Pretty much every academic field I know of is fractal. It’s never just “I’m a scientist” — like, what would that even mean? You’re a biologist, a molecular biologist, a genomicist, a comparative genomicist. Or something. I’m not a comparative genomicist.
Linguistics is like this! One huge subfield of linguistics is called speech act theory. Speech act theory describes how words accomplish real actions in the world, rather than just describing states and objects in the world. A bet is a speech act. When you say you bet somebody $20, it’s the saying of it that makes it happen. Promises and apologies, also speech acts. In fact, there’s a twist ending in speech act theory that all words perform actions. One of the more salient takeaways of linguistics is that “actions speak louder than words” is total horseshit. Words are actions.
Conventional wisdom, and conventional corporate wisdom in particular, doesn’t want you to acknowledge this, probably because those engaged at the corporate level would rather be culpable for less than more. But I’m just spitballing here. In any case I think consumerism strongly encourages us to narrow the scope of “appropriate actions”: you are what you buy, you are your beauty or fitness routine, you are what you eat, you are the movies you see. You are not who you love. You are not what you feel. You are not what you say.
But who’s that on the top rope? It’s Roman Jakobson’s functions of language! These are the things that language can do — in a much more general way than “bet” and “promise.” Functions, not specific actions. For example, the referential action refers typical declarative sentences. “You are reading my blog.” “I’m wearing a gray hoodie.” “It did not rain today.” The metalingual function allows us to discuss language with language, like asking someone how to pronounce something.
Okay okay, let me get to what I actually came here to think about: the phatic function. It is speech for the sake of speech. To be more precise, it’s speech for the sake of speaking to somebody. “Hello” means nothing, describes nothing. All it does is open a channel of communication. “Goodbye” closes that channel. Public speakers deride the use of “um,” but it serves as an important placeholder in face-to-face conversation: um tells your partner that you still need the floor, it’ll just take you a minute to get your thoughts together.
Hello, goodbye, and ummmm are all phatic in a very narrow interpretation. They affect the pacing of a conversation. But unlike genomics, linguistic objects are open to many different kinds of interpretation. “lady through whose profound and fragile lips/the sweet small clumsy feet of April came” both refers to something — a quality of a person — and serves the poetic function — to convey the message in a beautiful way. Depending on context it could serve the metalinguistic function, too, if you’re repeating for someone who missed it the first time. Nothing is ever cut and dry.
When I talk to you, my words are also performing an action. I am saying whatever it is I’m saying, and I’m also saying “I want to be here, with you, talking to you.” Sometimes that message is very quiet. We can talk about what we want for dinner, and at the end we will have dinner. Other times, the phatic message is very loud. We are talking about the worst shaped video game console, we’re telling stories we know we’ve told before. Our words are a long umm to hold our place in conversation with each other.
This is sometimes called “grooming talk,” which I super hate. I think “small talk” works better. Calling talk small is the same dismissal as calling a novel a cell phone novel — but rather than fixating on smallness as the counterpoint to bigness, I like small talk as a counterpoint to “the conversation,” the giant ongoing discussion of trends, of who bought who and for how much, of what someone said and what none of us should ever say. A smaller world isn’t a bad one.
As Twitter continues to undergo disassembly at the whim of someone who has likely never held a meaningful conversation, big or small, I’ve been thinking of how the app served to gamify conversation. It invited everyone to the widest stage. It encouraged particular behaviors, meaning it discouraged other ones. Twitter, and all social media platforms, ask you for a part of yourself, not all of yourself. Quote Kate Lindsay, “Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Substack will forever own the parts of my personality that I’ve handed over to them, as do the platforms from my past: Facebook still claims the extroverted college student; Tumblr, the angsty, artsy teen; MySpace, the confused and flailing twelve year old who shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
Online talk provides a whole new set of strategies for disengaging with small talk: the Leave On Read, the “Forget” To Respond, the Like React, the Lurk. You never have to speak online if you don’t want to. And you may have plenty of reasons to not want to — believe me, I understand. At the same time, it means that our ability to phatically communicate hangs more in the balance than ever. Spend any amount of time in a Twitch chat and I think you’ll find people desperately wrenching to open a channel of conversation that can’t exist.
Jonathan Gingerich writes about the experience of “spontaneous freedom,” a feeling of unplannedness he describes at length, but which I think is depicted really well in a passage from Mrs. Dalloway, which Gingerich takes as the object example: a character arrives in London by boat and realizes that nobody knows he’s there. He has no plans or obligations.
All spontaneously free talk is small talk. You’re not trying to accomplish anything, and there’s no “right way” unless you start speaking total gibberish. But online, there is very much a right way. Not just in the literal technical constraints required by certain platforms — you cannot post to Instagram without visual media, you cannot post to TikTok without videos of a certain length — but in the limitations placed on you by the architects of the platform. It wasn’t long ago that users who dutifully posted aesthetic photos to Instagram saw their engagement tank because, somewhere in Menlo Park, a group of people decided on the competetive advantage of Instagram Reels.
The difference between conversational rules placed on you by tech CEOs (rules like “Reels succeed” and “verified users are boosted) and the rules of small talk (“be kind” and “use correct pronouns”) are this: one is natural, one is artifical. A tweet I think about a lot came in response to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri discussing why photos from your friends don’t show up on your main feed.
Instagram will always construct its rules based on growth, based on market forces. No one unaffiliated with the company will share its loyalties.
Rules in small talk, on the other hand, already line up with our sensibility and empathy. You follow the rules because you want to be understood, and because you don’t want to harm your conversation partner. In that way, according to Gingerich, you can still experience the unburdened openness of conversation without the alien constraints of social media platforms.
In short, nothing online replaces small talk. The Internet has no third places, physical locations centered on human connection. For what it’s worth, scholars have been lamenting the disappearance of third places since at least 2000 and the publication of Bowling Alone. Car-dependent city design has done at least as much as the iPhone to destroy our sense of social space. Social media simply accelerated things, as it accelerates everything.
Now that Twitter has brought the ego of the platform into the neon limelight, I think we should all be seeking out ways to rebel. A great place to start: go talk about the weather.