[Telaneo]

I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.

[inimino]

> I convert that to digital time in my head

What? They are the same thing.

[Telaneo]

Not to other people I've talked to.

I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.

[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag

[wkat4242]

Totally agree. I do the same.

The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.

[1718627440]

Not really, analog clocks are readable over a much longer distance, because seeing an angle needs much less information, than parsing glyphs.

[Telaneo]

Tell that to my glasses. At any sort of distance where this could be an advantage, the clock is just going to be a blur anyway.

Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?

[1718627440]

Interesting, I also have glasses and am short-sighted, but for me light-emitting objects blur much faster than solid objects. It depends very much on the light type, frequency and brightness, but most LEDs, which most digital clocks use, tend to have an overgleaming effect, which makes them unreadable due to being a block of light.

> Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?

All the time? Being in a train station, sitting in a (class)room (during exam), in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.

[1718627440]

To me time is somehow both, but more so an analog thing. It is a multimodular linear scale, that turns logarithmic, the moment I focus on any specific point.