Perceived Collective Continuity: Seeing Groups as Temporally Enduring Entities

My social existence not only puts me in contact with a co-existing multiplicity of contemporaries; it connects me with a peculiar form of temporal continuity … which runs from predecessors to successors. This sequence extends beyond the boundaries of my life, both into the past before my birth and into the future after my death. (David Carr, 1986, p. 113)