Here’s my considered response.

Perhaps the approximity of an online interaction is created by the giving on oneself at the time of typing? The application of this energy is residual in the words long after their creation and available to any who would read it.

This is the same bond that can be sustained during long term separation during past periods of war or turmoil. Partners and families had no communication save a letter sent across the seas.

If people do not give some of themselves and focus their energy during an asynchronous online social interaction, then it will only be a time waster. Nothing will change in anyone’s life.

I would posit that if ‘mitsein’ is missing in someone’s life, then they are likely to experience ongoing psychological distress. However, perhaps the approximity of The Net is enough to make life livable, for some.

The first is to signal what a conversation is. At conferences, participants make up hashtags to coalesce the backchannel. Would this take hold in less formal conversations, is there any way to make the on-the-fly identification of a conversation to be not socially awkward? Many tools have subject threading – perhaps an affordance could build on the subject of a thread and allow participants to link another stream into the same thread.

The second is an affordance to explicitly curate a stream convergence on the fly. The Friendfeed model, is to unthinkingly dump all the flow from an object type into one big stream – all of your flickr photos and last.fm movies and delicious updates into an amazon of flow. The Facebook/Youtube/Blip model is for individually-based, object-based sharing. There is a video of cats that I must share with my friends right now. But the curatorial – or “tummling” opportunity is to select items from other streams and bring them in, in the flow. For this conversation about a movie, here are related updates, now, and the thread will flow together for a moment before separating.

This are science fiction UI ideas at the moment, I am not sure how in practice they might work, just trying to flesh out the picture.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jeroenvangeel: New at Johnny: Social media, converging streams? http://is.gd/4KXLq...