Phatic Workshop

The majority of deficits related to the parietal lobe belong to the category of phatic (amnestic aphasia, alexia, agrafia, and acalculia), gnostic and practical deficits.  Deficits in phatic functions develop with damage to the posterior portion of the parietal lobe in the dominant hemisphere and clinical pictures of gnostic functions are not strictly related to the dominant hemisphere. - From "Clinical Rehabilitation" by Pavel Kolar, et al., p. 95 Here the word " phatic " seems to mostly describe linguistic behavior (vocabulary, text understanding, ability to write); the acalculia case seems slightly different from the others.  All of these issues have to do with the parietal lobe, which includes a somatosensory cortex , and which has strong connections to the thalamus. During maturation of the parietal lobe centers, one's body awareness (somatesthesia) is formed, as well as, its relation to the surroundings. Even so it is clearly related to language as

HEY, ANYTIME. No biggie. Don't worry about it. Psycholinguistic research reveals that we choose our gratitude acknowledgements pragmatically, proving that such language isn't phatic (devoid of content) after all . University of Western Ontario psychologist Albert Katz suggests men, in particular, may use "anytime" to convey doiminance by signaling they have sufficient means to do the favor again in the future.  -- Conrad McCallum, Psychology Today, March 1, 2008 (emphasis added) I'm assuming that we would refute the idea that "phatic communication is devoid of content".  Then again, when I just tried to explain what I'm doing research on to the research librarian at the BL, I immediately put it in almost the same simplistic terms. 1. " How are you doing? " 2. " Oh really badly, actually. " 3. " Gosh, what's wrong? " 4. " I just stubbed my toe! " My claim was that Locutions 1-3 are all &q

Logos is always a dia-logos within which those who enter the dialogue co-individuate themselves -- trans-form themselves, learn something -- by dia-loguing.  This co-individuation can result in discord, in which case each participant is individuated with the other, but against the other -- as occurs, for example, in a game of tennis or chess.  But co-individuation can also result in accord or agreement, in which case it enables the production of a concept that is shared by the interlocutors, who thus together produce a new locution through which they agree on a meaning -- which, in Platonic dialogue, must be produced in the form of a definition corresponding to the question ‘ ti esti? ’ -- "What Makes Life Worth Living", p. 18 A bit later on, on page 19, he continues: "It was Jacques Derrida who opened up the question of pharmacology -- within which the hypomnesic appears as that which constitutes the condition of the anamnesic." The longer quote above

The relatively lonely, isolated status of most mass shooters means any community they interact with and any media they consume will have an outsized impact on their psyche. -- http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-mass-shooters-are-not-kind-crazy-you-think/ This article reminds me of the Bruce Alexander thinking about addiction.  It's interesting because it draws parallels between the people who "self-radicalize" and then act alone, and the people who are coached or goaded into becoming violent either through local connections or via online social media.  Regarding the latter: ... And there's a reason almost every issue of Dabiq includes a fawning story about the actions of some suicide bomber: They want anyone contemplating an attack to know their actions will be remembered and celebrated. You're targeting people with a strong sense of humiliation and no sense of community, and promising them great power and social status -- the two things they've never

Our current plan for the survey paper revolves around the idea of a "meta-analysis".  There are 35 pages of abstracts -- about 100 abstracts in total ("all papers related to phatics available through EBSCO" - email, 26 Oct 2015). Part of the plan would be to locate them according to their place in the Malinowski, Jakobson, and La Barre legacies, perhaps developing a "phylogeny" rather than a "taxonomy".  This would show something about how the term evolved.  (Note, the EBSCO papers seem to mostly be recent ones, and we may need to enlarge the corpus to be more accurate as regards earlier dates, but there is certainly plenty there to give us a start.) The issue on my mind comes from our own latest paper draft (edited 29 October 2015): "Once we acknowledge the immense role of phatic communion [and phatic communication, and other phatic behavior] we are faced with the difficult question of how to study it."  ​ Sorting papers out based

care of /r/rickandmorty

I just remembered the title of this book by danah boyd and co-authors.  Here's some summary information.  Possibly good source of data. Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. - abstract of report Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital medi

Photo of a Romanesco from the journal where the paper is published I've been looking around at some of the secondary sources on Simondon.  This paper, by Andrew Iliadis, seems like a reasonable short summary of things that could be relevant for our work here.  The main idea is a contrast between Simondon's notion of information as that which gives rise to form -- information "as" reality in other words -- and the simplified perspective from e.g. Shannon where the problem is how to move a "message" from one point to another, leaving aside how that message will be interpreted once it arrives.  Shannon said: Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.  These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. In contrast to this, Simondon deals with issues of morpho-genesis.  It seems to me that in this way of looking at thin

The only thing I really got done this week was a throwaway project of translating the abstracts of newest psychology articles into Estonian. I'm not exactly sure why I undertook doing it, perhaps to improve my academic Estonian, perhaps to find out what contemporary social psychology is dealing with. In any case I found one article whose example I consider worth emulating: Carter, Dorothy R.; Leslie A. DeChurch; Michael T. Braun and Noshir S. Contractor 2015. Social Network Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Conceptual Review. Journal of Applied Psychology 100(3): 597-622. Contemporary definitions of leadership advance a view of the phenomenon as relational, situated in specific social contexts, involving patterned emergent processes, and encompassing both formal and informal influence. Paralleling these views is a growing interest in leveraging social network approaches to study leadership. Social network approaches provide a set of theories and methods with which to art

Historically aesthetics has focussed on the philosophy of art, on the nature of beauty, and on the character of the experience of both. This tended to represent the aesthetic as somewhat rare and elevated above ordinary experience and practice. In recent decades the subject has broadened with attention being given to a wider diversity of art forms including conceptual art and land art, computer art, the cinema, and video arts. In addition there has been a growth of interest in environmental aesthetics. A more limited development has been the recognition of the ubiquity of the aesthetic within the fabric of everyday life as for example in work on the aesthetics of the built environment, of personal spaces, and on the aesthetic aspects of social life. Papers are invited that explore either the general idea of an aesthetics of everyday life, or particular topics within this general area. Of particular interest are papers relating the aesthetics of everyday life to issues in

There is a spectrum of different ways of understanding what information is. These range from quantitative analyses–which treat information in terms of uninterpreted patterns of data–to qualitative analyses, which treat information semantically, as a matter of meaningful structures. What is the relation between these different approaches? Are there invariants underlying the different uses of the term ‘information’ in disciplines such as computer science, economics, genetics, neuroscience, physics, and statistics? Is there some sort of logic, which transcends these different uses? How, for example, are we able to transform quantitative information deriving from meteorological sensors into the sorts of qualitative information that is useful for human decision-making? According to Shannon and Weaver, information refers to the degree of uncertainty present in a message. Does a view along these lines provide a viable starting point for a unified analysis of information, or mus

«After many months of an apparently futile search, I dreamt of an equilateral pyramid. After awaking, I interpreted the dream as follows: An equilateral pyramid has four basic angles. My group work is based on four elements.  They are interrelated, and my hypothesis is that they should be treated equally.» “I”: A single individual, “We”: The group, “It”: The theme or assignment the group is concerned with, and “Globe”: The environment which the gathering takes place in — both the direct surroundings, weather, timing constraints, and the whole universe. ~~ There is a similar breakdown due to Ken Wilber who writes about "I/We/Its/It" in Wilber, K. (1997). An integral theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4(1), 71–92. and another related sequence "Socialization/Externalization/Combination/Internalization" due to Nonaka and Takeuchi, in Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create

If we posit that our "phatic functions" are useful for telling stories, then it is worthwhile to note this little tidbit on greek grammar: The aorist and the imperfect are the standard tenses for telling a story. The ordinary distinction between them is between an action considered as a single undivided event and the action as a continuous event. Thus, for example, a process as a whole can be described in the imperfect, while the individual steps in that process will be aorist. [...] The other chief narrative use of the aorist is to express events before the time of the story. - Wikipedia [Cyrus] was playing in this village... in the road with others of his age. The boys while playing chose to be their king this one.... Then he assigned some of them to the building of houses, some to be his bodyguard, one doubtless to be the King's Eye; to another he gave the right of bringing him messages;.... [Here the imperfect ἔπαιζε "was playing" is the whole proces

Found this  four-page article from a well-known human-computer interaction conference ( CHI ) which is mentioned in a succinct student essay  about phatic communication.  It talks about the non-dichotomous relationship between strong and weak ties, among other things.  It's interesting as an example of a proposed approach to studying phatics empirically. Outcomes will be directed toward the general application of relational-cultural theory, to critique the interface design of sociable features in systems. From googling around it seems the work is still developing.  The paper is mentioned in another CHI paper (the lead author is someone I've co-authored with a while ago as part of a multi-author meta collaboration, and cited recently in writing on serendipity).  The inclusion of phatics in this paper seems to be a bit of an aside, but they raise some interesting points: We might say “Walking from airport, train is delayed, late for meeting,” but whether because of chara

I'm in Thessaloniki and I've taken the opportunity to query one of my Greek colleagues about the root words of "phatic". She takes it beyond "tell" and "show" to "light". So the phenomenon is somehow a "coming to light."

A List of Keywords and List of Names would be two wonderful magical devices that could help us navigate into this area. ( Joe ) This is a good idea. I've been considering doing something like it for my own blog for a while now because it's getting more and more difficult to navigate through all the clatter and clutter of phatic this and phatic that. My thought was to create a quasi-chronological listing of all sources that say something significant about phatics. I'm sure I'll get around to that when I've exhausted the materials I'm currently working on, but for our current paper I think a list of main terms could actually be useful. Here's a preliminary list from the top of my head: phatic communion (Malinowski) phatic function (Jakobson) phatic communication (La Barre) phatic image (Virilio) phatic text (Schandorf) phatic negotiation (Coupland, Coupland & Robinson) phatic interpretation (Žegarac & Clark) phatic technology (Vetere et

I couldn't think of a way of inserting my own thoughts into your structure without making it too clunky. I'll present my interpretations, and then we could probably proceed with what you suggested in your draft's comments: that we break each item into a different post. OR we could make a Google Document and attempt co-writing (not just drafting, but actually writing) the paper so that each item takes one page. If we can agree on the approximate content of each point, we can probably start hammering out a single page about each. A 8-page article is already an article. But we can go through several rounds of elaboration of this structure until we have a consensus about what we want to say. So here are my thougths: Characters in a comfort zone . In academic writing it's probably not that important to introduce ourselves, but we can definitely add a footnote about how we ended up entangled in phatics. (It would have to be pretty formal and concise.) That is, we need a foot

As to the assertion by Daniel Chandler that «The phatic function excludes as well as includes certain readers. Those who share the code are members of the same 'interpretive community'», I'm not so sure.  I sn't there also a case to be made for a phatic side to activities like de-coding, de-territorializing, rationalization (and the corresponding re-coding etc.)?   In short I think this is another case of a scholar seeing only one side to phatics. This relates to the tension between "tribal" and "intellectual". To paraphrase Eugene Holland, this would have to do with the idea that value does not inhere in objects but is subjectively bestowed.  But it goes further than that.  «By locating aesthetic value solely in the *activity* of poetic appropriation and distancing  himself from the objects of that appropriation, Baudelaire comes to occupy the position of what Jacques Attali calls the "designer" or "programmer," whose basi

For example, I think that Deleuze and Guattari's  schizoanalysis  is an earlier almost-correlate of our ι/ς/κ/ρ functions, but the presentation, at least on the Wikipedia page, is almost completely inscrutable. In my recent writing about  serendipity , I developed another four-step process that again seems related. (See image.) I'm not sure if we should try to deal with these issues (which I think we could do if we want to) or if we should just let them be a somewhat confusing and mucky side of the Wild Wood, and get on with other things. The bigger question here is how to "constrain" the search: what are our priorities in this phase?

ι-function , specifically related to establishing a channel Schimel: Opening Harmon: YOU.  [For now, let's start briefly with "us", our research and background, although we would probably jump in with a real protagonist later, namely, The Reader , or a stand-in for that person. Another important character to introduce here is Phatics , which will go on a journey in the paper along with the reader. We have through one path or another found out about phatics, semiotics, 20th century philosophy, and related fields.  We've taken different approaches to these topics (e.g. culture studies, computer science), but they are inherently interdisciplinary areas.  Our sources of Data should be revealed.  According to Schimel, the data provides all of the "characters" in scientific writing.  We might do something like an "A/B" story structure to deal with different journeys taken by these different characters.] The Reader Phatics We/Us Data NEED.

I'm reading A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The Modernist as Postmodernist . It includes the following useful tidbit: According to Jakobson, the metaphoric axis of discourse is based on the identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning "in absentia" (as Saussure put it) "outside" the linear time of utterance. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification "within" time--that is, in the duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. Jakobson thus concludes that every sign used in discourse has "two sets of

As if out of the blue I am forced to reconsider the pair of terms *sociopetal*: ( of a grouping of people ) arranged so that each can see and interact with the others and sociofugal : ( of a grouping of people ) arranged so that each can maintain some privacy from the others Because in my latest review (of Phatic Technologies) I wrote: If "phatic" is generally understood as an emphasis on sociality then forms of terminating communication (i.e. acts like leave-taking , parting and, on the Internet, blocking ) are naturally pushed out of the picture. For further research this necessitates a separate category of phatic investigation focused on unsociability, ungregariousness, avoidance, absence, shyness, social withdrawal, isolation, etc. which for classification purposes could be called minus-phatics (there is ample research in social sciences for this avenue). It just so happened that I had to look up the word psychedelic , which I knew to mean "mind manifes

I was a bit concerned that maybe my etymological investigations had gone down the wrong path, but it looks like things are OK. From "The Sophist", Focus Philosophical Library, Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem (trans.).

I'm currently writing my "Review of phatic technologies" and some moments from the quotes you brought out from Baudrillard (1976) in the tactile and the digital are not unconnected with the issues of phatic technologies. We definitely need to develop our ideas about the social power aspects of phatic communion, i.e. how "staying in touch" has become a control mechanism. Hopefully papers on phatics will yield ways to approach this (thus far my expectations in that regard have been more than exceeded). It also suits me well because the topic of "regulation" is something I'm very keen on. In any case, Baudrillard's comments on the neutralization of content through the question/answer and stimulus/response form and how the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter the cycles of this form can be tied in with the advent of the so-called "database culture" that Vincent Miller ("New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture", 2008

From Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), pp. 61, 63, 64-65, 67-68. I was reminded of this passage by something Rasmus wrote: " I'd like to convey that one of the prime characterstics of Phatica is that s/he is dedicated to taking over the field of communication. Most everything phatics has to do with can be, and is, elsewhere discussed with different terms. Phatica is constantly conquering foreign territory. " I replied: " I could also mention a critique from Baudrillard, who talked about how modern communication has become entirely tactical  -- similar root word to tactile -- and he would say that 'staying in touch' has morphed into a more sinister control mechanism. Not sure if we want to bring in this sort of philosophical polemic but if we do, I can dig it up. " Dig Up Her Bones by MoonsScythe It was a really tangential riff, but I'm glad that I brought it up now that I've read Rasmus's Review of John Laver