Showing all posts tagged: time is the new space
Kate Niederhofer via Social Abacus
I’ve blogged before about Wegner’s notion of the transactive memory, a concept I love about how we get information into our heads (encode), arrange and add context (store), and eventually access when needed (retrieve) *as a group*. In my mind, this is underpinning of the success that Twitter is. It also helps explain this tendency we have to read-and-share as a means to coordinate our social network. That is, by sharing certain content with specific people, we more effectively encode, store, and retrieve information as a social network. Think of it like really effective curating. Simply by sharing links, we’re making sense out of our expanding networks.
But something else happens when we read-and-share. We create virtual spaces. As the great sociologist Ray Oldenburg might say, we create “a third place.” Places, really. Salons. Sharing links creates places for us to meet and talk about our shared interests. Traditionally a “third place” is a place of refuge. It’s not your home, not your job. So these virtual salons we create let us escape— or augment our reality— while performing social network maintenance: clustering and categorizing our network.
Yes, I believe that by curating we are sharing more than links, although it’s not a space that we define, but a way to share time, to still the time we are in, and share it with others, who experience it themselves.
We are sharing experiences: Time is the new space.
