The Death of Time

I have gotten used to the Death of Distance--that I can monitor instanteiously the power output of my home photovoltaic system from Hong Kong, and that I can listen to Red Sox games rolling across the Dakota prairies. Of course, the death of distance cuts both ways. I can bring my local environment with me, but most of the time I opt to live in a generic average American culture, listening to CNN of MSNBC on my satellite radio, with no sense of the happenings or gossip in Boston.

Now time is dying too. Because newspapers are now a continuous process, and the daily paper is just a snapshot of that river at an arbitrary moment in time, the Boston Globe has all but eliminated use of the terms "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow," which used to be mandatory. Copy editors have to retrain themselves to restore what previously they were trained to eliminate. As the Globe explains,

The one print exception to the rule applies to headlines. Constructions such as “Crucial vote on debt limit today” are a newspaper staple. The “today” conveys an immediacy and often an urgency that we don’t want to lose. We suspect that “Crucial vote on debt limit Wednesday” would not rivet anyone’s attention.

So it goes.