Tag Archives: social currency

I like Jack Shafer and this piece of his has some real resonance for me. He talks about how newspapers traditionally offered readers a form of social currency (explained more below) that's increasingly being lost to social networks such as Facebook. Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition. The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans.