ABSTRACT
It is very difficult to appreciate the conditions and assumptions on which we base our vision of the world. We must recall that it was only in 1913 that the first time signal was broadcast from the Eiffel Tower, enabling twentyfive nations to synchronise the official ‘time’ they had decided to relate to the Greenwich meridian (Kern 1983:12-14). In 1881, the phonograph and the camera changed people’s experience of the past by making it alive in the present, obliging psychologists to revise the concept of memory (Kern 1983: 37-41). The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was the first disaster broadcast directly by telegraph and thus known about while it was happening on the Atlantic (Kern 1983:64-6). The first telephone line connecting the two coasts of the United States was inaugurated in 1915 (Kern 1983:214). Since our perception of time and space is conditioned by radical transformations that have occurred in a surprisingly brief and recent space of time, we can begin to understand why it possesses peculiarities and implications that the perceptions of other groups cannot have.
