the locals were very confused and annoyed that there was still sunlight nearing 9pm. Having grown up with it, I was quite amused at the "Daylight Saving Time Outrage."
Anthony Tantillo — November 6, 2011
Humans are social animals. Everything is a social construct. Stop trying to make "Social Constructs" a bad thing.
Lunad — November 6, 2011
As always, cross cultural comparisons can be enlightening. When studying history, it is fascinating to see how time was constructed differently for different cultures. For instance, when I study traditional Jewish law, there are always 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime. The number of hours in a day doesn't change, but the length of the hours do. Midnight is always exactly 6 hours after sundown, and noon is always 6 hours after sunrise. This distinction still matters for religious Jews, as various things that must be finished by 3 hours after sunrise, or fasts that end an hour after sunset use the older definition of hour. However, they don't use the system in their daily lives, so Jewish calendars list the standard times for different cities.
Jewish time can be seen here: http://www.chabad.org/calendar/zmanim_cdo/aid/143790/jewish/Zmanim-Halachic-Times.htm
NancyP — November 7, 2011
Isn't the reason behind DST to enable children to walk to and from school during daylight hours?
Umlud — November 8, 2011
What Nick Rowe perhaps fails to recognize is that summertime is when we are on DST, and not the wintertime. If the world's governments of countries that use DST told their citizens to leave their clocks alone this October/November (yeah, not all countries shift at the same time), then the countries in the northern hemisphere would remain on DST, while the southern hemisphere would remain on standard time. (Which, when calling my girlfriend in Chile, would have been fine, since -- during April-September -- our clocks are set to the same time, but for much of the rest of the year we are 2 hours apart.)
Of course, the failure of Nick to recognize when daylight saving time and standard time actually were in Canada (save for Saskatchewan and some portions of provinces and territories) could also be read as the relative importance (or not) of actually having DST.
What surprises me is why southern parts of Brazil (most of which is within the tropics, where sunrise and sunset don't shift too greatly throughout the year) observe DST, but the northern parts of Brazil don't. (Add to this the bizarre distribution of time zones in the country, and you've got a ripe playground for discussing our social relationship with how we measure time.)
Nick_Rowe — November 8, 2011
Thanks Lisa!
The weird thing is: I have found I have needed to talk about the social construction of reality quite a lot recently, when discussing monetary policy, and how the US Fed can loosen monetary policy despite interest rates being at zero. So here I am, a sort of monetarist economist, trying to remember the Berger and Luckman stuff I read 30 years ago. And writing stuff like this:
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2009/11/interest-rate-targeting-as-a-social-construction.html
Most economists think I'm nuts to say stuff like this. They don't get it. They think that economics is all nuts and bolts. Even when it comes to paper money!!! But some do.
[links] Link salad heads out for a rare change | jlake.com — November 29, 2011
[...] Social Construction, Deviance, and What Time is it Again? — A squib on Daylight Savings Time from Sociological Images. I still don’t buy all the moaning people do every year. Even if your sleep cycle is backloaded, go to bed an hour earlier. No different from staying up an hour later to see an evening movie or finish a book. [...]
G — March 11, 2012
Instead of changing clock times springing forth an hour in March or April (depending on where you live) and then springing back an hour in October or November, why not just change everything by 1/2 (half) an hour and leave it at that.
But then the entire concept of time as measured by clocks appears to be a social construct. Humanity got along fine when time was determined by the movement of natural phenomena like the Sun and sunrise and sunset, the stars, or the tides, the moon, seasons, movement of water, etc.
Stop Blaming 2016 — December 28, 2016
[…] in different scientific disciplines as a variable that helps to define a lot of what we know—but it’s a socially constructed concept. That means human beings literally MADE IT UP. We created time. It’s a subjective and fluid idea […]