A Geography of Time

In the preface “Time Talks, With an Accent” the author describes his reasons of writing the book, as well as he shares his plans about future careers, his interest, and ideas about time geography.

In the first chapter “Tempo: Speed of Life” special attention is paid to what tempo is, its core elements, economic well-being and what may happen beyond the tempo. In the second chapter “Duration: Psychological Clock” the author provides innovative and interesting suggestions and draws relevant conclusions bumps in time, how to change the life tempo and psychological experiences of time duration.

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Actually, I think that material presented in the preface and the first chapters are very exciting and informative as the author sets further background for research in this sphere.

In the preface the author writes that every culture is represented by its own concepts and fingertips about time and time geography. Actually, it is necessary to lean about time values as it gives an excellent opportunity to know the person better. Time gives idea of what person is, about his ideals and beliefs. The author admits that he has always been interested in time. As other Americans, the writer was taught that time is measured by the clock and nothing more.

Time is seconds, minutes and hours. However, when the author grew up he realized that the concept of time is not as simple as it might seem at the first glance. When planning personal career, the author claims he has ignored the concept of money being offered by the particular job. Instead, he decided to learn temporal lifestyle as that area interested him the most.

Firstly the author’s researches focused primarily on social psychology and attribution theory. Special attention was paid to gender differences in ideas about success and failure, self-confidence and attribution styles. Nevertheless, in several years the author became very interested in studying the value of time and the life pace in general. Therefore, the author devotes the whole book to the pace of own lives, how people use and have to use time, what time is doing in our cities, etc.

The first chapter addresses the question of time tempo stressing that tempo of life strongly depends on the factors of personal taste and skills, as well as on individual instruments and room involved. The pace of time is defined by the author as tome flow or movement being experienced by people.

Pace of time is characterized by rhythms, sequences and synchronies. However, life pace is a matter of tempo. ‘Tempo’ is borrowed from music theory and it is associated with rate and speed of piece performance.

The author is interested in characteristics of cultures and places distinguishing five factors which determine cultural tempos: economic well-being, degree of industrialization, population amount, climatic conditions, and orientation at individualism. Also, there are ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ people and the author warns us not to overgeneralize about them.

Actually, life pace depends on time, place and human doings. Ten areas are presented to think of yourself: speech patterns, concern with clock time, walking speed, eating habits, driving, schedules, list making, nervous energy, waiting and alerts.

The second chapter addresses the issues of psychological clock and duration of time. The author writes that there were several studies devoted to time perceptions and the interest in estimation of time appeared on the scale.

Duration is defined as the time that is going from the lat event. Actually, duration is the speed of the clock being ambiguous and precise. However, it is more difficult to define duration of time in the realm of psychological experience.

There are differences in time duration among Westerners and Easterners. For example, in Western culture listening is not opposition of talking as it is waiting.

Modern researchers are focus on identifying differences in types of information and in the ways the information is processed. Interestingly, Maslow defined creative people as people being fascinated and absorbed in the current situation and here-now. The author concludes that time is proceeding as a clock arrow does. However, speed of time passing depends fully on individual preferences.

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