Why digital clocks fail.

Anyone confronting a digital timepiece reckons with the oddly subtle way it restructures time. The concept "ten minutes from now," for example, becomes difficult if not paradoxical to measure. The statement "it's approximately" gives way to an exact expression of information such as "it's seven fifty-seven."

One of the major characteristics of this medium (and in the computer also) lies in its ability to limit something, in this case time, by fixating on preciseness. Unlike the circular, analog clock, which shows time in relation to its past and future, the digital clock reconfigures time only in relation to another precise unit of information. In this system, the raw message - i.e., the time - appears from out of an electrical void. With the circular clock, however, time is read out of its total context.

Problems arise with the digital clock because it replaces the tyranny of being unstuck in time with that of being stuck in time. The symbolic value of the circle, or the whole, becomes replaced by the abstractness of the digit, or fragment. Since past and future lie outside the reality of digital time, the present becomes nothing more than a systematic restatement of itself. Time, or more specifically the present to which it is reduced, becomes groundless. One present appears over another which, in turn, gets displaced by another and another.

With content thus divorced from context, one becomes detached from the stream of time. Meaning becomes overly isolated. We become trapped in a system that is only capable of perpetuating the instantaneous. Time no longer passes; it is replaced. Events no longer symbolically flow. A new sense of duration appears which moves one further away from the shared experience of time moving from the past through the present into the future.

Try programming your VCR. It can best be done with a VCR Plus, a device that, with the input of a few digits, simplifies the seemingly overly complicated programming routine. Try setting your digital clock radio without consulting the manual to ensure that a.m. and p.m. are correctly designated. Try getting a wake up call from a hotel switchboard that has a human at the other end of the phone line.

With digital technology, time not only gets dislocated, it becomes rendered motionless. As a result of such static precision, analog wrist watches, greatly enhanced by quartz accuracy, quickly came back into vogue. Not only do they signify something more fashionable to wear, but also they express a more cyclic way of looking at time. These timepieces belie a comforting relationship with the gentle sweep of the second hand, the rhythmic ticks of the minute hand, and the steady march of the hour hand as they move reassuringly around the dial.

Gary Mielo is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Communications at Sussex County Community College and a freelance writer, Gary Mielo lives in northwest New Jersey.