Phatic Technologies

Wang, Victoria; John V. Tucker and Tracey E. Rihll 2011. On phatic technologies for creating and maintaining human relationships. Technology in Society 33(1): 44-51.

Currently, some Internet-associated technologies seem to be increasingly used and some even created especially for social purposes. This set of technologies includes (i) systems of email; (ii) commercial sites; (iii) social networking sites; (iv) a range of web-based software programs that allow users to interact and share data through social networking sites sometimes known as social software; (v) advanced three dimensional virtual worlds created for different social purposes sometimes known as cybercommunities. Such technologies have transformed some individual users' personal experience and social relations. The social application and implications of software have enabled the internet to be an integral part of human society. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 44)

The first keyword here is social purposes - some technology is made specifically to serve social ends. In other words, this technology is made to connect people. It is difficult to tell yet how interacting and sharing data on the web qualify as phatic, but it is easy enough to understand that this kind of software is significantly different from previous non-social software in that social software involves more than one person using it. For example, Academia.edu makes self-distributed (self-uploaded) academic publications available for other users (or, basically, anyone with an internet connection). But it is not as social as Kami or Soundcloud, which enable individual users to comment and communicate their opinions about specific portions of the text or sound recording. Not only does Soundcloud make music available to listeners, it enables the listeners to connect in it, to voice their opinions among other listeners. What is especially important here is the aspect of transforming personal experience and social relations (psychosocial transformation?). Internet forums definitely transformed my personal experience and social relations by enabling me to get in contact with like-minded people. Most of my friends and some of my romantic partners I owe to this growing tendency of software to bring people together.

This paper defines the concept of phatic technology as follows - a phatic technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop and maintain human relationships. The primary function of this type of technology is to create a social context with the effect that its users form a social community based on a collection of interactional goals. Many technologies exhibit some degree of phatic use. Although limited aspects of phatic technology have been noticed and used to classify different types of technology, the precise characteristics that make up a phatic technology do not seem to have been recognised and generalised. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 44)

The transition from phatic function to phatic technology is pretty easy: establishing, prolonging and discontinuing communication here becomes establishing, developing, ad maintaining relationships. If thusly contrasted, there appears a curious shift - discontinuation or termination is lost, and prolonging becomes developing and maintaining. This leaves out the fact that phatic technologies could also be used for blocking people and terminating contacts. Since this is something Joe also has noticed, I'll start calling this minus-phatics (or —phatics). Context-creation is something Joe has also discussed at length in his PhD thesis; and "a collection of interactional goals" may vibe well with his Roadmap concept.

Our primary interest - Internet technologies - suggests a need to extend models of technology so that the cultural dimension of Internet technologies can be better represented. Secondly, we clarify the characteristics of phatic technologies. Communications technologies are not automatically phatic technologies, but some have been made phatic by their users - even if it was not intended by their producers. Thus, phatic technology is a subset of communications technology, where the essence of communication is relationship building not information exchanging. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

One of the primary characteristics of phatic technologies is surely that it is not only a communications technology, but one that is focused on the phatic function, that is, establishing, developing, and maintaining social relations. It is curious that users can subvert otherwise fully communicative technology and make it phatic. I'd like to see examples of this.

Next, in Section 3, we discuss the origins of our technical term phatic technology, which is inspired by the linguistic concept of phatic communion coined in sociolinguistics in the 1920s. We have appropriated the term phatic for an abstraction that emphasises sociality and is free of its deep linguistic features. The relevance of phatic communion has been worked [out] independently by others, e.g., Gibbs et al.. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

Sociolinguistics? Did you mean anthropology or semiotics? The concept of phatic as "an abstraction that emphasises sociability" is exactly the kind of definition that I am looking for in order to construct a more general definition of phatic. That is, I should add "sociality" to the list of terms associated with phatics (i.e., channel, contact, integration, infrastructure, etc.). Gibbs et al. refers to Gibbs, M. R., S. Howard, F. Vetere, M. Bunyan 2005. SynchroMate: a phatic technology for Mediating intimacy. In: DUX '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Designing for User eXperience. First prestented on November 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, CA. Although the abstract of this paper says that "This design sketch discusses preliminary ideas about an alternative way to think about interactive technologies - phatic technologies - that are less concerned with capturing and communicating information and more about the establishment and maintenance of social connection", I find this thoroughly disappointing, for it doesn't seem that different from various Haptic Technologies, i.e. contraptions aimed to communicate the feeling of being touched or hugged, and whatnot. It's almost like they switched the places of h and p in "haptic" and got "phatic".

For Bijker (2002), "Technology will have at least three different layers of meaning: physical artifacts (such as bikes), human activities (such as making the bikes), and knowledge (such as the know-how to build bikes and the fluid dynamics used to model them in the laboratory)" (p. 231). In Biker's (2002) understanding, the word technology applies to both hardware technology (e.g., electronic chairs) and social technology (e.g., the traditional dike management system used in the Netherlands). (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

And now I am also slightly disappointed in this article. These authors have a really hard time spelling the name Bijker and the word "bike". I have a hard time believing that the Netherlands have a dike management system in place, although, to be fair, I don't know all that much about the Netherlands, maybe they do manage their dikes.

A key notion of the SCOT [Social Construction of Technology] model is the role of the user group. A user group is a set of people who use a technology for some common purpose. Typically, it does not have a social structure though some particular technologies may be specific to exclusively professional groups. For example, some sort of social structure can emerge in user groups associated with advanced computer software tools through events and publications. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

The user group is the technological equivalent of what in some areas is called the socium.

The 'shape" of a technological artefact is the outcome of social processes - selection and variation - by relevant social groups (e.g., users and producers). In due course, "some of the variants 'die', whereas others 'survive'" (Pinch & Bijker 1984: 411). Pinch and Bijker (1984; 1987) describe this process as technology's interpretative flexibility. Different groups of users can construct quite different meanings for a technology; in time, the interpretative flexibility of a technology will vanish as a predominant meaning emerges among users. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

Interpretative flexibility is tõlgenduslik painduvus in Estonian. The idea itself is simple enough: survival of the fittest in the realm of technology. Cracked recently made a humorous video about something like this: Where Are They Now: 90s Websites.

The role of the user group is key in our understanding of phatic technologies. The user group of a phatic technology forms a community defined by the social function that is the "raison d'être" of the phatic technology. The user community is founded upon individual users' personal needs and goals. In an extreme case, the use of a phatic technology becomes a 'culture' in its user community. For example, there is a 'Twitter culture' among its users (e.g. Hamilton 2007; Corvida 2008; Koblin 2009). In this context, the term 'culture' can be understood as a set of values and beliefs that is generated by repetitive patterns of behaviour, enforced by both institutions and informal social organisations. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 45)

That is definitely true because Twitter, for example, does have its own culture in this sense. Also, it would be beneficial to turn to Ruesch and Bateson's Communication, The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951) at this point, because they apparently go on about values, beliefs and culture in relation with communication for quite a few chapters. Also, I cannot help but to take not that this paper came out in 2011 but the Twitter studies span from 2007 to 2009. As I understand it, Twitter culture has a very past-paced development, so even by 2011 those studies would have been outdated (at least that's me sligtly prejudiced assumption).

We now provide a definition of phatic technology.

A technology is phatic if its primary purpose or use is to establish, develop and maintain human relationships. The users of the technology have personal interactive goals.

The goals that are commonly found among the users form the social basis of a community. A phatic technology and its user community are rooted to a particular social context and the technology may be relevant to all human exchanges within the context. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 46)

The most important part here is the aspect of "personal interactive goals". I.e. phatic technology is one that serves the goals of interaction.

Although all phatic technologies are communications technologies, we asserted earlier that not all technologies for communication are automatically phatic technologies. The issue may be resolved by examining who bestows phatic use to a technology. Both the producers and the users can give some degree of phatic use to a technology. In communications technologies, phatic use is largely created by the users; for example, the producer of a commercial website may provide, as an add-on, a forum for users to rate the products, but users commonly do not bother to do so. In purely phatic technologies, phatic use is deeply embedded by the producers, and without strong user participation in the process of development, the technology will fail. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 46)

The only relevant theoretical take-away from this is the notion of "phatic use" which amounts to the use of a technology in the phatic function, or something to that effect. I am more reminded of Undocumented Feature by XKCD. It goes:

An old Windows utility has an undocumented feature. If you open "help" and click on the background, you get dropped into a "support" chat room. Only a few of us ever found it. But we became friends. We kept launching the program to check in. Eventually some of us were running VMs [Virtual Machines] just to keep accessing it. As the internet aged so did we. We don't know who runs the server. We don't know why it's still working so many years later. Maybe we're some sysadmin's soap opera. It will probably vanish someday. But for now it's our meeting place, our hideaway. A life's worth of chat, buried in the deep web. But even if it lasts forever, we won't. When we're gone, who will remember us? Who will remember this strange little world and the friendships we built here? Nobody. This place is irrelevant. Ephemeral. One day it will be forgotten. And so will we. But at least it doesn't have fucking video ads.

This is a good illustration of an user group subverting a communications technology originally intended for technical support for their own phatic needs. A chat room originally intended to provide help with technical issues became a social space for these users. That's one illustration I know of. I've yet to see this paper offer any.

The reasons behind such resistance [to using the technology] may stimulate further research and development from the producers of the technology in order to meet their objections and convert them into users.
Consequently, the phatic use of a technology is reflexively determined by the relationship between the producers, the users and non-users, and the phatic technology. At the heart of the relationship lies interpretive flexibility. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 46)

This is a novel way that the relationship aspect fits into the scheme of things. Here the relationship concerned with is basically the market relationship between users and producers, but it is nevertheless a relationship and a very important one. The success of modern technology often depends on the producers having a good public image. Uber, for example, is recently losing face due to its reprehensible practices (surge pricing) and goals (driverless cars). Although both make sense business-wise, they still strain the relationship between Uber and its users, so that many will likely consider an alternative service. Likewise, when it turned out that Ubuntu sells user data to Amazon it lost face with linux users who don't like that, and consequently there was a mass migration to Linux Mint, an open source fork of Ubuntu.

The phatic technology may become deeply embedded in its users' daily lives; not using it may be regarded as an odd or even deviant choice in a given social circle. In another circle, using it may be so regarded. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 47)

What is Facebook?

The concept of a technology's interpretive flexibility is especially relevant here. One subset of users employs the technology for social purposes. Hence, the technology becomes phatic with respect to this particular subset of users. For example, although not necessarily invented for business purposes, the telephone was supposedly produced for business purposes. However, to a community of women living in rural America, the telephone had an important function in establishing, developing and maintaining social relationships among this community of women and it has been a phatic technology since the early 20th century. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 47)

Why is this so reminiscent of Elyachar (2010)?

The term "phatic" has its origins in the Greek phanai which means to speak. The Oxford English Dictionary defines phatic as "...of designing, or relating to speech, utterance, etc., that serves to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information, communicate ideas..." (our italics). The term 'phatic technology' is inspired by the linguistic concept of phatic communion. This latter term originates in the British school of sociolinguistics, which is closely affiliated with anthropology and cultural concerns. Currently, phatic communion appears in sociolinguistics to designate a mode or type of discourse (Coupland, Coupland & Robisnon 1992). (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 47)

This is exactly the etymology I was in need of, because otherwise I would have thought that "phatic" relates to archaic English "bathic" and Aristotelian "pathos". The Coupland reference: Coupland, J., N. Coupland and D. Robinson 1992. "How are you?": Negotiating phatic communion. Language and Society 21: 207-230.

Phatic communion's significant function of sociability has been increasingly recognised since Malinowski saw it as a form of small talk. Post-Malinowski treatments of phatic communion often describe it as referentially deficient and communicatively insignificant. Abercrombie (1956) wrote "the actual sense of the words used in phatic communion matters little" (p. 3). Turner (1973) saw phatic communion as semantically empty and "designed more to accommodate and acknowledge a hearer than to carry a message" (p. 212). Hudson (1980) defines phatic communion as "the kind of chit-chat that people engage in order to show that they recognise each other's perspective" (p. 109). Thomas et al. (1982) list phatic as one of their 12 "activity categories" in communication, and define the category as "speech that initiates conversation, but [that is] conventional and ritualised, such as 'hello', 'how are you', etc." (p. 148). Their perspective is supported by further research on small talk and gossip (e.g., Beinstein 1975; Schneider & Klaus 1988; Jones 1990; Schneider 1987).(Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

Yup, a lot of sociolinguists see phatic speech as asemantic. References:

• Abercrombie, D. 1956. Problems and Principles. London: Longman.
• Turner, G. 1973. Stylists. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Hudson, R. A. 1980. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thomas, A. P.; P. Bull and D. Roger 1982. Conversation exchange analysis. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 1(2): 141-156.
• Beinstein, J. 1975. Small talk as social Gesture. Journal of Communication 25: 147-154.
• Schneider K. and P. Klaus 1988. The art of talking about nothing: Zur Beschreibung phatischer Dialoge. In: Weigand, E. and F. Hundsnurscher (eds.), Dialoganalyse II: Referate der 2. Arbeitstagung Bochum, 437-449.
• Jones, D. 1990. Gossip: notes on women's oral culture. In. Cameron, D. (ed.), The feminist critique of language: A reader. London: Routledge, 242-250.
• Schneider, K. 1987. Topic selection in phatic communion. Multilingua - Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 6(3): 247-256.

Laver (1975; 1981) shifted analytic attention of phatic communion to the positive and functional (cf. Coupland, Coupland & Robinson 1992). His position is exemplified in his debates with Firth (1972). Laver perceives phatic communion as a tool, known only for its (three) social functions; Firth considers it as a culture and ritual. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

Did you mean "cultural ritual"? Will find out when I read Raymond Firth firsthand. References:

• Laver, John 1975. Communicative functions of phatic communion. In: Kendon, A.; R. M. Harris and M. R. Key (eds.), The organization of behavior in face-to-face interaction. The Hague: Mouton, 215-238.
• Laver, John 1981. Linguistic routines and politeness in greeting and parting. In: Coulmas, F. (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech. The Hague: Mouton, 289-304.
• Firth, J. R. 1972. Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting. In: La Fontaine, J. S. (ed.), The interpretation of ritual. London: Tavistock, 1-38.

Laver's (1975; 1981) speculative predictive mechanism specifies how speakers are able to stake claims about solidarity/intimacy and status relationships through particular encoding choices within phatic talk. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

Huh, I found nothing of the sort in Laver (1975). Maybe the second article contains it.

Other academics have explored the functionality of phatic communion. In Jakobson's (1960) taxonomy of six functional categories of interaction, the phatic function is described as the channel characteristic of interaction in establishing, developing and maintaining social contact. In Barr's The Human Animal (1954), the contextualised nature of phatic communion is discussed; a surprisingly large part of every culture is merely the phatic sharing of a common emotional burden which has no relevance at all to the outside world. Scollon's machine metaphor for human communication (1985) considers communication as a generative mechanism, in which the machine must be 'humming' if we are not to think it has broken down. Indeed, phatic communion is humming in his analogy. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

I've never before seen someone refer to Jakobson's scheme of language functions like this. In any case, I'm very interested in "the contextualised nature", but the article manages to remind me that it's a bit sub par. This "Barr" character is actually the anthropologist Weston La Barre. His The Human Animal seems extremely interesting (It's even available at our department of sociology). But much as I can make out from the excerpts that Google Books displays, Welscott (1966: 350-351) seems to be correct in noting that LaBarre understands "phatic communication" in the sense of "nonlinguistic vocalization". References:

• Barr, W. L. [Weston La Barre] 1954. The human animal. Phoenix Books.
• Scollon, R. 1985. The machine stops: silence in the metaphor of malfunction. In: Tannen, D. and M. Saviller-Trokie (eds.), Perspectives on silence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

On reflection, it can be seen that the traditional, Malinowski's 'small talk' perspective and Laver's functional, prosocial perspective are not two opposing theories, since each theory is formulated by theorists addressing different ranges of interactional situations and contexts. Perhaps the phaticity of utterance is a matter of personal, contextual, and cultural definition, and there are no generally relevant abstract criteria for defining forms of talk as phatic or otherwise. The most significant nature of phatic communion is its human embeddedness. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

I have to agree with this. If phatic communion is viewed, as Raymond Firth suggests, as a sign system, then the conclusion that it is culturally relative, is foregone.

It is clear that at its inception in the academic research field of linguistics, phatic communion was perceived as a tool, which qualifies it to be considered as a technology. [...] Phatic communion may enter human lives as a technological tool, become a culture, and in due course win academic recognition as a communicative system serving various social functions, oiling the wheels of social relations. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 48)

The jump from "tool" to "technology" seems dubious for me, but these authors subscribe to the identification of "technique" and "technology" so it's at least understandable. "Oiling the wheels" is a catchy phrase.

In short, language is a technology so phatic communion can be seen as a phatic technology. (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 49)

Is that what it takes to get published in Technology and Society?

Indeed, the Internet's rapid integration into human society rests upon its strong phatic nature, which arises from one of Internet's fundamental characteristics - the minimised time span between producers and users. In theory, this minimised time span should allow users of strong phatic technologies a very important role as co-producers. Rapid feedback from users allows the producers to adjust their production to suit the requirements of the community of users in the particular context(s). (Wang, Tucker & Rihll 2011: 49)

This is indeed so. It is especially prevalent in the movie world, where a terrible movie will garner ridicule and a good movie praise in an unseenbefore manner, so that if a small amount of people have given it a strong review a great amount of people will follow their judgment and either go or not go see the movie. Word travels fast these days. Everyone knew Adam Sandler's Pixels (2015) was shit long before it even hit the screens in some parts. And on the other hand, glowing reviews and throwbacks to Akari (1988) has made the current generation look back and revisit this great masterpiece. Others have already commented that we're living in an age where the producers can have instant feedback on their products and change it up to suit the consumers better. In this regard it would be wise to take up Ruesch and Bateson's metacommunication and expand the feedback model they propose to modern forms of instant feedback.

Wang, Victoria; John V. Tucker and Kevin Haines 2012. Phatic technologies in modern society. Technology in Society 34(1): 84-93.

With the accelecated growth in the development and influence of the Internet and its associated technologies, such as social networking, software technology and social life are becoming increasingly integrated. Indeed, such technologies seem to be fusing with the social fabric of society. Current theories of technological development are not yet sufficient to provide an understanding of the new phenomena to be found in the intimate union between Internet technologies and contemporary society. A fresh review of the relationship between technology and society is needed. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 84)

Not only society, I would argue. Internet and modern technologies (like smartphones, tablets, etc.) are also fusing with cultural production and consumption. Or, in less economic terms, the avalanche of texts and images in modern interconnected culture is more complex, intricate and interactive than ever before.

Prominent examples of phatic Internet technologies include the cybercommunities such as Second Life, and the social networking systems: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace. The software technologies of the Internet are the primary examples that motivate our interest. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 84)

MySpace and Second Life in this list are really odd. Why not Minecraft? And who still uses MySpace? I'd rather like to see a list including Academia.edu, Soundcloud, Last.fm, GoodReads, and IMDB; maybe even Tinder, Instagram and Vine or whatever the kids are using these days.

In this sequel to Wang et al. (2011) we attempt to understand the sociological significance of phatic technology. We will employ theoretical ideas that focus on how phatic technology exemplifies the transformation of personal and social relationships in the contemporary world, including the individual in relation to the self, to other individuals, to social groupings and to societies. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 84)

I did not expect them to include autocommunication, but I'm very happy to see that they did. Hopefully they will follow up with significant contributions.

Sociological analysis of the modern world has led to various theories of modernity that define these transformations in terms of abstract sociological conditions. We will arguet hat certain abstract social conditions that are characteristic of modernity amplify significantly the human need for, and thus the technical development of, phatic technologies. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 85)

I wonder if they'll address the growing distance coupled with increased interconnection that characterises our modern social landscape.

we use key notions in Giddens' theory of modernity (1990; 1991) as our analytical tools. In doing so, we propose that phatic technologies enable the reconnection of social relations that have been stretched across time-space. A phatic technology creates a social community constituted by its users (from two or many) and individuals within that social community become dependent on the phatic technology to fulfil some of their social needs. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 85)

As when a midlife person starts using Facebook and reconnects with highschool buddies and sweethearts? References:

• Giddens, Anthony 1990. The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Giddens, Anthony 1991. Modernity and self-identity - self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Actually, phatic technologies are so named for phatic dialogue, which is empty of informative content but serves to engage people with one another in purely social exchange. [...] The relationship between the speakers is affirmed by the act of communication rather than the content of communication (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005). Thus, in social life, phatic conversation serves to reassure that communication and interaction are alive and well. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 85)

Score for my theory that the phatic function parallels the poetic function in terms of autonomy: while "talking for the sake of talking" is a simplification, it seems true enough that phatic communication functions by bringing the (f)act of communicating to the foreground. Licoppe, C. and Z. Smoreda 2005. Are social networks technologically embedded? How networks are changing today with changes in communication technologies. Social Networks 27(4): 317-335.

For example, Facebook has a special function to sustain 'the humming' - the poke. The poke does not have any specific function, yet it can be used for various purposes on Facebook, e.g., onec an poke one's friend to simply say 'hi'. When poked, the receiver would be sent a poke alert - a short note that appears in the receiver's profile telling him that he has been "poked" by the sender (name displayed) without any other contextual information. The poke is a form of phatic communication that "serves the purpose of keeping individuals in touch and making others aware that they were in their thoughts" (Vetere, Smith & Gibbs 2009: 183). For us, the poke could be considered as a phatic technique inbuilt in Facebook to keep the Facebook social community active and humming. Indeed, the triviality of exchange to be found in phatic technologies - particularly, social software such as Blogs, Forums, Facebook and Twitter - is noteworthy. Notably, the volume of empty exchanges is reminiscent of the origins of phatic technology in sociolinguistics (see Malinowski 1923) but underlines the point that such exchanges are (and can only be) about relationships, e.g., requesting attention and engagement. We use technologies and in using these technologies we are re-embedded in a web of social relationships. Indeed, the essence of phatic technology is not information exchanging but relationship building. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 85-86)

I didn't know that the Facebook "Poke" still existed, but after googling I found that it was still possible to poke friends, and I poked one, just to try it out (I had never done it before). In any case, the poke is pointless and a vestige of early days of Facebook, but the theory around it is sound. I will have to unpack the implications in the review section of this post. Reference: Vetere, F.; J. Smith and M. Gibbs 2009. Phatic interactions: being aware and feeling connected. Awareness systems, human-computer interaction Series, Part 2, 173-186. Also, before I forget the thought: There are other aspects in Facebook that are almost utterly phatic. One poignant example that comes to mind is the Happy Birthday wish. Since Facebook automatically notifies you of upcoming birthdays, you don't even have to rely on your own memory of your friends' birthdays. You have a listing of birthdays and when Facebook notifies you that a certain person has a birthday that day it's up to you to decide whether your relationship with that person is strong enough to wish a happy birthday. And the wish is almost invariably the same phrase. That is, the wish itself is basically meaningless - it has a meaning only in so far as it refers to your relationship with the person. Any expressive element of sincere well-wishing has been far removed by the use of routine formulas as wishes.

Phatic technologies, with the Internet as their primary source, combine the technical with the social to produce a culture, and thus, extend the notion of technology from a tool or a system, to a culture. In this context, by the term "culture" we mean a set of values and beliefs generated by repetitive patterns of behaviour, reinforced by both formal social systems and informal social organisations (e.g., the culture of a military regiment or a particular academic discipline). (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 86)

This part is why I think I should follow these two articles with "New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture" (2008) by Vincent Miller. It's partly because of the thematic overlap, but also partly because I doubt if Miller's paper would be interesting enough to review on its own, and my current aims involve writing thorough reviews of the articles I read.

However, in these cases, technology is still defined in terms of solving concrete problems as a facilitator, or in Jacques Ellul's terms, as "external to man" (1964: 6). In case of phatic technology, we observe a paradigm shift in the notion (and uses) of technology. [...] It is, however, the transformations of social life and personal relationships enabled by the Internet and associated technologies that have moved technology from an external facilitator to a stage of being internal to man. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 87)

I wish this had something to do with autonomy and introspective semiosis in Jakobsonian terms, but the connection is ever so slight. The point stands well on its own, though, or minimally on "autonomy". If phatic technologies is considered as a technology then it is indeed clear that it is not meant to solve any concrete external issue. For example, what problems does a Facebook "Poke" solve? It enables you to let your friend know that you still exist, but if that is a problem then it's a very small problem indeed. (A "first world" problem?) Rather, the role of phatic technologies is "autonomous" in the sense that it doesn't solve any concrete external problem but a very abstract internal problem that humans in modern society may have - to overcome the feeling of isolation brought about by our ever-fragmentating and -specializing social organization.

The potential for the Internet and associated software to be socially transformational were identified almost at its inception, indeed notions of culture pervade early discussions of the Internet. For example, a year after the launch of the World Wide Web (WWW), Dery (1992) defined the term cyberculture as "A far-flung, loosely knit complex of sub-legitimate, alternative, and oppositional subcultures whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities often framed by radical body politics... Cyberculture is divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, frince science, avant-garde art, and pop culture" (Dery 1992: 509). (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 87)

This, I figure, may be useful for A. V. and M-L. M. and their study of the use of Internet technologies by right-wing extremists in Estonia. Reference: Dery, M. 1992. Cyberculture. South Atlantic Quarterly 91: 508-531.

Currently, cyberculture, driven by the Internet and associated technologies, is no longer a form of sub-culture - it is deeply embedded in the fabrics of our daily lives - at times, transcending individual preference. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 87)

The last phrase, "transcending individual preference", is in line with their understanding of culture as "a collective social construction transcending individual preference, while influencing the practice of people in the culture" (ibid, 87). That is, this is just an elliptical way of saying that cyberculture is no longer a sub-culture, it is the dominant culture. This is especially true in Estonia which prides itself in its e-Governance and whatnot. It is impossible to work and study in Estonia without an internet presence. My friend even had very serious problems with school on his first year as a university student because he couldn't habituate right away with the fact that home assignments are sent over the Internet. If you've grown up sitting behind a computer all day then none of it is an issue for you; but you're kinda fucked if you're not that kind of a person.

For example, there is a "Facebook culture" among its users, especially young people (e.g., Blincoe 2009) - 48% of young Americans learn about the news through Facebook (Colman 2011). The use of Facebook is able to become a culture because it satisfies young people's desire for connection to their peers in their own private space (Nussbaum 2010). (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 88)

I would argue that Facebook is not the best example of this, because Facebook actually "bubbles" you off from the rest of society. You may be able to keep up with the news your peers are reading and promoting, but the consequent Facebook "cultur" is very much a small-scale culture. Reddit, on the other hand, does not "bubble" you off like that. Although it does have "subreddits" with their own styles and small-scale culture, they are overshadowed by the hive-mind-like general reddit "culture" which is a large-scale culture in contrast with the Facebook one. That is, if you would examine Facebook in its totality what you would find is a whole lot of small bubbles formed around national boundaries, localities, peer groups, etc. If you examine Reddit in its totality, on the other hand, you find a unified culture than pervades every subreddit. You don't get news that your peers deem worthwhile; you get news that the collective total of reddit users deem worthwhile. References:

• Blincoe, N. 2009. How Facebook changed our culture. The Telegraph.
Colman, D. 2011. The Facebook obsession. Open Culture.
• Nussbaum, B. 2010. Facebook's culture problem may be fatal. Harvard Business Review.

Also, before moving on, I'd like to mention a problem not taken account of here, because it pervades this article. Look at these references. Two of these are online news (one of them is even a short video) and one is a blog post. What you have here is a reliance on online materials which in themselves are localized. It would have been much more difficult to use such sources in academic writings decades ago, but now we take the like of these for granted.

The use of the phatic technology becomes a habit that shapes members' actions in the social community. As a consequence, through this process, it becomes a real social community of valued meaning to its members. We term the above process phatic technological habituation and use this notion to provide an understanding of why phatic technologies are able to sustain intimacy at distance. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 88)

It is clear to see that this is related to "cyberculture" transitioning from the status of "sub-culture" to "culture" proper (in this case, phatic culture). "Sustaining intimacy at distance" is the point for which I can once again whip out that Sage Francis quote: "Technology made it easy for us to stay in touch while keeping a distance, 'til we just stayed distant and never touched. Now all we do is text too much." (from "The Best Of Times", 2010).

A phatic technology serves a social purpose in a context (indeed, one that it may have created). In the process of phatic technological habituation three stages may be observed:

1. Facilitative - where the technology simply performs certain tasks in the context.
2. Pervasive - where the technology is widely used in the context.
3. Embedded - where the technology is fully integrated in the fabric of the context.

These three stages suggest a development life cycle for a phatic technology that must also allow for changes in its social environment. When a new phatic technology is first developed to perform a social task, it is exposed only to a small sector of society. The individuals who meet the new technology have the choice of (a) carrying out the social task in some traditional way without using this technology; (b) adopting the technology to meet the task; or (c) not carrying out the task at all. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 88)

Beautiful. In case of e-Voting (electronic voting) in Estonia, it was first used in a pilot project for the municipal elections in 2005, has by now become pervasive in the sense that it is used for most elections, and is steadily becoming embedded. While voters can still go to the voting stations to vote, in a decade or few this option will start seeming more and more like a way to waste resources, and consequently only e-Voting will remain. At least one can imagine it happening that way.

The separation of time and space is one of the primary characteristics of modern social life (Giddens 1990). In pre-modern societies, social space and physical space largely coincide, and the spatial dimensions of social life are mostly dominated by localised face-to-face activities. In modern societies, locationally distant social relations that are not face-to-face are fostered. The separation of physical space from social space is brought about by the separation of time from physical space. In modern societies, time has become standardised and globalised. We do not need to rely on natural phenomena in our physical surrounding (e.g., the shadow of the tree) to carry out our daily tasks. Our social space has been expanded and our social activities have been disembedded from immediate locales - we can be in the same social space, without being in the same location. The expansion of the separation of time and space and disembedding of social systems, largely enabled by transportations and communications technologies amongst other things, has broken up communities based on localised physical proximity and kinship - family members and friends can be in different counties and countries, and home and work can be many miles away. Consequently, it may be said that communications technology has played a significant role in the breakdown of the meaning of physical community (e.g., Berger, Berger & Kellner). (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 89)

This is something I've thought about extensively but in other terms: my physical situation has been divorced from my "mental" (vaimne) context. That is, physically I am situated in Estonia, but via the Internet I am a man without a country, a bilingual hoodlum strolling through all the world online has to offer all without ever physically traveling further than Tallinn and Riga. Reference: Berger, P.; B. Berger and H. Kellner 1974. The homeless mind. Penguin Books Ltd.

This longing [for community], amongst others, calls for the reembedding of social systems and, in turn, translates into an increasing demand for systems that reconnect social relations in various social contexts and, in some cases, create new social environments for individuals to establish, build and maintain these relationships. For Delanty (2003), technology plays an important role in reshaping social relations in various communities. Phatic technologies form a significant type of system of reembedding, which sustains intimacy at distance by re-constructing social relations across indefinite spans of time-space (cf. Giddens 1990). (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 89)

I feel like the causal connection here is weakly constituted, for it hinges on the assumption that there is a need for community. Ever since learning that man is different from his closest evolutionary relatives who after childrearing like to stick on their own, I've had the nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that perhaps this "need for community" is more of a social construction than we commonly like to imagine. Perhays man is a social creature not because of any intrinsic need but because of social conditioning? I.e. the speech center in the human brain is purportedly closely related to the pleasure center, which implies that phatic communion is pleasurable in itself. But pleasure is not a necessity. It seems very likely that if social conditioning would be according, we could very well live like hermits, connected only through our smart-devices, and get together every once in a while to procreate, like other decent animals do. Reference: Delanty, G. 2003. Community (key ideas). London: Routledge.

Actually, the sustaining of intimacy at distance by systems of technical expertise is one of the most prominent phenomena of modern society. Giddens (1990) wrote: "the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems" (1990: 83; emphasis in original). The character of trust is best explained by separating trust relations into two types - facework commitments and faceless commitments (1990: 80). In traditional societies, much social interaction is face-to-face and trust is expressed in, and sustained by, facework commitments - direct interactions with other individuals in "circumstances of copresence" (1990). The character of trust has changed radically with the emergence of modernity. Although many relations of trust in family and local community are still direct and personal, the essence of modern institutions is evident in the nature and scale of mechanisms of faceless commitments. Faceless commitments, at their core, are trust in systems not in persons; they manifest in individuals' trust in abstract systems. The trust in abstract systems, i.e. abstract phatic systems, produces the trust in everyday life, which enables the creation and sustenance of a social relationship/community that is constituted by its users. The use of the phatic technology becomes a habit that shapes members' actions in the social community. As a consequence, it becomes a real social community of valued meaning to its members - who are habituated in the use of this phatic technology. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 89)

I'm on board with the distinction between facework and faceless commitments because these mirror Emil Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity, but the concept of abstract phatic systems is beyond me. At best I can imagine that this distinction and this abstruse concept could be applied on a comparison between traditional Taxi industry versus transportation networking services (like Uber and Lyft). While not ideally or absolutely so, taxi is more of a facework-based commitment. You have to make a telephone call or in some places hail the taxi with a gesture, communicate with the driver, etc. With an app-based solution you don't have to call, or even necessarily talk or gesture at all. With some such services you can even choose your car and driver, as opposed to the taxi firm just sending out whoever is available. This kind of faceless commitment curiously/ironically ends up being more about face than the traditional option. It is the closest I can currently imagine to an abstract phatic system.

Giddens identifies two different forms of reflexivity. The first one - the "reflexive monitoring of action" (1990: 36) - exists in both traditional and modern periods, and is defined as "All human beings routinely "keep in touch" with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it" (1990). The second form of reflexivity is unique to modernity - modern society is experiencing a process of reflexivity at both the institutional and personal levels, which is modern institutions' and individuals' regular and constant use of knowledge as the conditions for society's organisation and change. In traditional societies, actions are based exclusively on tradition and cannot be conceived beyond the framework of tradition. In modern society, individuals reflect on tradition and act in accordance with it, only if it can be legitimised by reflexivity. The future, therefore, is regarded as essentially open, yet is counterfactually conditional upon courses of action undertaken with future possibilities in mind. The two forms of reflexivity are intimately associated - reflexive monitoring of action brings an individual more information about him continuously, some of which may turn into useful knowledge - the basis for the individual's constant self-creation, evaluation and change. Under the conditions of modernity, an individual's action has social influence at a global scale, for modernity is created and reproduced in a reciprocal interaction between individual's actions and social institutions, in such a way that society's institutions and structures are the means and the outcome of individuals' actions (Giddens 1990). As a result of these reflexive processes, an individual's self-identity is no longer static and given - instead, it is a reflexive project constituted by a reconstruction of the individual, collective life-stories and identities, which Giddens (1991) terms the reflexive project of the self. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 90)

I wish this was a bit more concrete. In the previous passage it is written that "Phatic technologies provide modern individuals with an opportunity to achieve an even higher degree of reflexivity." - In this light I would like to conjecture that modern forms of reflexivity are tied with phatic technologies in the sense that we no longer relie so much on internal monologue about ourselves, what others say about us, or even what we have written down on paper. Now we can reflect on who we are based on our Facebook timeline, Twitter history, Instagram gallery, Last.fm library, Goodreads bookshelf, etc.

For Giddens (1990), modern science and technology have generated the plethora of lifestyle choices, and thus opened up a radical process of self creation, examination, reflection and transformation. Communication and interaction via phatic Internet technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, are usually carried out by typing messages onto a screen computer, phone or pad. An individual's actions are communications and messages displayed in front of him. He is able to observe what he is saying as he is typing it, and thus, is able to constantly change and modify his actions. Moreover, messages typed onto the computer screen can be recorded, stored and examined at a later date. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 90)

This is almost exactly what I meant. I say "almost" because I wouldn't put so much emphasis on typing. Our phatic technologies are becoming more and more - not even click, but - touch based. It is not out of the question that future will be keyboardless and our primary interface with the Internet is the touchscreen. Or whatever technology may surpass touchscreens, it is likely that the future will hold less text and more images and visible connections. I would hypothesize "more movement", but that's a bit off topic. But the point stands, and the fact that we have such a great amount of feedback about our own online actions (of Facebook, for example, you can "View Activity Log" on your profile) is something I've tried to comprehend via the concept of autocommunication. It may be called reflexion or whatever, but the point is that we no longer only communicate with others - more so than before the technological age and outside of it where we hear our own voice and proprioceptively feel our facial expressions and movements - we now also communicate with ourselves in the sense that we are within the audience of our online lives. By the looks of it we are even the primary audience (as, for example, only you can view your own activity log on Facebook).

For example, if two individuals have met on Twitter then their entire rapport can be recorded, stored and examined any time or over long time intervals with full contextual information (e.g., personal information, date and time). [...] In short, communicating and intercating via phatic Internet technologies enable the achievement of a more intensified experience of the reflexive monitoring of action. One can re-live, re-examine, re-enjoy social exchanges over and over again. They have repetitive value. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 90-91)

This is exactly why Joe proposed to take our relationship as a case study - all of our interactions and communications are contained in e-mails and documents attached to those e-mails.

Phatic technologies, characterised by their social purposes, are able to facilitate the reembedding of personal and contextual intimacy and reduce alienation. We suggest that this reembedding may be at the heart of the appeal of cybercommunities and virtual worlds. Our argument implies that in modernity there is a human need for phatic technologies and that their technical development is destined to grow. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 91-92)

Welp, it's hard to argue with that.

We have proposed the idea of phatic technological habituation to make a direct and intimate connection between a technology and its social context(s). It illustrates the three stage developmental process of some phatic technologies from tools to systems to cultural forces; and it explains, in some cases, the users' heavy dependence on a phatic technology to the extent that the application of it becomes a culture within the user community. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 92)

To repeat: Facilitative - tool; Pervasive - system; Embedded - cultural force. This scheme may have important implications for when I turn to Miller's paper on phatic culture.

Social interactions via phatic technologies are removed from the physical; rather it is built via abstract systems that reembed individuals and social relations in distant locations. Thus, it is not just that individuals in the modern world have to place trust in abstract systems, i.e. phatic technologies, it is that the act of doing so has become a normal and normalised feature of modern social life. (Wang, Tucker & Haines 2012: 92)

Ah, so that's what they meant by "abstract phatic systems". By the wording it can be inferred that they mean something like "pervasive phatic technologies".

Miller, Vincent 2008. New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14(4): 387-400.

This article is a theoretical discussion of blogs, social networking websites and microblogs. I argue that these new media phenomena are symptomatic and illustrative of both technological affordances and larger socio-cultural trends. In particular, it will link the content of two major new media products with certain ongoing cultural and technological processes which arguably can be considered problematic: namely a flattening of social bonds as we move into 'networked sociality' (Wittel, 2001), and a similar 'flattening' of communication in these networks towards the non-dialogic and non-informational. What I will call her phatic culture. (Miller 2008: 387-338)

Technological affordances, I think Wang et al. above already covered in some measure, i.e. how facilitative phatic technology becomes pervasive and thes embedded. The socio-cultural trend towards phatic culture was also covered in some measure, particularly when it came to the values and beliefs that form in user groups of certain phatic technologies. "Flattening" on the other hand seems new. It "seems" so because it's actually not - Wang et al. managed to cover extensively the historical background of how "phatic" is oftentimes identified with "meaningless" and how there is actually an alternative view - that offered by John Laver, wherein sociality is understood positively as the consolidation between the microcosm of the interaction with the macrocosm of the society at large. To "generate" something on these fringe theoretical items, it could be posited that in microblogs, too, the users in some sense consolidate their own private world with that of the broader cultural landscape. It's not like every Twitter post is referentially irrelevant or semantically empty by fiat. Some Tweets manage to pack quite a lot into so few characters.

There will be four substantial sections to this article, which will demonstrate the move towards a phatic media culture thematically and chronologicall. First I will focus on blogging culture and its relationship to the social contexts of individualization. Second, I will discuss the social networking profile within the contexts of 'network sociality' and the rise of database culture. Then I will examine the most recent phenomenon of microblogging within the notion of 'connected presence'. In the fourth section I will briefly discuss the encouragement of phatic communication within the context of marketing. (Miller 2008: 388)

The concept of "phatic media culture" feels much more palatable than Wang et al.'s "abstract phatic system". "The social contexts of individualization" can probably link up with the discussion of reflexion and the modernist project of the self. "Network sociality" probably touches the interconnectedness aspect of social networking (i.e. Facebook offers you friend suggestions of people you may know); "database culture" may link up with the "storage" and "recording" aspect discussed in relation with modern forms of reflexion. Presence and marketing elude me currently.

In general, individualization refers to a process in which communities and personal relationships, social forms and commitments are less bound by history, place and tradition. That is, individuals, freed from the contexts of tradition, history and, under globalization, space, are free to, and perhaps forced to, actively construct their own biographies and social bonds. Because of the increasingly disembedded nature of late modern life, a major task of the individual is to continually rebuild and maintain social bonds, making individualization by its nature non-linear, open ended, and highly ambivalent (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Within this context of disembeddedness, consumer society offers up to the subject a range of choices from which to create biographies and narratives of the self, in addition to a set of relationships that can be seen as somewhat ephemeral or tenuous (Bauman, 2001). (Miller 2008: 388)

Disembeddedness is a familiar term from Wang et al. but here it seems to apply only on social relations or the individual's situatedness in social relations, not technology. The relevant point to make in emulation of Wang et al. is that modern technology users actively construct their own biographies and social bonds through phatic technologies. The point being that there is phatic technology out there - that Facebook and Twitter and whatnot exist in the first place to allow for such self-construction. The consequence is, as Miller aptly points out, that these phatically produced relationships are somewhat ephemeral or tenuous. It is perhaps easier to get in touch with people, but conversely more difficult to develop and maintain these relationships because the traditional social bonds that used to hold people together are now disembedded.

[...] for Giddens, trust, like 'the reflexive project of the self', is something that must be continually worked at. (Miller 2008: 388)

This is also true for the relationship between producers and consumers in modern phatic culture. It is much easier for a software company to go under than for one that creates material products. For us to use any given online service we must indeed have trust and security in it. Otherwise there is nothing stopping us from moving on to the next service provider; more often than not the alternative is a couple of clicks away.

One aspect which is particularly important here is the assertion that self-disclosure becomes increasingly important as a means to gain trust and achieve authentic (but contingent) relationships with others. Giddens argues that late modern subjects gravitate towards relationships which engender trust through constant communication and reflexive practice. In other words, we crave relationships that allow us to open up to others, and not just in the romantic sense, because in late modernity, the demand for intimacy becomes 'virtually compulsive':

A given individual is likely to be involved in several forms of social relation which tend towards the pure type; and pure relationships are typically interconnected, forming specific milieu of intimacy. (Giddens, 1992: 97)

Clay Calvert (2004) pulls at a similar thread in his discussion of the rise of wider voyeuristic and exhibitionistic tendencies in contemporary media, such as reality TV, tell-all talk shows and tabloid news. He argues that there has been an increasing willingness to 'tell all' or 'expose oneself' in the media, and that this is largely the result of several processes, including an ever increasing need for self-clarification, social validation and relationship development, which are satisfied through acts of self-disclosure. (Miller 2008: 389)

In this note it is noteworthy how well Bernie Sanders' campaign has managed to display his authenticity on youtube. Not only does he keep bringing up how his views differ from those of Hillary Clinton in every conversation where Hillary is brought up and he has a chance to explain how he voted against and Hillary for the Iraq invasion, youtube delivered and recently a video of both candidates arguing, one vehemently against, and the other reluctantly for, the Iraq invasion, surfaced. It is not all that difficult to trust a person whose claims are backed up by video evidence.

The desire to tell one's story to the world, to write about one's personal experiences of, for example, emotional pain, or give one's opinions on world events through a blog sits quite easily in a contemporary society in which compulsive intimacy has become a major way to overcome disembededness and the continual reconstruction of social bonds. (Miller 2008: 389)

The consequence of this, I think, is a widely distributed version of "radical honesty", or, to use a larrywilmoreism, "to keep it one hundred". It could be due to, what at least feels like, informal nature of the internet which, let's face it is still in its baby shoes, we have a habit and expectancy of honesty. This can of course lead us astray, as when the scene is infiltrated with paid shills who tout a party line, or when we believe that there are no repercussions to what we say on the internet and the obvious backlash ensues (this usually involves famous people). Fuck, even I am at fault for being more honest and upfront on this blog than I would ever be allowed to be in an academic paper.

Blogging, for the most part, is based on the notion that information is a commodity that is used to build anda maintained relationships. In personal journal blogs, it is personal information, created through relationships of mutual self-disclosure, which attains a commodified status. In the case of other types of blogging (political, news, technological and the like), substantive information is the commodity. In both these cases, this exchange is based on the logic of the 'pure' relationship: an exchange of substantive information achieved through dialogue. This exchange creates tenuous, individually-oriented self-defined communities or networks, which revolve around shared interests and dialogic exchange related to those interests. (Miller 2008: 389)

My blog here is of the "substantive" kind but I cannot agree with its commodity status and origin in dialogue. I've recognized and come to terms with the fact that I am in it alone. Most users who stumble on this leave within five seconds. Most likely they are not looking for lengthy walls of texts, blockquotes of substantial information and rambling comments to complement them. No "shared interests" or "dialogic exchange" can be found here. One can keep a blog for personal reasons. In my case the goal is to improve academic writing - I retype quotes that I find interesting and steadily work my way towards writing my own academic prose. Other people don't really figure all that much in it. Aside from people who I've known beforehand I've never even been bothered by authors of the texts I'm quoting and commenting. (Though that may be because most of the people I quote have long joined the choir invisible.)

For Manual Castells (1996/2000; Castells et al., 2006), the disembedding and continual deconstruction and reconstruction of social bonds implied by writers such as Giddens, Bauman and Beck is epitomized in the new social morphology of the network society. A morphology that is based less on hierarchical structures and spaces, than on flows across horizontally structured flexible networks. To belong in networks is to achieve a greater measure of security in the "space of flows'. (Miller 2008: 389-390)

These authors do like to emphasize the flexibility of this or that. E.g. interpretive flexibility in Wang et al. 2011.

In terms of micro-level social relationships, Andreas Wittel (2001) built upon the network society thesis by charting the emergence of what he called 'network sociality': a disembedded intersubjectivity which contrasts the 'belonging' of 'community' with the concept of 'integration' and 'disintegration' in a network. Instead of gaining security through 'trust' and self-disclosure within the late modern context of mobility and disembeddedness, network sociality is an instrument or commodified form of social bonding based on the continual construction and reconstruction of personal networks or contacts. (Miller 2008: 390)

I don't know why some of these thinkers are so bent on "commodification". I believe there was social networking in this sense long before the Internet. People used to study in far lands and create bonds over letter exchanges before. That is, the continual construction of reconstruction of personal networks or contacts does not seem novel. What is novel is the achievement of these ends through phatic technologies.

Since the goal of communication becomes the active construction or reconstruction of a social network, one has to 'consistently renew, refresh and revalue the existing contacts' (Wittel, 2001: 66). Such bonds, he argues, were typified in the compressed social acts of 'catching up', networking, the half-hour business meeting, and speed dating. Nowadays, Wittel would have to add the brief blog post or social networking update to that list. (Miller 2008: 390)

How is speed dating related to 'catching up'? Isn't the point of speed dating to get to know lots of new people really fast? Catching up in itself does seem phatic enough to merit further attention. These are the social acts that do in fact "compress" phatic communion into a brief exchange in order to reify the relationship. By compression I here mean that phatic communion originally (in Malinowski's treatment) pertained to the relaxed exchange of personal histories while sitting in a circle around camp fire; "catching up" has the quality of participants anxiously waiting for their turn, but now the interaction itself is not relaxed but fast-paced because people have stuff to do and places to be.

For Wittel, these social relations become primarily 'informational', not 'narrative'. What he means by this is that communications between people become more ephemeral and more akin to an exchange of 'data' than deep, substantive or meaningful communication based on mutual understanding. (Miller 2008: 390)

This is a valid point. In contrast to the narrative nature of phatic communion in Malinowskian sense, "catching up" is more informative. There's no time to tell a lengthy and detailed story of your life when you're meeting an old friend in the grocery store. You have just enough time to recount the most significant events in your life, packaged as discrete units of information (finished school, worked on a project, married that girl, had 2.5 children, etc.).

Social networking profiles push the networking practice to the forefront by placing more prominence on frineds and links to others than the text being produced by the author. Where the blog had links to others either on a fairly anonymous list of hyperlinks on one side of the front page, or on a separate profile page, MySpace, Facebook and other networking sites give much more space to friends (including pictures) and thereby much more visual prominence on the profile at the expense of textual material. The overriding point of the networking profile is to reach out and sustain a network through the maintenance of links to others. Thus it is not the text of the author, but the network of friends that takes pride of place on the social networking profile. (Miller 2008: 390)

Well, nowadays, you get that effect only in the "common friends" section on facebook. Otherwise it figures little. Reddit is even beyond such networking. You can add users as your "friends" but what it does is miniscule: their usernames will appear highlighted and a collection of your friends' submissions can be viewed at /r/friends - other than that it does nothing. In that sense reddit is more informative than phatic.

Lev Manovich (2001) among others argues that we are in the process of a shift from narrative forms (as epitomized by the novel or the cinematic film) as the key form of cultural expression in the modern age, to the database as the prominent cultural logic of the digital age. Narratives are presented as finite works with beginnings and endings that follow a linear path establishing cause and effect thematic development determined by an author. Databases are defined by Manovich as: 'Structured collections of data organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer' (Manovich 2001: 218). In contrast to narratives, the database form, as the foregoing passage suggests, is presented as a collection of somewhat separate, yet relational elements. Because databases are in essence collections or 'lists', they are theoretically endless and always 'in progress'. In addition, since databases consist of relational elements, their order or combination in terms of consumption or use is determined by the user as a co-author, rather than rigidly designed by one author. Therefore, databases are (potentially infinitely combinable in their use. (Miller 2008: 390)

This is related to the storage aspect of phatic technologies. We no longer need to tell stories about ourselves. For anyone interested we can link to relevant profiles on various sites. I don't have to tell you who I am and what I like. My self-description is already written down and everything I like is available on my profile, listed in statistical, chronological and preferential order.

It would seem that such a plethora of information makes it inevitable that the database, whose purpose it is to efficiently store, retrieve and provide an interface with data, should ascend in cultural importance. Thus new media is, in particular, dominated by cultural objects and products which:

do not tell stories, they do not have a beginning or end, in fact, they do not have any development thematically that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other. (Manovich 2001: 213; my emphasis)

In effect, with the database, there is no context. Instead individual items are connected to each other, in an ad-hoc manner, by specific linkages or elements useful at particular times. (Miller 2008: 392-393)

I would argue that some context can be created. For example, on Last.fm you can create playlists, on IMDB you can create lists, and on blogs you can label your posts and group them according to those labels. I can't argue that these contexts are contrived in an ad-hoc manner.

In this respect, social networking websites in particular can be seen as part of the database culture of network sociality. Profile building, while on the one hand enmeshing the profile/self in a network, is essentially the creation of a series of lists; markers which can be called up by others searching for people with similar interests. And of course, in social networking websites, the most important list is the list of 'friends'. (Miller 2008: 393)

"Friends" are more and more replaced by "followers" but the point remains. On Academia.edu the so-called "Research Interests" act as markers through which you can find people who research something similar to what you're researching.

However, social networking websites tend to complicate this notion of 'friend'. For example, Danah Boyd (2006) and Boyd and Heer (2006) discuss the notion of 'friending' and how the concept fo 'friend' on something like MySpace becomes horizontally flattened. Close members of one's inner circle sit alongside strangers under the same banner in an endlessly expanding horizontal network, thus compressing social relations and eliminating context. The only context present is the egocentric nature of the network itself. In other words, friends as a whole create the context in which one's profile sits and from which identity emerges (Boyd, in press). (Miller 2008: 393)

Alas, the horizontal flattening of social relations refers to the fact that there is no vertical distinction between close friends and mere acquaintances. Google Plus, as far as I know, attempted to alleviate this by creating various levels of "circles". But the collective response of Internet users was "nope, not having that".

The point of the social networking profile is blatantly to establish (and demonstrate) linkages and connections, rather than dialogic communication. Thus, what is seen here is a shift in emphasis from blogging technology which encouraged the creation of substantive text along with networking, to social networking profiles which emphasize networking over substantive text, thus shifting digital culture one step further from the substantive text and dialogue of the blog further into a realm of new media culture which I refer to as the phatic. (Miller 2008: 393)

I was patiently waiting for this article to turn to phatics. Here "the phatic" is understood as a form of new media culture that emphasizes linkages and connections rather than substantive text.

Thus, phatic messages are not intended to carry information or substance for the reciver, but instead concern the process of communication. These interactions essentially maintain and strengthen existing relationships in order to facilitate further communication (Vetere et al., 2005). (Miller 2008: 394)

Another score for the theory that phatic communication is autonomous in Jakobson's sense.

Licoppe and Smoreda (2005) note that one way in which these transformations take place is through a change in the notions of 'presence' and 'absence', which occur in an age where many people are continually 'in touch' through networking technologies. These technologies essentially 'stand in' for them, making one almost continually contactable. Licoppe and Smoreda refer to this blurring of presence and absence as 'connected presence'. Their argument is that a new sociability pattern of the constantly contactable, one which blurs presence and absence, has resulted in relationships becoming webs of quasi-continuous exchanges. (Miller 2008: 394)

This point reminds me of an informal analysis I did of the minimalist web sites of 90s computer science gurus. I concluded that most of those pages were written in HTML "by hand" so to say, and that they functioned more like glorified visit cards. Some of those sites even used the outdated <address> tag that indicated the means of contact (e-mail, telephone or tax, and sometimes even the physical address). Somehow social networking sites took over this function and suddenly not only distinguished people who had something to offer professionally (i.e. teachers, lecturers, and experts) but everyone had a public means of access and address.

With the enlargement of social networks, and the technical means available to communicate with them, this encourages communication that retains a general sociability without the exchange of real information. For example, a growing amount of research into ubiquitous computing, done by, for example, Vetere, Howard and Gibbs (2005), has started to shift away from systems which support personal and informational issues (i.e. capturing and communicating information), and towards what are being called 'phatic technologies': technologies which build relationships and sustain social interaction through pervasive (but non-informational) contact and intimacy. (Miller 2008: 395)

Woop, there it is. The reason why I grouped this article with those by Wang et al. Also, it means that perhaps I should really take up the article referenced here, titled "Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability Through Ubiquitous Computing". Since it's a three-page article, I just might.

Licoppe and Smoreda (2005), argue that the technological affordance of connected presence leads to a rise of compressed expressions of intimacy. Non-dialogic means of communication signal recognition and a demand for attention, but allow for the looser commitment of non-intrusive sending of data, and deferred as asynchronous response. Simply put, their findings suggest that there has indeed been a rise of small communicative gestures whose purpose is not to exchange meaningful information, but to express sociability, and maintain social connections. The kinds of communication that Malinowski described as phatic communion. (Miller 2008: 395)

These notions, "communication signal recognition" and "demand for attention" sound awfully technical but do seem to figure large in the sphere phatic communication. The demand for attention, especially, has become the core of Paul Virilio's phatic image.

The overall result is that in phatic media culture, it is the connection to the other that becomes significant, and the exchange of words becomes superfluous. Thus the text message, the short call, the brief email, the short blog update or comment, becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence in an ever-expanding social network. (Miller 2008: 395)

The aspect of mediaton will hopefully be handled well by "Mediated gesture: Paralinguistic communication and phatic text" (Schandorf 2012).

The point of twitter is the maintenance of connected presence, and to sustain this presence, it is necessarily almost completely devoid of substantive content. Thus twitter is currently the best example of 'connected presence' and the phatic culture that results from it. In that way, Twitter is a glimpse into a future media/communications world of connection over content. Even among users, there is a certain amount of trepidation as to the general 'pointlessness' of the messages circulated, at the same time as an appreciation of an overall feeling of intimacy by being connected in real time to many others outside one's geographic location. (Miller 2008: 396-397)

"Connection over content" pretty much sums up the essence of phatic( technologie)s.

To answer this 'why?' question, one has to return to the concept of information as a commodity. In blogging, personal information was used as a commodity to build relationships. Within social networking and microblogging, the value of information is based more on the generation of large amounts of small bits of data, which can be analysed easily in the marketing process. Strategies such as data mining, consumer profiling, 'buzz' monitoring, and reading brand relationships are much more compatible with the small bits of 'data' exchanged in brief phatic exchanges than the narratives and dialogue associated with, for example, blogging. Phatic communication is much easier to put in a database, and much easier to package and sell to those looking to market products or gain consumer insights. (Miller 2008: 398)

This is where the concept of "commodification" actually works. It's a very good point that lengthy blog posts are a shitty source of market information: the amount of people who sit down and write reviews about various products is probably miniscule, while many people actually do give "shoutouts" to various products on Twitter. All in all this article turned out to be much better than I expected. References:

• Wittel, A. 2001. Towards a Network Sociality. Theory, Culture & Society 18(6): 51-76.
• Beck, U. and E. Beck-Gernsheim 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE.
• Bauman, Z. 2001. The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity.
• Giddens, A. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity.
• Calvert, C. 2004. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Castells, M. 2000[1996]. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Castells, M.; J. Qiu Linchuan; M. Fernandez-Ardevol and A. Sey 2006. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Manovich, L. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
• Boyd, D. 2006. Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites. First Monday 11(12). Link.
• Vetere, F.; S. Howard and M. Gibbs 2005. Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability Through Ubiquitous Computing. Proceedings of CHI 2005, April 2-7, Portland, Oregon, USA. Link.
• Licoppe, C. and Z. Smoreda 2005. Are Social Networks Technologically Embedded? Social Networks 27(4): 317-335.

Vetere, Frank; Steve Howard and Martin R. Gibbs 2005. Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability through Ubiquitous Computing. Proceedings of CHI 2005, April 2-7, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Recent research in ubiquitous computing has mostly concerned systems that support personal and informational issues. This workshop paper introduces the concept of phatic technologies - systems that establish and maintain the possibility of social interactions. These systems are not concerned with capturing and communicating information as such, but with building relationships. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

Thus, the "systems" in abstract phatic systems implies computer systems. It seems self-evident upon reflection, but it's worthwhile to keep in mind that the "pervasiveness" of phatic technologies pertains to ubiquitous computing (also known as pervasive computing, i.e. the growing trend towards embedding microprocessors in everyday objects so they can communicate information). It is relevant to include this paper because it seems to originate the concept of phatic technologies, preceded perhaps only by Christian Licoppe and Zbigniew Smoreda's "Are social networks technologically embedded?" (2005). How deep does this rabbit hole go?

Studies in Ubiquitous technologies have tended to focus on the personal (or individual) dimension and/or the informational aspects of interaction. [...] However reseach in ubiquitous computing does not often explicitly deal with human relationships, or communication. Of course there are exceptions (e.g. Marmasse et al. 2004), but even here the emphasis is on context awareness and information display (e.g. modality issues) rather than relationship building. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

The task of phaticists, on the other hand, is to distinguish personal/individual and informational aspects from relationship and communication aspects. Reference: Marmasse, N., C. Schmandt and D. Spectre 2004. WatchMe: communication and awareness between members of a closely-knit group. Proc. Ubicomp 2004, 214-231.

Phatic exchanges, a term first introduced by Malinowski (1923) and then adopted by Jakobson (1960), do not inform. They do not express any particular thought or aim to exchange facts about the world. They do however strengthen social bonds and establish and maintain the possibility of communication. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

Wrong. Neither of them proposed "phatic exchanges" and it's not that phatic communion does not inform, express thoughts or exchange facts. It's that these are not the primary functions of phatic communion. You can inform, express thoughts and exchange facts, but what makes such communication phatic is that it's primary function is to achieve a feeling of fellowship, a communion.

The phatic exchanges occur when messages are not intended, by the sender, to carry information for the receiver. The phatic dimension to an interaction concerns the process of communication, not its substance. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

I think Miller quoted this. By "concerning the process of communication" Vetere et al. mean that it's metacommunicative, as they go on to quote Jakobson's listing of those technical steps (checking whether the channel is operational, attracting and confirming continued attention, etc.).

Phatic acts ensure existinc communication channels are kept open and usable. These interactions maintain and strengthen existing relationships in order to facilitate further communication. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

This is a very pragmatic interpretation. I don't recall such future-orientation elsewhere other than perhaps Laver's concept of "cumulative consensus".

Thus Phatic Technologies are those specifically designed to sustain social interaction, rather than convey information. Phatic Technologies are not concerned with the utility of the interaction, the usefulness of the information nor the ease-of-use of the device - though each of these may contribute to the end user experience. Phatic Technologies are measured by the degree to which they contribute to a feeling of ongoing connectedness. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

These are curious definitions. "A feeling of ongoing connectedness" is actually a workable notion. Personally I have a feeling of ongoing connectedness when I'm connected to the internet, and especially when there's a data transfer of whatever kind (for example, torrents are seeding). It's not that I use the internet constantly. It's that I have an ongoing possibility of using it at any time (even when only using Google for checking up references or checking the meaning of a word).

Technologies that support phatic exchanges are similar to devices that support peripheral awareness (Gaver 2002), such as a lamp that glows in one room when a dear friend walks into another room far away. However, whereas awareness devices would tend to support phatic interactions, phatic interactions are not limited to being peripheral. Phatic interactions are often embedded within the routine of everyday life, and so can be foral as well as peripheral. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 1)

Man it gets really weird when computer scientists take up philosophical-sociological terms and apply them on technology. Reference: Gaver, B. 2002. Provocative Awareness. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11: 475-493.

The facility to chat idly, to 'waste' time with someone you care for was a valuable expression of the care they shared for each other. The substance of their communication was not always important. It was the reassurance that they were connected, that a channel of communication was available to them, and that this somehow strengthened and nurtured the relationship. These phatic exchanges were genuinely valued. (Vetere, Howard & Gibbs 2005: 2)

Despite being somewhat poorly written (the authors sometimes don't bother to punctuate their sentences) it makes some very good points. Phatic techniques (though perhaps not yet phatic technologies) offer reassurance of connectedness that strengthen and nurture (in a word, develop) the relationship.

Licoppe, Chrisitan and Zbigniew Smoreda 2005. Are social networks technologically embedded? How networks are changing today with changes in communication technology. Social Networks 27: 317-335.

Social behaviour becomes accountable from the objective and external perspective of the networked distribution of ties that is prior to the action. But two particular dimensions of social ties are often overlooked. First, the inner disposition to experience and sustain commitment towards another - what Simmel labels "faithfulness' - which stabilizes such commitments to social relationships, within an ever-changing stream of consciousness and beyond the initial context where such a relationship was born, like a kind of "intertial force of the soul" (Simmel 1908). The actual work that is performed to accomplish relationships as observable sequences of reciprocal actions, as a temporally organized succession of moments of presence and absence, of encounters separated from one another by pauses and silences, bursting from a variety of events and situations, and relying on an ever-growing array of mediations and interactional resources (face-to-face, letters, phone calls, etc.). (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 318)

The stabilization of commitments to social relationships is comparable to the stabilization of successive working consensuses to the cumulative consensus that forms the essence of a relationship (in a Laverian sense).

We try to address this issue empirically. For instance, does the constant growth (indeed, mass proliferation) of information and communication technologies (ICT's) lead to new ways of managing close relationships, and to different experiences and representations of what a strong tie and one's attachment to it actually mean? The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that ICT's have had effects. So we argue that at the levels of the construction and experience of social ties, the nature and the role of the mediation technologies that are used to support them matter. In that sense, social ties and social networks are embedded in a web of interaction-supporting artefacts. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 318-319)

This paper is very thick but also extremely relevant. The terminology itself is commendable: for example, "social ties" are much more workable than a quasi-Malinowskian "social bonds" (or, for Vetere et al., above, "social binds").

We will speak about "sociability", as the art of "living together" (Barthes 2002), which gathers all conventional modes of interaction with others, through which we manage to adjust our interpersonal behaviours, the temporal ordering of moments of presence and absence, the rhythms of speech, writing, gestures and silence. Sociability is made up from the flow of exchanges people maintain with those to whom they are tied. We see sociability as having three distinct poles: (i) social networks (sets of social ties with various possible metrics); (ii) exchanges, that are performed through a succession of embodied gestures and language acts (thes emay take a number of different formats or genres, even within one medium - as has been shown by research on writing (Chartier 1991), the telephone (Licoppe and Smoreda 2000), or on the forms of interactional reciprocity (Peters 1999)); and (iii) the various technical means which are available at a given moment of historical time and which mediate actual interactions. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 319)

When Wang et al. (2011: 45) emphasize that they "have appropriated the term phatic for an abstraction that emphasises sociality and is free of its deep linguistic features", this is most likely what they mean, or at least can be interpreted as such.

The massive development of ICT had led to a significant increase in the range of interactional devices, which actors may use. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 320)

That is, we have more computer-mediated means of communication now that ever.

In a given situation, using a particularly mediated mode of interaction rather than another (e.g., sending an e-mail rather than calling a person) is extremely meaningful, and such conventional meaning is easily decoded by participants. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 320)

Something something flexibility.

We will show that the rationale behind the decision to tell a friend or relative about the birth [of one's child] on the mobile phone, rather than with a greeting card is based on the proper time that news will take to reach a given person. Inner commitment to relationships therefore appears to be related to the temporal ordering of the mediated contacts, which actualize such a relationship. Contacts made via a particular channel of communication confer a kind of time-based tonus to the relationship. The choice of a particular technology rather than another therefore contributes to actors' inner experience of the strength of the bond. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 320)

This article keeps on making good points. In simple words: the nature of the social relationship is related to the phatic technology used to actualize that relationship.

We will give particular attention to the ways communication technologies (the tools used to achieve sociability) allow people to be present or absent. The first of our two regimes [for the temporal ordering of sociability practices] relies on an opposition between absence and co-presence, which is rather widespread in the Western world. This idea is the foundation for the representation that ICTs can be considered as surrogates for co-presence, in circumstances where face-to-face meetings are too difficult to organize. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 321)

Surrogates presumably in the sense that face-to-face contact is substituted with contact via communication technologies, which, if the primary function is maintaining contact or the feeling of co-presence, become phatic technologies.

We will provide evidence for the emergence and reinforcement of a new sociability pattern, in which presence is not simply the opposite of absence. In this new pattern technologies of communication (in particular mobile phones) are not just substitutes for face-to-face interaction, but constitute a new resource for constructing a kind of connected presence even when people are physically distant. In the regime of "connected" presence, participants multiply encounters and contacts using every kind of mediation and artifacts available to them: relationships thus become seamless webs of quasi-continuous exchanges. The boundaries between absence and presence get blurred and subtle experiences of togetherness may develop. The use of messaging technologies develops, for "connected presence" weighs heavily on participants' limited availability and attention; however committed they are to sustain that form of mediated sociability. Phatic communications becomes increasingly important, because simply keeping in touch may be more important than what is said when one actually gets in touch. In a sense, any type of mediated contact does the job of sustaining social bonds in the regime of "connected presence". (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 321)

There's a lot to unpack here. Hopefully I will manage it in the review section below. In any case they emphasize that connection indeed becomes more important than content.

The interaction is guided by conventions but also constructed in the course of interaction itself. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 322)

Interactions are paradigmatic and enigmatic at the some time, which is undoubtedly a truism.

Friends who are seen less frequently receive a written announcement of the event [the birth of one's child]; colleagues are more likely to receive an e-mail. These written media are less committing in terms of reciprocity compared to conversation (face-to-face or on the phone). (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 323)

This is an aspect that allows for further original theoretization: most phatic technologies seem to be focused on reaffirming connectedness but are not very committing in terms of reciprocity. A Facebook "Poke" does not commit the recipient to poke you back.

The differential use of particular means of communication thus lays down a space of relational practices where ties of similar closeness are treated in a similar way, and where this degree of closeness is publicly expressed and negotiated. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 323)

More on how technology and relationships reflect each other.

The work of sociability thus turns into a joint redefinition of relational proximities in the network, and a redefinition of the sense of each of the interactional resource available for the maintenance of the relationship. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 324)

This kind of negotiation of relationships goes on all the time on Facebook, for example, where the relationship you have with another user determines whether you like his or her comment or not, for example.

But a [social] tie is woven out of many contexts, many occasions and many technical means of communication. It is constructed in a constant point and counterpoint of interaction, a chronicle of encounters - each with a particular form of communication - where the thread of timing stitches the presence and absence according to the characteristic modes, which make up a relationship. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 325)

Compare, contrast and conjoin this with Laver's "cumulative consensus" approach.

This mode of technically mediated sociability is not new. Throughout the centuries it has adapted to the transformation of interpersonal mediations. In the sixteenth century the exchange of gifts between peers, gentlemen and scholars helped the latter to keep in contact "like the stones of a good building held together by cement" (cited in Zemon Davis 2003: 105). In the nineteenth cuntery, bourgeois correspondence took up the same theme. We might even talk of an epistolary pact - a widely accepted idea that physical separation is a test for the letter-writers to overcome. Letters thus filled in the absence of the other by providing news and signals of presence. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 325)

Exactly what I argued (though less eloquently) against Miller's statement that mobility and disembeddedness is a late modern emergence.

Exchanges mediated by technical means nonetheless constitute an important connective tissue coordinating and synchronizing group activities and meetings. The fact of being "on the list" both expresses the fact that one belongs to the group and makes it possible to participate in group activities (Manceron 1997). (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 326)

This is more in line with the paradogigal concept of Roadmap.

It has also been encouraged by the development of various kinds of message systems such as answering services, e-mail, SMS, etc. These technologies for sending messages loosen the constraints, which would otherwise be imposed by the proliferation of communication because they allow the person receiving a message to choose the moment of reply. For the more numerous communications become, the more frequently people have to interrupt the activity they are currently engaged in to fit in with another cadence. The risk is that ties with friends will become institutionalized in the form of expectations and mutual obligations to be constantly available electronically. Mediated sociability currently seems to be countering this risk of control and preserving playful pleasure and improvisation in the interpersonal tie by making greater use of less intrusive means of communication. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 330)

This is a pertinent point, and exactly the reason why I consciously decided to stop using MSN and Facebook chat. I can tolerate and even enjoy constant background music but having a conversation with another person online feels like a full time commitment that obstructs concentration in reading, for example.

At the same time short calls and messages fulfill a phatic function where the discursive content of the communication gesture is less important than the act itself. Phatic communication is spreading, for it constitutes a key resource in the management of quasi-continuously connected relationships. Rather than constructing shared experience by recounting small and large events of the day or the week, one sends short expressive messages, giving one's sensations or reactions to some event, an emotion, or perhaps asking the person to express themselves in this way. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 331)

These authors manage to turn asemanticitiy into an affirmation of autonomy. The second part affirms the shift from narrative to database culture that Miller described.

Sometimes indeed these messages do not even require a direct response, for they authorize a kind of civil lack of attention. In some extreme cases the mere fact of knowing that a line of communication is active and that one is therefore "connected" to the other is sufficient. The emotion, which accompanies this knowledge makes the tie present to consciousness and for the moment make exchanges of words superfluous. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 331-332)

Score for autonomy.

Social ties are the basic units of social networks. We have shown how the relational work, on which strong ties are built is shaped by the tools of communication used in such work. (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 333)

Reaffirming the determining importance of technology on the type of relationships that a particular technology fosters.

Review

Introduction

This review was originally intended to cover two relatively recent papers by Wang et al. (2011; 2012) that are written explicitly about phatic technologies. Growing interest in the origins of the term and the conceptual area it applies to lead me to read several slightly older papers from the previous decade (namely Miller 2008; Vetere et al. 2005; and Licoppe & Smoreda 2005). Thus, the end result is not a review of papers by Wang et al. in particular but a review the concept of phatic technologies, and the implications this concept has for phatic studies, in general.

Phatic autonomy

First of all, Wang et al. (2011) should be commended for doing what numerous writers in the past were either unable or unwilling to do (this regrettably includes me). Namely, they looked into the etymology of the word phatic and came up with a solid and useful piece of information: "The term "phatic" has its origins in the Greek phanai which means to speak" (Wang et al. 2011: 47). This turns out to be the correct etymology, originating from the sequence: phasiā ("speech"); phasis ("utterance"); and phanai ("to say").

The import of this discovery cannot be understated for it can be used as a basis for reformulating our understanding of the three speech functions that Roman Jakobson (1981[1960d]) introduced to Karl Bühler's (2011[1934]) organon model of language. Namely, the additions, the poetic, metalingual, and phatic functions of speech all have something in common: they are in a sense metacommunicative, or, to use Jakobson's own term, introversive.

Jakobson writes that "The introversive semiosis, a message which signifies itself, is indissolubly linked with the esthetic function of sign systems" (Jakobson 1971[1970d]: 704-705). In contrast with extroversive semiosis, which manifests a referential component, that is, refers to something external to the utterance itself, introversive semiosis is self-referential, or, to use a term that refers back to the Prague Linguistic Circle, autonomous.

I prefer to use the latter term, despite it's other uses in Jakobson's phonological theory and Tynyanov's literary theory, because the concept of the autonomous function goes at the heart of the matter in Jan Mukařovský's original conception of the aesthetic function. In the distinction between the autonomous (valuative) and the communicative (informative) function of the work of art, Mukařovský affirms that art does not always necessarily communicate something to someone but has it's own intrinsic value as a work of art (cf. Gandelman 1988: 266).

It can be argued that the three functions that Jakobson attaches to Bühler's original three are all autonomous in this sense. It must also be mentioned that although they are speech functions they are not necessarily communicative functions: the common perception of his functions as pertaining to all forms of communication is slightly erroneous. They can certainly be interpreted and applied as general communication functions but they are not originally conceived as such. Jakobson himself insists that the structural and functional particularities of nonlinguistic messages should be investigated, but does not engage in it himself (cf. Jakobson 1971[1970d]: 698).

Thus, the three latest functions can be thought of as having a non-communicative operation at their core; instead of transmitting information in the strict sense of communication, these functions bring to light the intrinsic value of various components of communication. The aspect of autonomy is generally most evident in the poetic function, which is directly modelled after Mukařovský's aesthetic function, and merely reconceptualized to apply on linguistic material. The metalingual function is introversive in the sense that it does not refer to external reality but explains the meaning of a given word with another word or set of words. Jakobson even goes as far as describes the basis of the metalingual function, message about code (or M/C form of duplex structure) as "the autonymous form of speech" (Jakobson 1971[1957c]: 133).

And finally we have the phatic function of speech, which, now that we know its etymological origin, presents us with a seemingly paradoxical interpretation: the phatic function of speech is the speech function of speech. If we were unaware of Jakobson's method of constructing duplex structures this would be paradoxical. But knowing that he does this, the paradox fades away and we come to a deeper understanding of "phatic" as contact about contact or communication about communication.

This lengthy prologue is necessary in order to understand the nature of phatic technologies because several authors who write about phatic technologies intuitively understand this aspect when they use terminology more akin to Malinowski's (1946[1923]) phatic communion. Given the newly rediscovered etymology, phatic communion can now be understood as something like "sharing in speech" or "union through language". In order to comprehend phatic technologies this definition must of course be complemented with modern means of communication that transcend speech and language as such.

Thus, Wang et al. write that "phatic technologies are so named for phatic dialogue, which is empty of informative content but serves to engage people with one another in purely social exchange" and that "the relationship between the speakers is affirmed by the act of communication rather than the content of communication" (Wang et al. 2012: 85). While some (like Hymes 1971: 43-44) simplify phatic communion to mean "talking for the sake of talking", these authors hold that "in social life, phatic conversation serves to reassure that communication and interaction are alive and well" (Wang et al. 2012: 85).

Affirmation and reassurance of the communicative contact or relationship is exactly the autonomic aspect in phatic communication: it foregrounds the (f)act of communication over the informative content as background. In another formulation, "phatic messages are not intended to carry information or substance for the reciver, but instead concern the process of communication" (Miller 2008: 394).

Besides the interpretation of phatic communication being about the process of communication itself, i.e. autonomous, there is also an emphasis on communication about relationship: phatic exchanges "do not express any particular thought or aim to exchange facts about the world" but "do however strengthen social bonds and establish and maintain the possibility of communication" (Vetere et al. 2005: 1).

At this point it is interesting to note how some of these authors manage to turn the putative asemanticity of phatic utterances (the claim that phatic speech is meaningless) into a positive affirmation of the autonomy of phatic communication: "short calls and messages fulfill a phatic function where the discursive content of the communication gesture is less important than the act itself" but at the same time "it constitutes a key resource in the management of quasi-continuously connected relationships" (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 331).

Wang et al. (2012) perform an analysis on the Facebook poke, revealing that it does not have any specific function but can serve various social purposes; the poked user receives a notification that he or she has been poked, and by whom, but without any other contextual information. They conclude that "the poke could be considered as a phatic technique inbuilt in Facebook to keep the Facebook social community active and humming" and underline the point that "such exchanges are (and can only be) about relationships, e.g., requesting attention and engagement" (Wang et al. 2012: 85-86).

Licoppe and Smoreda (2005) argue from the viewpoint of a "connected presence" that phatic technology does not work only by requesting attention and engagement but also by creating a quasi-continuous presence: "In some extreme cases the mere fact of knowing that a line of communication is active and that one is therefore "connected" to the other is sufficient" (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 331-332). Here the aspect of "holding the channel open" takes on a broader dimension.

Ultimately, the autonomy of the phatic function infects phatic technology, which ends up becoming autonomous in its own sense. Wang et al. (2012) discuss the paradigm shift from an understanding of technology as something that facilitates solving problems external to man to the use of Internet and associated technologies in the social life and personal relationships in an internal, embedded, way (Wang et al. 2012: 87). In opposition with the primary function of communication technology, which is transmitting information, phatic technology is used autonomously for staying in quasi-continuous potential contact with others.

Thus, there emerges "a new sociability pattern" in which "technologies of communication [...] are not just substitutes for face-to-face interaction, but constitute a new resource for constructing a kind of connected presence even when people are physically distant" (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 321). Miller complements this conclusion by stating that "the text message, the short call, the brief email, the short blog update or comment, becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence in an ever-expanding social network" (Miller 2008: 395).

The final point about phatic autonomy that leads us into a discussion of the nature of phatic technologies is Miller's musement that Twitter, with its maintenance of connected presence by quasi-continuous barrage of messages almost completely devoid of substantive content, "is a glimpse into a future media/communications world of connection over content" (Miller 2008: 396-397; my emphasis). In short, he predicts that communication for the sake of connection will ultimately dominate communication of substance.

Phatic technology

As far as it is possible to tell, the concept of phatic technologies was first conceived by Vetere et al. (2005) in a short conference paper titled "Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability through Ubiquitous Computing", and owes much of its basis to a paper published earlier in the same year by two French telecommunications researchers, Licoppe and Smoreda (2005), in a paper titled "Are social networks technologically embedded?". These authors insisted that "short calls and messages fulfill a phatic function where the discursive content of the communication gesture is less important than the act itself" (Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 331) and that "In this sense we could term this an almost "phatic" maintenance of ties" (ibid, 331; fn 21). Vetere et al.'s approach to ubiquitous computing expanded this notion to include computer systems and voilà the concept of phatic technologies was born.

At the heart of the matter is the interplay between modern communication technology and human social relationships. Curiously, these two bases echo Jakobson's conception of contact which involves "a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication" (Jakobson 1981[1960d]: 21; my emphasis). Given that modern communication technology offers a greater variety of technical means to enter communication and that psychological connection involves a broad spectrum from solidarity to intimacy in staying in communication, we can affirm that the discourse on phatic technologies is situated firmly in what we call phatic studies (or phatics for short).

Nevertheless, despite this continuity of concerns, phatic technologies also raise the larger question of the place of technology in society. This is most succinctly captured in Licoppe and Smoreda's (2005) title, "Are social networks technologically embedded?" and pertains to the opposite side of the issue as well: phatic technologies are "deeply embedded in the fabrics of our daily lives" (Wang et al. 2012: 87). Thus, at the same time, technology is embedded in society, and society is embedded in technology. The study of phatic technologies turns our attention to this interplay and is poised to elucidate the role of each pole in developing both technology and relationships.

These aspects also follow the course of the two papers originally considered for this review: Wang et al. (2011) attempts a meticulous definition of phatic technologies on the basis of Malinowski's phatic communion; and Wang et al. (2012) goes on to outline how "use of the phatic technology becomes a habit that shapes members' actions in the social community" (2012: 88), a process they call phatic technological habituation. In broad terms: how technology mediates sociality and how sociality habituates technology.

Vetere et al.'s original contention begins with a remark that "Recent research in ubiquitous computing has mostly concerned systems that support personal and informational issues" and must be complemented with research on phatic technologies, i.e. "systems that establish and maintain the possibility of social interactions" and "building relationships" (Vetere et al. 2005: 1). It is worthwhile to mention that ubiquitous computing is synonymous with pervasive computing, which figures as the second stage in the process of phatic technological habituation (in Wang et al. 2012), which we will get to in a moment.

The role of modern communication technologies in social relationships does not escape the authors of other papers surveyed in this review. Licoppe and Smoreda insist that interactions mediated by technology "constitute an important connective tissue" in modern society, without which "coordination and synchronizing group activities and meetings" seems impossible (cf. Licoppe & Smoreda 2005: 326). Wang et al. put it poetically by stating that phatic communion through technological tools fulfills important "social functions, oiling the wheels of social relations" (Wang et al. 2011: 48).

Their general understanding of phatic technology follows the logic that phatic communion is a tool or a technique that has developed into a full-fledged category of technology. Their outline of the three-step process of phatic technological habituation embodies this development from tools to systems to cultural forces. These stages are as follows (cf. Wang et al. 2012: 88):

1. Facilitative - where the technology simply performs certain tasks in the context.
2. Pervasive - where the technology is widely used in the context.
3. Embedded - where the technology is fully integrated in the fabric of the context.

By "the context" they mean society. A pertinent illustration of this process of habituation is close at hand (for the author) in the form of Estonian electronic voting system. It was first facilitative, aimed to solve the problem of sparse voter turnout in rural areas, and used in a pilot project for the municipal elections in 2005. By now, a decade later, it has become pervasive in the sense that it is widely used (by about 1/3 of all voters) and available for most elections. It is possible that it will become embedded in the future and elections in Estonia become unimaginable without it, if that's not already the case. Although electronic voting is not a perfect example of phatic technology it manages to illustrate technological habituation pretty well.

Wang et al. (2012) also introduce a practical distinction between phatic technology characterised by either weak or strong phatic use. That is, there are technologies that are explicitly made for phatic purposes, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, etc. but there are also technologies that were originally made for other purposes but were as-if subverted by its users to suit phatic needs. The authors bring eBay as an example of the latter but there is a more relatable illustration available in comic form:

An old Windows utility has an undocumented feature. If you open "help" and click on the background, you get dropped into a "support" chat room. Only a few of us ever found it. But we became friends. We kept launching the program to check in. Eventually some of us were running VMs just to keep accessing it. As the Internet aged so did we. We don't know who runs the server. We don't know why it's still working so many years later. Maybe we're some sysadmin's soap opera. It will probably vanish someday. But for now it's our meeting place, our hideaway. A life's worth of chat, buried in the deep web. But even if it lasts forever, we won't. When we're gone, who will remember us? Who will remember this strange little world and the friendships we built here? Nobody. This place is irrelevant. Ephemeral. One day it will be forgotten. And so will we. But at least it doesn't have fucking video ads. (xkcd, "Undocumented Feature")

This story manages to capture the essence of what Wang et al. (2011) call interpretive flexibility of technology, i.e. the possibility of using technology for social and phatic purposes. A pertinent illustration that the authors themselves provide concern the telephone, which "although not necessarily invented for business purposes [...] was supposedly produced for business purposes" but became an important means of establishing, developing and maintaining social relationships among a community of women living in rural America (Wang et al. 2011: 47).

The consequence of technological embeddedness, the final stage in habituation, is that "not using it may be regarded as an odd or even deviant choice in a given social circle" (Wang et al. 2011: 47). Both the telephone and currently Facebook exemplify this stage of habituation. These authors capture the essence of interpretive flexibility in the dictum that "the phatic use of a technology is reflexively determined by the relationship between the producers, the users and non-users, and the phatic technology" (Wang et al. 2011: 46; original emphasis).

Here they actually outline a novel form of relationship concerning phatic technology. Namely, that the so-called "market relations" figure large in the scheme of things when it comes to phatic technologies: "The 'shape' of a technological artefact is the outcome of social processes - selection and variation - by relevant social groups" (Wang et al. 2011: 45). This is aptly illustrated in recent Internet history by the mass migration of users from Digg to Reddit after the former's update removed emphasis on user contributed content and promoted more sponsored content.

So much for the embedding of technology in society. But what about the embedding of society in technology? Wang et al. (2012) revisit the concept of cyberculture, which was conceived shortly after the public launch of the World Wide Web, as "A far-flung, loosely knit complex of sub-legitimate, alternative, and oppositional subcultures whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities ofter framed by radical body politics" (Dery 1992: 509; in Wang et al. 2012: 87).

Without skipping a beat, the authors add that "Currently, cyberculture, driven by the Internet and associated technologies, is no longer a form of sub-culture - it is deeply embedded in the fabrics of our daily lives - at times, transcending individual preference" (ibid, 87). That is, in their view there is no cyberculture as a sub-culture anymore. Cyberculture has become the dominant culture, "a collecive social construction transcending individual preference, while influencing the practice of people in the culture" (ibid, 87).

But before turning to the concept of phatic culture, there are some more worthwhile remarks on technology that must be reviewed. Miller, for example, attributes the growth in importance of "communication that retains a general sociability without the exchange of real information" to "the enlargement of social networks, and the technical means available to communicate with them" (Miller 2008: 395). To what, in turn, should we attribute the enlargement of social networks? Wang et al. have an answer: they argue that "certain abstract social conditions that are characteristic of modernity amplify significantly the human need for, and thus the technical development of, phatic technologies" (Wang et al. 2012: 85; original emphasis).

These abstract social conditions originate from the work of Anthony Giddens, which we will not dwell on here (at least not yet), but are captured in the concept of alienation, which phatic technologies supposedly alleviates by facilitating reembedding of personal and contextual intimacy: "Our argument implies that in modernity there is a human need for phatic technologies and that their technical development is destined to grow" (Wang et al. 2012: 91-92).

More down to earth, perhaps, is their contention that "Social interactions via phatic technologies are removed from the physical; rather it is built via abstract systems that reembed individuals and social relations in distant locations (ibid, 92). Thus, for example, an Estonian that travels or works abroad can still vote over the internet through electronic voting, as well as maintain "connected presence" with family and friends through various phatic technologies. A similar situation in pre-modern times would have meant almost absolute cut-off from domestic politics and close ones.

Phatic technologies thus enable one to live a full-fledged social life in a virtual space regardless of location in physical space. These technologies are also pervasive enough to allow for this: hand-held devices can connect to the Internet and keep a person connected with his or her social network as long as the internet connection suffices. Next I'll review the aspect of phatic technologies that pertain more directly to social networks and relationships.

Phatic networks

In order to deal with the social networking aspect, it must first be acknowledged phatic technologies allow for broader interpretation of phatic communion than is customary. Wang et al. acknowledge that the concept of phatic communion "originates in the British school of sociolinguistics, which is closely affiliated with anthropology and cultural concerns" (2011: 47) but add that this has inspired them to appropriate the linguistic term and consequently to "free [it] of its deep linguistic features" (ibid, 45). They view phatic as "an abstraction that emphasises sociality" (ibid, 45).

A more general understanding of phatic communion is perhaps impossible. We learned, above, that phatic originates etymologically from the Greek word for "speech", and saw that it has profound implications for our understanding of the phatic function of speech. Now we have at hand the task of reframing the communion in phatic communion. Wang et al. suggest that the primary function of phatic technology is "to create a social context with the effect that its users form a social community based on a collection of interactional goals" (2011: 44).

The primary interactional goal for phatic technology users seems to consist in prolonging the relationship. This can be inferred from the fact that the original list of phatic functions that Jakobson put forth - establishing, prolonging and discontinuing communication - Wang et al. have eliminated discontinuing and divided prolonging up into developing and maintaining relationships.

As a sidenote, this is more symptomatic than it may seem at first sight. 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). But this does not concern us now.

Interestingly, Wang et al. lay emphasis on the ability of phatic technologies to "enable the reconnection of social relations that have been stretched across time-space" (2012: 85). Popular culture sometimes makes use of this ability by portraying older people discovering Facebook and reconnecting with highschool buddies and college sweethearts. On the other hand these authors also emphasize the ability of phatic technologies "to sustain intimacy at distance" (Wang et al. 2012: 88). It can be hypothesized that current generations growing up and old with social networks facilitated by phatic technologies have a smaller chance of completely losing touch with schoolmates and even mere acquaintances, not to mention friends and lovers.

On a critical note, sustaining intimacy at a distance can also be understood negatively. With increased dependency on phatic technologies it is possible to hypothesize that face-to-face interactions will begin to transform over time towards increasingly more dependence on said technologies. This sentiment is captured in the following lyrics:

Technology made it easy for us to stay in touch while keeping a distance,
'til we just stayed distance and never touched. Now all we do is text too much.
(Sage Francis, "The Best of Times")

Miller treats of this in terms of social relations becoming more informational [not informative, but informational] instead of narrative-focused: "communications between people become more ephemeral and more akin to an exchange of 'data' than deep, substantive or meaningful communication based on mutual understanding" (Miller 2008: 390). That is, instead of telling each other stories and identifying with our communication partners, the communication process becomes increasingly like the hyposemiotic communication model (Fiordo 1989) prescribes: a back-and-forth transmission of discreet packages of data.

Turning to social networking, the papers surveyed for this review present a pretty consistent view that phatic technologies embed users in social networks. Their views introduce variety in the details of how this occurs. Millor, for example, holds that disembodied intersubjectivity contrasts the "belonging" of "community" with the concept of "integration" and "disintegration" in a network (Miller 2008: 390). He adds that network sociality consists in a "commodified form of social bonding based on the continual construction and reconstruction of personal networks or contacts" (ibid, 390).

That is, modern people no longer belong in a community so much as they join social networking sites and construct their relationships through phatic technologies that demand one to consistently renew, refresh and revalue existing contacts. These latter processes are penultimately "typified in the compressed social acts of 'catching up'" (ibid, 390). Although the terminology here is colourful, the matter at hand seems easily intuitable: instead of the stretched out and relaxed phatic communion of face-to-face interactions we are faced with life-histories reduced to a few stamp sentences pertaining to recent events.

The core argument here could be that social media "compresses" both the form and the content of social interactions that are mediated through phatic technologies. Miller argues that in contrast with blogs which usually had "a fairly anonymous list of hyperlinks" to affiliated blogs of friends, acquaintances and public figures, the social networking profile pages "give much more space to friends (including pictures) and thereby much more visual prominence on the profile at the expense of textual material" (ibid, 390).

While the blog logic was to link to other blogs that were topically related (i.e. music blogs linked to other music blogs, technology blogs to other technology blogs, etc.) the social networking profile forefrounds relationships instead of what people actually do. There are of course exceptions. Reddit, for example, gives little relevance to "friends". Instead, there are topical subreddits where the users' personal relationships have no bearing on the substantive content of the subreddit.

Social networking also doesn't necessarily have to be viewed in a negative light. Miller writes that "Profile building, while on the one hand enmeshing the profile/self in a network, is essentially the creation of a series of lists; markers which can be called up by others searching for people with similar interests" (Miller 2008: 393). This is almost exactly the case with Academia.edu, which lets people make lists of markers for their own research in general as well as for a specific research paper in particular. Through these markers it is indeed possible to get in contact and possibly collaborate with people working away on the same subject.

Nevertheless, Miller has a pertinent point in noting, with reference to Boyd's (2006) study of MySpace "friend" feature, that relationships become horizontally flattened in social networking sites. Friends and family are on the same peg with mere acquaintances and public figures. In this particular case these authors may be a bit outdated since Facebook later introduced a feature that lets you group people as friends, acquaintances, family, and even to make up new groups. Not to mention the "circles" feature on Google Plus.

His point stands only because despite these additions, social relations have indeed become compressed and the context of relationships in a sense eliminated. Miller writes that "The only context present is the egocentric nature of the network itself" and that "friends as a whole create the context in which one's profile sits and from which identity emerges" (ibid, 393). We'll deal a bit more with the egocentric or narcissistic tendency below in terms of reflexivitiy.

Phatic culture

Perhaps the most promising aspect in this for future research is the concept of phatic culture. Here there are two slightly diverging interpretations. One the one hand we have Wang et al. (2011: 45) saying that sometimes "the use of a phatic technology becomes a 'culture' in its user community", and on the other hand we have Miller arguing that the non-dialogic and non-informational flattening of social bonds in networked sociality is a larger socio-cultural trend (Miller 2008: 387-338).

Wang et al.'s approach is perhaps more promising because it's more grounded in the role of technology in modern culture. They emphasize the user group of a phatic technology "forms a community defined by the social function that is the "raison d'être" of the phatic technology" (Wang et al. 2011: 45; emphasis in original). And by culture these authors understand "a set of values and beliefs that is generated by repetitive patterns of behavior" (ibid, 45).

This definition is akin to the classical definition of culture relied on by Jakobson: "Culture is the totality of behavior patterns that are passed between generations by learning, socially determined behavior learned by imitation and instruction" (Campbell 1966: 287; in Jakobson 1985[1967e]: 102-103). While the phatic culture, the culture pertaining to particular phatic technologies, probably does not involve much intergenerational learning, it most certainly involves socially learned, imitated or instructed behaviour.

This definition of culture also jibes well with that of the semiotics of culture, where culture is understood as "the collective mechanism for the storage of information ("memory") [that] ensures the transmission from generation to generation of fixed rigid schemes of texts [...] and whole fragments of them" (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 68-69). Once again, if the intergenerational aspect is discarded, the definition suits for an elaboration of phatic culture in the sense that phatic technologies are frequently used to transmit, store, and exchange texts and fragments of texts. The rigidity and fragmentariness of said texts can very well be appropriated for an approach to linking and quoting practices in Twitter culture, for example.

Such an emphasis on this seemingly throw-away definition of culture by Wang et al. is elaborated here because these aspects are surprisingly compatible with Miller's view of phatic culture as a socio-cultural trend that shifts the key form of cultural expression in the digital age from the logic of narrative to that of the database (cf. Miller 2008: 390). This is well illustrated by the move from blogs to microblogs, in a way that increasingly supplements narrative story-telling with links to and short quotes from what others have written.

In other words, phatic culture encourages exchange of texts instead of production. Instead of creators of the content of our social lives we become increasinly the managers of said content. Here it is possible to come full circle to the autonomy aspect in the beginning of this review: by sharing a link I am not communicating so much as evaluating whether a given piece of information suits my public profile, whether it confirms my role and position in my social network or not, and whether it reinforces or sets obstacles for my relationships.

In this sense phatic technologies do separate from communication technologies on the basis of autonomy: while the dominant function of the latter is to inform, the latter's is to maintain social ties, largely by means that are if not divested from substantive content at least not self-produced.

It is at this point that I come to a full realization that I do not have the means to go forward with this review. In the course of organizing the notes for this review I hoped to end by covering the concept of "phatic reflexivity", i.e. how phatic technologies are related to autocommunication and what Giddens calls the modernist project of the self, but these are topics best left for the next review in this series, on Ray Harris's chapter on "Communication and self" in Signs, Language and Communication (1996).

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