Skip to main content

Phatics and the Design of Community - notes

Image
By
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 character limits, social convention, or an unwillingness to talk about emotion rarely add “I’m very busy, enjoying this work but starting to get stressed, and feel a bit under the weather.”
These things seem to offer a few simple ideas about the question: how should we study phatics?  The idea that we could do simple human-computer interaction experiments and get somewhere is worth considering (at some point).  In the mean time it is also interesting to think about how this "virtual" community of scholars works -- with different people citing each other and reading each others' papers, say five years after the fact, but not necessarily having direct conversations with each other.  (In a typical "meta" reflection, something we've talked about a while ago, I wonder if we could ping a bunch of the people who are studying phatics and invite them to collaborate, and what that would lead to.)

On another note: One thing I like about the student essay was that it mentions "negative phatics", which I rarely see mentioned, so that I sometimes have wondered if I made it up.
The purpose may be to prolong communication, to discontinue communication, to check whether the communication channel is operational, to attract attention, or to confirm continued attention.
- quoting from "Phatic Interactions: Feeling Aware and Being Connected".  So I guess it's a recognized "thing"!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Metacommunicative cues

By Semiophrenic
In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a
7 comments
Read more

Extra channels

By Semiophrenic
In the following, I would like to clarify the connection between channel and context and concomitantly the difference between metachannel and parachannel . Paul Kockelman urges us "to notice the fundamental similarity between codes and channels" (2011: 725) but instead of that purported fundamental similarity points out the contrast between them. I argue that context , or objects and states of affairs (Bühler 2011[1934]: 35), demonstrate a closer relationship to channel than to code. This is largely because the first three fundamental relations, sender or subject , context or object , and receiver or addressee , belong to Bühler's original organon model while code , contact and message , which were previously implicit in the organon model, are made explicit as additions to the model by Jakobson (1985[1976c]). Thus the most productive approach would be to pair a component from the original organon model with an additional component in the language functions model.
3 comments
Read more