Within society, time is commonly used as an index. Some event can be said to happen or have happened at a certain point in time, or is scheduled to happen after a specific period of time. To make this reliable, time is thus considered as a steady continuum that can be referenced whenever the need arises. Einstein’s theory of relativity changed the secure notion of time, albeit without much social consequence. As society does not travel at speeds approaching that of light, the effects of relativity are negligible for social practice. And, after all, Einstein did not challenge the underlying notion of the form of time as a continuum, rather, he postulated rules as to how this continuum relates to other continua.
How, then, is time used within society? One obvious example are clocks. Their face with the constellation of its hands or digits are a communicational offer that can be referenced in further communication, even though it does need a contextual interpretation. For example, when reading a 12 hour clock, the observer needs to provide the additional information of a.m. or p.m., which he had to derive from a different source. Often, this will be clear to the observer because of the events that preceded the reading of the clock, e.g. having been to work already without a night’s sleep in between. This may seem trivial, but remember that the ability to observe such a sequence of events is a common initial step in a medical sanity check.
Clocks can be thought of as devices designed for the sole purpose of creating a defined sequence of events and counting them, such that the score is always visible on their outside. The events are mechanical or astro-mechanical movements, or samples of battery-powered oscillations of a quartz crystal, or the measured decay of atoms. Regardless of the actual device, society is mainly interested in the score, i.e. that which we consider the actual point in time, or the delta in between different scores, which we consider a period of time. Either way, the readings used in these processes are samples of other processes designed to be read by society itself. The scores kept, even by a sun clock, are based on social conventions of number systems and of linearity in counting. Clocks can, then, be described as devices which are part of and extend their creator’s observation of what time should mean for society.
If we broaden our perspective beyond just clocks, it will become apparent that society in general is based on the sequentiality of events. Causalities are constructed because certain events follow others, with expectations towards specific sequences. Returning to the notion of distinctions, we can postulate that in general, observations of distinctions are expressed not all at once, but in sequence. Certainly, some distinctions can perhaps be observed together, contextualizing each other, but any expressions of such constellations are expected to be followed by others, just as others preceded them. In society as the autopoiesis of communication, observation follows observation, and some observations happen to reference certain scores treated as accounts of time. In this broader perspective, it would be oversimplifying to speak of clocks and the society that built them as keeping time. Instead, the events, i.e. the observations being expressed within communication, would have to be understood as the source events generating time for society. We will continue to analyze the actual functional processes involved at a later time.