We still don't quite have our finger on what qualities a temporal form brings to the discusion. e eliminated the topical order but now find the temporal entwined with spatial order. Here are a couple of examples of alternate posting (AB AB AB...). One is a
chat and the other a
conversation or discussion. Of necessity, ordinal posting, or use of the space in an ordinal manner will be accompanied with temporal elements.
One thing - our lonely little timestamp is not noticeably pronounced in the post frame. It does not even get a bold type. What if it appeared as a link? So we could go to every other post that was identically timestamped? Scrolling through the thread, I could click a timestamp and be taken to our search engine that would return results with the timestamp emphasized. The timestamp would also appear in the search field for a quick edit.
So let's take a timestamp that includes seconds, say,
12:09:27. All posts with that timestamp would appear. To expand my search I could backspace and remove the last second
12:09:2 and our search engine would give us all of the posts that occurred from 12:09:20 until 12:09:29. To expand it further, I could backspace again
12:09: and I would get everything in that minute 12:09:00 to 12:09:59. I could expand the search further by editing the timestamp -
12:0 would return everything stamped from 12:00:00 to 12:59:59 (everything within the 12th hour).
But what would we do with this information? What does it tell us?
I am still on the qualities of temporal order and I do feel that I am getting closer. Time is a measuring device. What do we measure with time?