Time and Memory in Social Media

Abstract

As I briefly outlined in the section ‘Thomson: mediation and space time’ in Chapter 3, the ways in which mediated messages can persist through time and the consequences of this have received less attention than the way that mediation enables such messages to travel through space. This is of particular concern because as Mayer-Schönberger suggests (2009), in some respects it may be more difficult to craft messages appropriately to address future audiences than it is to address geographically disparate ones. While you can develop some understanding of present audiences anywhere, the future is generally to a large extent unknowable.