Western Time

Mid-century modernism helped confirm and create a new way of thinking about time. It is characteristic of First World, industrial cultures to think of time as something open-ended. This marks them as very different from traditional, face-to-face societies, who are inclined to think of time as something repetitive, redundant, in a word, circular. Western time is a bullet train. It hurtles away from the present, taking us with it as it goes.
--Grant McCracken