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Phatics and the Design of Community - notes

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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"!

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