But to safely navigate where we are going we must remember also where we have come from. The present is digital and the future will be more so, mostly to humankind’s immense benefit. None of this proves that the past must be archived in hard copy for ever or that people should store banknotes under the mattress. Ministers had not grasped the value buried in those old clerical records. Last week it was revealed that the Home Office had destroyed landing cards that proved the entitlement of Windrush-generation migrants to be in Britain. The same anxiety attends concerns about huge government IT projects – the administration of universal credit, for example, and NHS systems – on which millions of lives and livelihoods depend. The virtual location of the crisis, exposing the abstract quality of digitised money, compounded people’s feelings of helplessness. This week many TSB customers were locked out of their bank accounts due to the botched introduction of a new IT system. That journey is thrilling when it works but terrifying when it fails. These narrative connections are especially important when so much of our activity is migrating into a digital realm. The circular face recalls the sundial, the pre-modern parcelling of the Earth’s rotation into even portions. The ticking hands express a behind-the-scenes mechanism based on physical laws harnessed to precision. It is as a bridge to ancient systems for organising the world. Only with practice does this awesome mental feat come to feel easy.īut the persistence of analogue timekeeping has another more subtle function. Reading an analogue clock is a cognitive workout, requiring attribution of different values to the same 12 symbols, interpreted on three parallel planes – seconds, minutes, hours. And rightly so, because of the computational gymnastics involved. Telling the time by a pattern of hands on a dial is part of the primary school curriculum.
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