Mark Stouffer posted on March 03, 2010 06:13
Real-time is a term bandied about when speaking of Lost. Like you even know what it is.
When the characters of Lost were first experiencing time travel we referred to it as them “being in the past”. We might say, “Now they are in the past and so anything they do will affect the future.” But we didn’t quite have terms for it yet. Then some episodes included sequences where you were not sure what time they were in. Which past? "Are they in the seventies?" "For a second I thought they were in the past…" Or in the case of the introduction of Desmond on the island, “Are we on the right channel?”
But now we have binary time. Two time-lines fluctuating in opposite polarities like a giant electron in Schrodinger’s famous equation, or something. We might call it island time and real time. We might compare the progression of events between the two time-lines. We might say, “his brother is married to Nadia!” to our inattentive and negligent friend who has stepped out of the room. And they might yell back, “in real-time, I mean normal-time?”.
These terms help us group time-lines into useful clusters.
If you text your friends during Lost and you pause your DVR you may not want to hear the reckless theories of your I-told-you-so opponent. You may send them a message saying, “I am off real-time.” If you are using t9 you may leave off the hyphen. But the term is there. Just like when speaking about the dual time-lines in lost. When you are watching live are you on island time? Or real time?
You go off island time every time you pause your DVR. Because Lost’s time-line is an analogy for that most efficient and ancient means of transmitting information; writing, which transmits information through time.
When you read that information you will be in real time. But the focus of your attention will be in the time the writer wrote it or the time of it’s subject’s sequence of events. Stories always involve sequences. One thing happens after another. Sequential order. But they also involve series. Two things are happening at the same time. But they always tell you about the simultaneous events at different times. So at the end of the story you may be reading about the same events as at the beginning. It’s happened.