Analog clocks intuitively show the passage of time and relative position, making it easier to understand the rhythm of daily life. While digital watches offer precision, analog watches convey a more approximate sense of time through visual perception.
Why are analog watches more popular than digital watches?
Why are analog watches more popular than digital watches? I think it’s a no-brainer: for many people, digital watches are perceived as tools that tell the time accurately, but analog watches offer so much more. In particular, the character and visual beauty of an analog watch’s representation of time makes it a small work of art in its own right. We need to deeply understand the essential difference between the two and their approach to time. While digital is all about “precision,” analog is all about “overall flow” and “relative sense of time. Rather, the question we should be asking in this day and age is, “How did digital watches manage to infiltrate analog watches?
But many people don’t think this way. They think that the question we should be asking is, “Why is analog surviving? I would like to question this. Why are analog watches more popular than digital watches? I believe it’s because analog watches are better at what they do as watches. People tend to think that the function of a watch is simply to show us a number like 00:00, but the true function of a watch is to allow us to have an “awareness of time”. Time is the concept of dividing the day into regular intervals so that when we do something, we know when it starts and when it ends, and how long it takes. Now let’s apply this to our daily lives.
The functional advantages of analog watches
The sense of time we get from analog watches is more than just knowing the hours and minutes. When the hour and minute hands of an analog watch are at a specific position, we get a sensory understanding of “oh, it’s around this time of day”. This gives us an intuitive sense of how we’re spending our time in the flow of the day. For example, the position of the hour and minute hands between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. has been imprinted in our brains as the angle that symbolizes a busy morning. This is perceived by most people as the time to get ready in the morning, while the angle between 6 and 7 in the evening is associated with the evening hours and the end of the day. In this way, analog clocks provide a visual representation of more than just numbers, allowing us to tie our daily rhythms to the clock.
Differences in intuitive perception of time
First, a clock tells us what time of day it is at this moment. This is something we’ve learned over time, and it’s something we remember sensually. For example, we associate a day’s routine with a time zone: “I wake up at 6:30am, shower at 7am, go to work at 7:30am, eat lunch at 12:30pm, and leave work at 6pm.” Second, analog clocks intuitively tell us the time interval between one point in time and another. Third, it gives us a visual reminder of how much time we have until we need to do something.
Here are some examples Let’s say it’s 4:27 on your digital clock. After a while, you look at the time again and it’s 5:13. With a digital watch, you can see the exact numbers, but you can’t visually feel the gaps, so you don’t get a good sense of the time. On an analog watch, you can easily recognize how much time has passed by looking at the distance the hour and minute hands have traveled. If you picture the hour and minute hands at approximately 4:30 and 5:15, you know that about 45 minutes have passed. Here’s another example. You have an urgent task to finish by 6:00. On a digital clock, the current time is 5:37, and to calculate the time remaining on this clock, you need to subtract 37 from 60. On an analog clock, however, you can see at a glance how close you are to your target time of 6:00, which makes the pressure feel real. This shows that analog clocks make us more naturally aware of specific time intervals.
The essential difference between digital and analog
Recognizing time isn’t just about knowing a number, it’s about knowing where that time is in relation to other times of day or the flow of the day as a whole. In this sense, digital clocks, with their four numerical digits, make it difficult to understand the relative position of time. We usually calculate numbers using the decimal system, but watches use the hexadecimal system, which doesn’t make sense and requires recalculation. On an analog watch, the hour, minute, and second hands go around in a cycle, and this makes us naturally aware of the relativity of time, which means we can immediately recognize where we are in the cycle of a day.
The sensory benefits of analog watches and their historical significance
Despite these clear differences in functionality between analog and digital watches, and despite the fact that we can feel them, we tend to assume that digital watches are better because they provide “accurate time”. This is a result of our modern society’s overemphasis on ‘accuracy’ and ‘efficiency’. However, reducing the function of time to a precise number is an overly narrow definition of time. Analog clocks are losing ground to digital devices, but they have a special value in reminding us of the natural passage of time. In the digital age, pausing to savor the value of analog reminds us to reflect on the meaning of time and how we perceive it.
An analog watch is more than just a machine that tells time; it’s a visual representation of the rhythm of life. There are moments in our daily lives when we need to calculate the exact time, but most of the time, a rough idea of the passage of time is enough. The reason digital watches are perceived as superior is because we’ve become addicted to the value of technology and cutting-edge, and have forgotten the inherent value of analog watches. Hopefully, the value of analog watches will continue to be appreciated by many people in the future.
