Where Does the Time Go?
Time flows, but which way? This quarter I’m teaching an information design class, and my students and I were having a conversation yesterday about the ways time can be visually represented. The answer, predictably, is a timeline.
A hand raised in the back. “Do cultures that read right-to-left have time move the same way?” Uh, er, um, uhhhh. And so, a dutiful student went to research and shared the results. From the delightfully titled Can mirror-reading reverse the flow of time?
in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward.
I started to imagine a world where my time biases were reversed. Timelines went right to left, the hands on the clock moved counter-clockwise, the giant ball on New Year’s Day would move up to count down. Yesterday would be to my right, I’d feel uncomfortable with a photo where the person was walking left-to-right instead of right-to-left, and all the faces of movie stars would be framed on the opposite side of the screen. My calendar would have Sunday on the right. This flip-horizontal world exists, and we, this Western culture, are that bizarro world to someone else.
So if time marches on, what are the marching orders? Does time really move in a line? What if we both have it wrong? Who is on which side of the mirror?
But, what if we both have it right? What if it is not a mirror, but rather, glass? I suppose time will tell.
