Clocks, Calendars, and Claims: On the Uses of Time in Social Problems Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Social problems claims use rhetoric and other tools of symbolic communication to persuade audiences that some troubling condition is important and needs to be addressed. This paper considers how common measures of social time are employed as rhetorical elements in social problems claims. It is argued that time units operate as temporal frames that contribute to the structure of claims, articulate core meanings, and facilitate spread into relevant public arenas. A typology of three general ways that social problems claims incorporate temporal frames is offered; these include metered time units, attention maintenance mechanisms, and epochal markers.

KEYWORDS:

• Social problems
• claims
• rhetoric
• time
• temporal frames

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An exception is Adorjan and Kelly (2022) whose focus is the “hermeneutics of temporality” – how constructionists adopt the time frameworks used by claimsmakers.

2. See Adorjan and Kelly (2022) for discussion of how constructions about time lend credibility to claims and claimsmakers.

3. The Bulletin’s founding editors have explicitly stated that the clock imagery was designed to “suggest that we [don’t] have much time left to get atomic weapons under control” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2021b).

4. Clockfaces can even be used in ways that seem divorced from conventional timekeeping. The some QAnon claims use clocks as a graphical device to show links between seemingly unrelated phenomena (Hannah 2021).

5. Instead of the minutes-to-midnight frame used in the Doomsday Clock, the Climate Clock uses the notions of a DEADLINE (the number of years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds left to “achieve zero emissions” [when we were drafting this paper, there were about six and a half years remaining]) and a LIFELINE (“% of the world’s energy from renewables” [a bit over 12% when we checked]) (Climate Clock 2021).

6. In other cases, claimsmakers don’t count down to future turning points, but their logic is similar. Thus, demographers have offered various projections for the date when the U.S. will become “majority-minority” (i.e., when whites will constitute less than half of the nation’s population). Critics have suggested that these claims substitute bureaucrats’ racial categories for those actually used by the people being tallied (Alba 2020).

7. Pink October began in the 1990ʹs as a campaign promoting increased awareness, education, and fundraising for breast cancer screening and research (Carneiro 2021). The success of early campaigns lead other claimsmakers, advocacy groups, and corporations to adopt pink imagery and place their issues on the October calendar to capitalize on the sustained public attention directed toward women’s health issues during that time (c.f., King 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Monahan

Brian Monahan is a professor of Sociology at Baldwin Wallace University. His research interests include social problems, mass communication, and the cultural forces that underpin social control.

Joel Best

Joel Best is a professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. Most of his research concerns the social construction of social problems. His most recent books are Social Problems, 4th ed. (Norton, 2021) and Is That True? Critical Thinking for Sociologists (University of California Press, 2021).