Gravity7: Social Interaction Design SxD By Adrian Chan

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It’s a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do.

A piece by Tim Leberecht reminded me of Canetti this morning. Got me thinking about converging streams and how conversational media sometimes produce that effect of being together at the same time.

Which is really a matter of paying attention at the same time, more than of being together, for the medium only connects across our individual spaces and times. The Germans have a nice word for the sense of being with others: “Mitsein.” “Being with” is contrasted with contiguity, or being “next to” or adjacent to one another. We’re not in one another’s stream of consciousness when we are just next to one another; we are when we are “with” one another.

There is no “Mitsein” online, but there is a sense of something that approximates it. But it comes not through being together. It comes through talk. Talk that indicates we are here and now, paying attention. The response is its signal flare.

In a medium so perfectly suited for a kind of self-talk, or talking aloud in front of others, it might be strange that there are occasions when we get a sense of Mitsein. Approximated, of course, in the medium’s own peculiar kind of proximity, or proximate intimacy. An “approximity” perhaps. A blend of the real and the imagined, of memory and expectation.

Verbal communication, not the language of bodies sharing space as in Crowds and Power, produces this approximation online. The kind of talk that appeals for a response. The kind of talk that runs out a line with hooks.

Hooks are important for conversation. I much prefer dialog to monolog. Hooks, in the form of “and you?” strung out along the thread of a good conversation are what call me into the world of people. I listen, I pay more attention, when conversation is drawn by the two of us. I like interruptions and clipped sentences, finishing one another’s thoughts, and mutual effort of threading out a good line together.

I wonder if the brief moments of simultaneity that pass now and then across our webbed social spaces will result in stream convergence. If the community of talk media might lie not in distributing messages but in the sense of sharing time. And if the point of doing more to make streams — of messages and update and activities — more interesting is also to create more hooks by which to connect them. If streams, like people, not only want the greater flow of the river but also the shared flow of time.