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IT juhtimise head tavad koolis

Leego Hansson 2013. IT juhtimise head tavad koolis.

Käesolev heade tavade kogumik soovib olla kooli juhtkonna ja teiste IT juhtimise teemadega seotud töötajate abimees IT-valdkonna valikute ja otsuste tegemisel. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Siit ka sellised küsimused nagu "Millest võiks koosneda kooli infosüsteem?" ja näiv kohatus - IT-nooremspetsialistid ei kuulu kooli juhtkonda ja ei ole õppuritena pädevad kooli juhtkonna tegevusse kuuluvates küsimustes. Kõikidest neist kooli kohta käivatest küsimustest jäi mulje, et õpetaja esitab selliseid küsimusi, sest tema on õpetaja. Tõenäosus, et õppivad IT-nooremspetsialistid tulevases elus koolis töötavad on väike.

Kuna kooli IT-üksus ei ole tavaliselt väga suur ja eraldi IT-juhi ametikoht on haruldane, siis tuleb IT-valdkonna valikuid ja otsuseid teha kas arvutiõpetajal või kooli juhtkonna valdkondliku ettevalmistuseta liikmel. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Kindlustus eelnevatele kommentaaridele: koolid ei vaja väga palju It-nooremspetsialiste ja kui, siis ei saa neilt kuidagi eeldada kooli juhtkonna valdkondlikku ettevalmistust.

Rahanappuse tõttu tuleb leida nutikaid tehnoloogilisi ja töökorralduslikke lahendusi. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Fraseoloogiline leid: Nutikate tehnoloogiliste lahenduste all võib tõenäoliselt pidada silmas kõikvõimalikke "nutilahendusi", ehk nt õpilastel juba taskus olevatesse nutitelefonidesse koolitöö sokutamist jne. Töökorraldusest ei tea hetkel midagi. "Tee tööd!" on korraldus, aga mis on töökorraldus? Googeldamine annab tulemuseks portsu vasteid kus põhikombinatsiooniks on "töökorralduse reeglid", st lihtsalt öeldes reeglid kuidas töö on korraldatud (tööaeg, töötasu, ja muu hea kraam).

Mõned näited olukordadest, mis valed otsused kaasa tuua võivad:
  1. IT-rakendus (nt eKool) ei suuda koormuse kasvades töötada;
  2. It-spetsialisti lahkumisel ei tea keegi paroole ja süsteemide seadistusi ning tema tööd ei ole võimalik sujuvalt üle võtta;
  3. arvutid kaotavad vanuse tõttu järjest töövõime;
  4. printeri taga on hommikuti pikad järjekorrad;
  5. tarkvaralitnentsid on soetamata jäänud ja kooli ähvardab trahv;
  6. nutikatel õpilastel on õnnestunud saada salajane ja õpetajate õigustega juurdepääs hindamissüsteemile;
  7. töö on sageli häiritud arvutivõrgu katkestuste töttu.
Kogumik katab IT-vajaduste kirjeldamise, IT-arengu juhtimise, IT-meeskonna rollide ja vastutuse, taristu loomise ja hardamise ning kooli IT-turvalisuse teemad ja annab ülevaate olulisematest juhenditest ja kordadest. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Neid punkte küsimusele "Millised ohud kaasnevad IT-teenuste sisseostmisega?" üle kandes võib täheldada järgnevaid riske: (1) teenusepakkuja ei saa vajaliku töökoormusega hakkama, mis peaks tegelikult olema igasuguste (IT-)projektide puhul tüüpiline probleem - hinnatakse iseenda võimekust üle ja tulemus on selle võrra kesisem, st lühidalt ebapädevus; (2) teenusepakkuja võib näiteks kasutada kodukootud (proprietary) tarkvara või töömeetodeid, mille tulemusel seatakse üles nagu sõltuvussuhe - meie saame asjaga hakkama, aga selleks peate meid edasi palkama, või, lihtsam juhtum, teenusepakkuja on niivõrd ebapädev, et paroolid lähevad kaduma ja seadistused kukuvad üsna varsti koost; (3) kõik, mida kasutatakse, kulub - ja see käib ka võrdlemisi stabiilse kõrgtehnoloogia kohta, ma arvan - seega on üheks ohuks kindlasti see, et teenusepakkuja väärkasutab ja panustab seadmete vananemisele ja töövõime kaotusele; (4) teenusepakkuja ei pruugi hoomata ettevõtte nö "inimdimensiooni" (see mõiste jäi strateegilise juhtimise Vikipeedia leheküljest külge, sest on pisut üldisem ja parem kui muidu nii mugav "inimvajadused") - näiteks isegi KHKs on mõned rakendused loodud tegelikke vajadusi täielikult mitte arvestades, näiteks tunniplaani rakendus ei võimalda eristada rühmasid, mistõttu keegi peab iga nädal ikkagi tunniplaani MS Paint'is soperdatud kujul e-mailile saatma ja fuajeesse üles seatud puutetundlik ekraan ei võimalda allapoole scroll-ida, mistõttu viimast tundi lihtsalt ei ole näha; (5) sama kodukootud tarkvara probleem (mis on küll litsentside teema vastand, kuid siiski), mida esines ka KHKs kui esimesed siseveebi arendajad läksid ära ja keegi ei osanud seda muuta, parandada või uuendada; (6) üldine teabeturve - õpilaste ligipääs hindamissüsteemile on koolipõhine näide, aga on ka selliseid juhtumeid olnud kus näiteks USA sõjadroonide kaamerafeed olevat olnud täiesti tavaliste Microsofti tabletitega ligipääsetav, mistõttu terroristid said iseennast droonide pilgu läbi vaadata ja rünnakuid ette näha; (7) ruumis 411 tõepoolest ei ole Wifi levi.

Väikse kooli ressursid (raha, aeg, inimesed, teadmised) on väiksed ning kooli erinevate sihtgruppide vajadustest tuleb valida välja jõukohane komplekt ja detailsuse tase. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Tautoloogia vastaspoolusel: suure kooli ressursid on suured; ja keskmodaalsus: kesmise kooli ressursid on keskmised. Tarkus! "Detailsuse tase" on hea sõnakõlks ja üks neist asjadest, mis IT-juhtimise aines näib paigast ära: kust võtta vastuseid ettevõtte juhtkonna pädevusse kuuluvatele küsimustele, kui pole kunagi IT-ettevõttes ega suvalise ettevõtte IT-osakonnas ise töödanud? Samuti "presentatsiooni" probleem - isegi kui vastused on googeldavad võivad need oluliselt erineda ühe ettevõtte tegelikest asjaoludest (teoreetilises plaanis on lihtne esitada idealiseeritud punkte, aga iga ettevõte on erinev ja kindlasti leidub ka selliseid, kus kõik teoorias kaunid ettekirjutused on kehtetud).

Õppetööd efektiivsemaks ja huvitavamaks muuta aitavate tehnoloogiate puhul on oluline koolitada õpetajaid ja olla teadlik võimalustest - on olemas hulk tasuta või väikse kuluga lahendusi. Ühe uudse viisina tasub kaaluda õpilaste isiklike seadmete kaasamist õpitegevustesse (BYOD-poliitika). (Leego Hansson 2013)

Täpselt nagu kõhutunne ütles: nutikaim tehnoloogiline lahundus koolis on saata koolitöö õpilaste isiklikele nutiseadmetele. BYOD tähendab Bring your own device ja poliitikana kujutab see endast luba isiklikke seadmeid töökohal kasutada ja ettevõtte informatsioonile ning rakendustele ligi pääseda. Siinkohal saab veel viriseda selle üle, et IT-juhtimise aines on justkui analoogne Bring your own materials poliitika - ülesanded ja küsimused on olemas, aga vastust mine otsi ise, õpeta end ise. Samahästi võiks tunnis käimise koha pealt kokku hoida ja kodus ise märksõnu googeldada, mõned tekstid läbi lugeda ja midagi ette kanda. Tunnis pooleteise tunni jooksul "pastakast" vastuste "välja imemine" (tõepoolest oleks vaja analoogset metafoori, a la "vastuste googeldamine", aga midagi püändikamat, nagu see lounge-muusika pala pealkirjaga "Google your feelings").

Kasutajatoe puhul on otstarbekas juurutada elektrooniline tööde edastamine - nii saab väline spetsialist abitegevusi paremini planeerida ja õigeks ajaks teostada. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Siin peaks rõhk olema sõnal "juurutamine", sest selliseid asju on väga kerge välja mõelda, võib-olle isegi võrdlemisi lihtne valmistada, aga tegelik kasutus on hoopis teine tera. Kohe hüppab pähe USA telesarja Kontor episood milles praktikandist ettevõtte juhiks saanud tegelane Ryan saab arreteeritud defraud-imise pärast, sest käskis töötajatel interneti-tellimustena registreerida ka oma telefoni-tellimused, st võltsida tegelikke müüginumbreid (allpool on see märgitud kooli üldiste vajaduste all kui "dubleeriva andmesisestuse vältimine"). Tuleb meelde ka Enics-is suvetööl nähtud olukord kus mingite komponentide tellimuse kohalejõudes tuli täita väga kõrgtehnoloogiline ankeet, mis oli kohe nii kõrge tehnoloogia, et keegi ei saanud sellega korralikult hakkama; või Hanza-s käibiv süsteem, kus iga tehtav tööots tuleb barcode scanner-iga registreerida nii, et umbes 10% tööajast kulub tegelikult digitaalsete formaalsuste jaoks (rääkimata kõikidest pisivigadest, nagu alustamise-lõpetamise unustamine või vale riba skänneerimine). Parem planeerimine ja õigeks ajaks teostamine, neh.

Välise IT-spetsialisti paindlikumaks kaasamiseks on mõistlik luua kaughalduse võimalus. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Täitsa tänase teema (IT-teenuste sisseostmise) lainel: kaughaldus. Üks kirjatükk käesoleva aasta algusest võib asja ehk valgustada (kuigi asi on ilmselgelt native advertising, ehk reklaam mis on maskeerunud uudislooks): "Kes meist ei oleks maadelnud tõrkuvate arvutite ning erinevate programmidega ja mõelnud, et kuidas küll lihtsalt, ilma kõigi IT-jamadeta, oma tööd teha saaks." - Millest rääkis eelmine kommentaar; juuruta palju juurutad, et kulusid kokku hoida, tulemuseks on rohkem IT-jama ja IT-peavalu kõigile töötajatele. Kaughaldus on lühidalt kõikide ettevõtte arvutitega seonduvate IT-murede "loovutamine" IT-teenuse pakkujale. Silma torkab artiklist veel see, et "Halduspaketile lisaks on võimalik tellida ka lisateenuseid, näiteks rentida ka kõik arvutitöökoha seadmed Teliast." See tuletas meelde Arthur Bannisteri tegelast Olev Remsu Kurbmäng Paabelis-t, kes iga uue semesteri alguses lasi kogu mööbli ja sisustuse oma vanalinnaateljees välja vahetada, sest kui juba rentida, siis miks mitte maksta ka vahelduse eest. Pani täitsa mõtlema, et kas ise teeks rahakamas olukorras sama - rendiks kõik arvutid ja lisaseadmed, kandiks oma kettalt kogu tarkvarasüsteemi peale ja nii käiks uusima raudvaraga kaasas ise kalli ja kiiresti vananeva tehnoloogiaga jagelemata. Näiteks, tahad, et töötajad saaksid puhkeruumis pauside ajal ja pärast tööd kõige uusimaid arvutimänge mängida, rendid vastavad pillid.

Peamised turvariskid väikse kooli puhul on andmete hävimine, materiaalne kahju, tehnoloogiliste lahenduste dokumentatsiooni puudumine ja vähene turvateadlikkus. Dokumentatsioonil on jätkusuutlikkuse tagamisel oluline roll. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Andmete hävimine ja materjaalne kahju on põhimõtteliselt tark- ja raudvara eristusel põhinev riskikategooria (kogemata kustutatakse midagi vajalikku ära vs lõhutakse või rikutakse riistvaraseadmeid). Dokumentatsiooni puudumine on päris reaalne asi, sest minu vähese töökogemuse põhjal ei ole tegelikult midagi kuskil kirjas, igal töötajal tuleb kõik vajalik algusest lõpuni ise omal katse-eksitus-meetodil selgeks õppida, ettevõttele muidugi suurte kulude ja kirjadega, aga vähemalt ei tule planeerijatel kulutada oma aega ja ajusid kirjatööle, mis on ausalt öeldas rängalt tüütu kui alternatiiv on lihtsalt mitte tegemine.

Suure kooli puhul on vajaduste spekter laiem ja tuleb arvestada rohkemate eripäradega. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Ah et suure kooli ressursid polegi suuremad? Vajadustespektri laiusest saan aru, aga rohkemate eripärade puhul peab küsima kas ikka on nii? Kas ei tundu tõenäolisem, et väikesed organisatsioonid on eripärasemad ja suured rohkem nagu ühe vitsaga löödud? Siin eeldan ma, et keerulisemad vajadused viivad sarnasemate lahendusteni.

Suure kooli taristu olulised teemad on standardiseerimine ja jätkusuutlik dokumenteerimine. Kirjeldada tuleb lahenduste seadistused, deponeerida juurdepääsud ja tagada kontrolljälgede kogumine võtmesüsteemides. Kooli huvides tuleb saavutada olukord, kus töötajat või teenusepartnerit saab igal hetkel sujuvalt asendada. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Siin on sõnavaraline kasum: deponeerimine on hoiustamine või talletamine (juriidiline, majanduslik termin). Inglise keeles escrow, ehk see "you're screwed" filmist Bad Neighbours 2. Kontrollijälgede kogumine võtmesüsteemides kindlasti suurendaks turvalisust, läheb kirja vajaliku turvemeetmena ka sisseostetud IT-teenuse jaoks. Läbipaistvus. Sujuv asendamine oleks ka väikeses koolis või ettevõttes kasulik, aga tõenäoliselt raskemini saavutatav, sest isegi dokumentatsiooni loomine nõuab tegelikult päris palju resursse (raha, aega, inimesi, teadmisi).

[Õpetajate vajadused -] Tagada õpilastele tunnis vajalikud materjalid [st] trükkida materjale [ja] paljundada materjale. (Leego Hansson 2013)

See nüüd küll 21. sajandi (või muu "tulevikuideaali") moodi ei kõla! Mis sai BYOD-poliitikast? Pigem peaks siin kirjas olema, et õpetajal peab esiteks endal olema ligipääs vajalikesse andmebaasidesse ja võimalus õppematerjale õpilastega vabalt jagada (Äripäeva IT-juhtimise õpik on hea näide selle tulevikuideaali läbikukkumisest ja üldisest tundmusest, et IT-juhtimise valdkonnas mitte ainult ei ole vastav ametikoht haruldane, vaid ka selle õpetamiseks nagu puuduvad materjalid). Selle jaoks on tegelikult allpool ka eraldi punkt: "Jagada elektroonilisi õppevahendeid ja lisamaterjale - jagada õpilastele õppevahendeid ja lugemismaterjale".

Hea viis edendada IT-vahendite kasutamist õppetöös on võtta tööle selle valdkonna eriettevalmistuse saanud spetsialist - haridustehnoloog. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Enesereklaam.

Infoühiskonna teenuse seadus defineerib teenusepakkuja kohustused ja vastutused. Kui kool ostab mõnda sellist teenust (näiteks eKool), on selle seaduse tundmine abiks lepingu hagamisel. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Tõenäoliselt vastus küsimusele, "Millised rollid jäävad [IT-teenuse sisseostmisel] ettevõtte kanda?" Kui tolle ülesande päises on kirjas, et "Töötajatelt nõutavad oskused, õigused, vastutus ja kohustused peavad olema selgelt määratletud ning neid tuleb üle vaadata korrapäraselt", siis siit ilmneb, et teenusepakkuja kohustused ja vastutused on defineeritud infoühiskonna teenuse seaduses.

Teosed, millele kehtib autoriõigus, on muu hulgas ka: (*) mis tahes elektrooniliselt avaldatud ja autoriõigusega kaitstud teosed, sh e-õppematerjalid; (*) veebileheküljed; (*) arvutiprogrammid; (*) audiovisuaalsed teosed; [ja] (*) andmebaasid. Oluline on paika panna varaliste õiguste ja teoste kasutamise teemad. E-õppematerjalide varalised õigused kuuluvad enamasti materjali autorile, kuid otseste tööülesannete täitmise käigus loodud teoste puhul lähevad need üle tööandjale. Spetsiifilised juhud on vaja reguleerida töölepinguga. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Samal teemal: ettevõtta üks rollidest on tõenäoliselt ka panna paika "varaliste õiguste ja teoste kasutamise teemad" ja spetsiifilistel juhtudel seda "reguleerida töölepinguga".

Karistusseadustikus puudutavad IT-ga seotud teemasid
  • § 157 "Kutse- ja ametitegevuses teatavaks saanud saladuse hoidmise kohustuse rikkumine",
  • § 157 "Delkaatsete isikuandmete ebaseaduslik avaldamine"
  • § 157 "Teise isiku identiteedi ebaseaduslik kasutamine",
  • § 206 "Arvutiandmetesse sekkumine",
  • § 207 "Arvutisüsteemi toimimise takistamine",
  • § 208 "Nuhkvara, pahavara ja arvutiviiruse levitamine",
  • § 213 "Arvutikelmus",
  • § 216 "Arvutikuriteo ettevalmistamine",
  • § 217 "Ebaseaduslikult kõrvaldatud ja muudetud identifitseerimisvahendiga terminalseadme kasutamine",
  • § 222 "Piraatkoopia valmistamine",
  • § 222 "Ebaseaduslikult reprodutseeritud arvutiprogrammi valdamine",
  • § 284 "Kaitsekoodide üleandmine",
  • § 285 "Dokumendi ja arhivaali ebaseaduslik hävitamine",
  • § 286 "Dokumendi ja arhivaali kasutamiskõlbmatuks muutmine",
  • § 287 "Dokumendi ja arhivaali kasutamiskõlbmatuks muutmine ettevaatamatusest",
  • § 299 "Ametialane võltsimine",
  • 19. peatüki 2. jagu - "Dokumendi võltsimine ja kahjustamine".
(Leego Hansson 2013)

Täitsa omaette kasulik kraam, mida tuleks mingil hetkel üksikasjalikult googeldada ja läbi töötada.

Sõltuvalt võimalustest, vajadustest ja kompetentsusest võib arengut planeerida erineva mahukuse ja detailsusega. Esmased strateegilised küsimused on järgmised.
  1. Kui palju IT-ülesandeid täidavad kooli töötajad ja õpilased ning millist eksperditeadmist ostetakse sisse?
  2. Millised on valukohad, probleemid ja rahuldamata soovid?
  3. Kas kooli tegevuses on lähema kolme aasta jooksul plaanitud muutusi? Kui, siis milliseid?
Tugevat vundamenti rajavad muudatused IT-valdkonnas võtavad aega. IT-valdkonna arengukava on mõistlik koostada kolmeks kuni viieks aastaks ja eelarvestatud tegevusplaan kaheks aastaks. (Leego Hansson 2013)

See on kena, et need kolm punkti vastavad justkui võimalustele, vajadustele ja kompetentsusele. Iseäralik on aga see, et kooli töötajate ja õpilaste IT-ülesanded kattuvad siin "võimalustega", mis võib johtuda tõigast, et autorid kirjutavad haridustehnoloogide seisukohast ja võivad neid asju "võimalusteks" pidada. Vajadused kattuvad siin valukohtadega (vajadus kui puuduse tulemus). Ja muutuste juurutamine muidugi nõuab kompetentsust. Käesoleva teemaga haakub siin ainult esimene punkt, aga kuna see on küsimus, mitte vastus, siis ei ole sellega vist midagi pihta hakata, kuiet ajada umbluud:

Q: Milliseid rolle ja IT-teenuseid on ettevõttel sobilik sisse osta?

A: Sõltuvalt võimalustest, vajadustest ja kompetentsusest. Täpsemalt kooli töötajate ja õpilaste IT-ülesannete mahukusest ja detailsusest.

IT-organisatsioon ja juhtimine - IT-valdkonna rollide ja vastutuste jaotus, juhtimine ja koordineerimise korraldus, teenuste sisseostmise ulatus. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Siit võib välja lugeda, et küsimusele "Milliseid rolle ja IT-teenuseid on ettevõttel sobilik sisse osta?" peaks ilmnema vastus ettevõtte IT arengukava koostamise protsessis.

Riist- ja tarkvaraKulu vajadusKommentaarid
Riist- ja tarkvara paigaldamine ja integreerimineHarvaSisseastetud exsperditeenus või IT-spetlialisti tööaeg
Konsultatsiooni hankimineVäga harvaSisseostetud eksperditeenus
Testimise kuludHarvaSisseostetud ekspertteenus või IT-spetsialisti tööaeg
AuditeerimineVäga harvaNõuetele vastavuse hindamine välis- ja/või siseaudiitori poolt
(Leego Hansson 2013)

Need on IT-kulude planeerimise tabelist väljanopitud sissekanded mis puudutavad IT-teenuse sisseostmist. Kaudsete kulude hulgast võiks teemasse minna "töötaja IT-probleemi lahendamise ootamisest tulenev tööseisak", st teenuse sisseostmine võib ettevõtte püsitöötajatele tekitada tööseisakuid. Üldkokkuvõttes on vähemalt koolil IT-teenuse sisseostmist nähtavasti (vähemalt kululiikide järgi) vaja kas harva või väga harva.

IT koostööpartner - Spetsiifiline tehniline või valdkondlik kompetents. Üldjuhul kasutatakse koostööpartnerit väikese mahuga, kuid head erialast pädevust nõudvate tööde puhul (nt serverite haldus, tarkvara arendus). Koostöökokkulepped peavad olema täpsed. Teha tuleb asjatundlikku järelevalvet. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Järelvalve ehk monitooring.

Enam ei ole võimalik pidada ühte universaalset IT-spetsialisti, kes suudab hallata servereid, anda kasutajatuge ja läbi viia arvutiõpetuse tunde. Konkreetsed tehnoloogiad vajavad järjepidevat teadmiste täiendamist ja töörollid vajavad erinevaid isikuomadusi. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Versus natuke ülalpool: "Keskmiselt on koolil ükks IT-valdkonda toetav erialase pädevusega inimene, kelle põhikohustuseks on kasutajatoe ja süsteemiülema tööd. Tähtis on tagada, et kõik rollid on kas oma töötajate või teenusepartnerite abil kaetud ning rollist tulenev vastutus teadvustatud."

Tavapärased spetsialistide leidmise viisid:
  1. kuulutamine tööportaalides ja avalikus meedias,
  2. sihtotsingud tutvusringkonnas,
  3. kooli kogukonna kaasamine otsingutesse,
  4. kandidaatide andmekogu pidamine.
Tavapäraste personaliotsingu viiside kõrval on häid tulemusi andnud koostöö kutseharidus- ja kõrgkoolidega praktika läbiviimisel. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Nagu oleks vastus küsimusele, "Kuidas valida partnerit? Usaldusväärsus?" - mille puhul ei peeta vist silmas seksuaalpartneri valimist, vaid spetsialisti leidmise viisi. Siin nimekirjas tunduvad kõik viisid panustavat ühel või teisel viisil usaldusväärsusele, kuigi märgatavalt ei ole siin mingit objektiivset kvalifikatsiooni vaid toetutakse ühiskondlikkule võrgustumisele - keegi teab kedagi kes teab kedagi.

Kandidaatide hindamise kriteeriumid:
  1. senine töökogemus;
  2. erialane haridus;
  3. ametikohale vastava sertifikaadi olemasolu;
  4. tagasiside eelmistelt tööandjatelt;
  5. suhtlemisoskus;
  6. praktilise katsetöö tulemus.
IT-valdkonnas töötavatel inimestel on oma eripära - sageli on palganumbrist olulisem põnevate väljakutsete ja huvitavate seadmete küllus. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Siin on natuke objektiivsema suunitlusega vastused samale küsimusele. See IT-valdkonna eripära on vististi põhjus miks It-kutsestandard sisaldab peale vastavate nõuete haridusele, teadmistele, oskustele ja kogemustele ka nõudeid "väärtushinnangutele ja isikuomadustele".

Oluline on läbi mõelda, milliseid kompetentse on mõistlik koolis hoida ja arendada ning millised ülesanded välistele teenuseosutajatele usaldada. Väiksema IT-meeskonna või ühe spetsialisti puhul on tavaline roll kasutajatoe osutamine ja töökohaarvutite administreerimistöö. Välised teenuseosutajad aitavad serverite halduse, IT juhtimise, arenduse juhtimise ja turvalisuse teemadel. Väikestel koolidel on mõistlik osutada IT-teenust koostöös kohaliku omavalitsusega. NB! Kõikidele kompetentside [sic] osas on võimalik teenust sisse osta, seda alates IT-juhist kuni kasutajaote pakkujani välja. Leego Hansson 2013)

Väga oluline tõesti - tuleb läbi mõelda, aga mida täpsemalt mõelda tuleb (mida silmas pidada) nagu ei ole. Sellegipoolest on siin üks osa vastusest küsimusele "Milliseid IT-teenuseid on Eestis võimalik sisse osta?" Vähemalt kooli puhul on nüüd enam-vähem selge pilt: kõike saab sisse osta kui vaja.

Lepinguline suheEelisedMiinused
Teenuseosutaja
  • Firma annab teenuse jätkusuutliku osutamise garantii - ka spatsialisti vahetumise korral teenus jätkub.
  • Pädevus ja kogemus koguneb paljude süsteemide baasil.
  • Eksperdi arendamise ja töövahendite kulu on teenuseosutajal.
  • Piiratud teenusemahuga spetsiaalse kompetentsi puhul on kulu väiksem oma töötaja kulust.
  • Kõiki IT-kompetentse on võimalik sisse osta.
  • Kui teenuseosutaja pole iga päev kohal, võib nõrgeneda kontakt teiste töötajatega.
  • Kogemused on sama tähtsad kui teadmised.
  • Eeldab head teenuse sisseostmise pädevust: partneri vaik, lepinguliste suhete kirjeldamine ja järelvalve.
  • Viletsa dokumenteerimise korral ei kogune asutusele põhiteadmisi oma infosüsteemist ja partneri kadumisel on probleemile raskem lahendust leida.
Palgaline töötaja
  • Tõõtaja on kaasatud täistööajaga.
  • Töötaja on füüsiliselt lähedal, nõu saab pidada lühikese etteteatamise peale.
  • Põhiteadmised infosüsteemist on asutuse enda töötajal.
  • Töötaja on tidedamalt integreeritud ülejäänud meeskonda ja selle arendamisse.
  • Vajaminevad kompetentsid infosüsteemi tagamisel on laiast spektrist ja on vaja mitut inimest, kes samas on alakoormatud.
  • Häid spetsialiste on raske leida ja hoida.
  • Heale spetsialistile on vaja pakkuda pidevalt väärilisi väljakutseid.
  • Töötaja puhul on vaja samuti järelvalvet.
  • Töötaja puhul on sageli keerulisem tagada kvaliteeti, sh jätkusuutlikku korrektset dokumenteerimist.
(Leego Hansson 2013)

Ülesandes on põhimõtteliselt vaja reprodutseerida tabel sellest allikast, aga natuke erineval kujul. Mudisin tabelit nii palju, et vastaks ülesanded nõutud struktuurile. Kummalisel kombel on originaal-tabelis "miinuste" all väga vähe, põhimõtteliselt on nagu lükatud "märkused ja riskid" kategooriasse kõik olulised miinused, st justkui ei taheta tunnistada, et mõlemal variandil üldse on mingid miinused (#pehmo).

Sisseostetava teenuse üks eelis ja võimalus kooli jaoks on töötunnipõhine arveldus. Vähese mahu korral on võimalik kaasata suure erialase kogemusega spetsialiste nii, et kulu ei ole väga suur. Sisseostetava teenuse kasutamine on vältimatu. Levinumad sisseostetavad IT-teenused on:
  1. IT strateegiline planeerimine;
  2. kasutajatugi;
  3. tööjaamade ja lisaseadmete haldus;
  4. kodulehe majutus;
  5. serverite haldus või serveriteenuste osutamine;
  6. arvutivõrguühenduste pakkumine ja haldus;
  7. valdkondliku infosüsteemi rakenduse tugi (nt raamatupidamise või raamatukogu rakendus);
  8. spetsiaaltarkvara arendus;
  9. tellijapoolne projektijuhtimine ja arenduse järelevalve.
IT-teenuste sisseostmine toob kaasa vajaduse olla asjatundlik tellija nii partnereid valides, lepinguid sõlmides kui koostööd tagades ja järele valvates. Koostööpartneri valiku olulisemad kriteeriumid:
  1. partneri kogemus;
  2. teenuse hind;
  3. teenuse osutamise aeg ja kiirus, sh avariisituatsioonide lahendamise paindlikkus;
  4. pakutav dokumenteerimise tase;
  5. partneri usaldusväärsus ja võtmeisikute inimlik sobivus.
Kooli huvide kaitse tagamiseks tuleb saavutada olukord, kus töötajat või teenusepartnerit saab igal hetkel sujuvalt asendada. (Leego Hansson 2013)

Päris otsene vastus küsimusele "Kuidas valida partnerit? Usaldusväärsus?" - Kui esiotsa oli tundmus, et need on sellised küsimused, millele võib vastused pastakast välja imeda, siis nüüd jääb hoopis vastupidine mulje, et õpetaja on koostanud küsimused seda dokumenti täht-tähelt järgides. Ühtäkki on kogu harjutuselt ka võlu kadunud, sest müstilisena tundunud informatsioonipuudus näib nüüd korraga järjekordselt laiskuse tulemusena. Kas ongi mõtet jätkata? Võib vist ülesande ära teha.

Niðurhal 03


Obeyeskere, Gananath 1969. The Ritual Drama of the Sanni Demons: Collective Representations of Disease in Ceylon. Comparative Studies in Society and History 11(2): 174-216.

According to Ayurvēda, disease is caused by the upsetting or excitement of any one or more of the three humours basic to the human organism: vāta or vāyu (wind), pitta (bile), slēshma or kapha (phlegm). Collectively these are known as the tri-dōsa, 'the three troubles' (Sinhalese, tun dōsa). In addition to these diseases that spring from within the organism are those caused by external (supernatural) agencies. Thus demons, and gods, may also cause diseases and other types of misfortune like drought, flood and famine and certain types of illness. (Obeyeskere 1969: 175)

In the European tradition, there were four, if I recall correctly. Was the missing humour "sanguine" blood?

The drama of the Sanni demons is performed after the midnight watch (mäda yāma). (Obeyeskere 1969: 178)

"Mäda jama" is a false friend in Estonian, meaning rotten bullshit.

Therefore he called the great sage, Ananda (Buddha's chief disciple) and asked him where these demons now were. (Obeyeskere 1969: 182)

Relevant for my inchoate short story based on Remsu's Kurbmäng Paabelis. Ananda would be the opposite (much like the Antarctic continetn) to the female character, Anda. It may be possible that Remsu was aware of Ananda and modelled her after buddhist mythology.

No, none of this would do. You now have to dance and say 'may you live long' (ayubōvēva, a salutation). (Obeyeskere 1969: 194)

I'm still collecting these kinds of linguistic reports for phatic greetings. Cf. the Nepali "have you eaten rice?" (in Kunreuther 2006)

We have discussed earlier the manner in which public confidence is brought about. Second, and more important, there is the prescribed obscenity and horseplay which has the social function of easing this special interaction situation. This is achieved mainly by stripping these beings of their mythological attributes and presenting them in the arena as ludicrous, comic and humorous figures. [...] The problem can be summed up thus: the deities demand absolute respect, of fear or allegiance; any superordination-subordination relationship of this sort creates tensions towards the latter by the former; these tensions are relieved by the cathartic mechanism of obscenity; the expression of these feelings in the ritual permits individuals to better interact with these authority figures in normal social life. (Obeyeskere 1969: 205)

Obscenity is, next to alcohol, one of the uncelebrated factors in phatic communion. Ruesch has pointed out the importance of the latter, but this may be the first I've met the social function of obscenity and horseplay, at least in this direct of a form.

The Ratana Sutta or 'Jewel Discourse' that the Buddha is said to have recited on the occasion of the plague in Visala is found in the Khuddhakapatha, or 'The Minor Readings' (trans. Nānamoli, 1960: 4-6) and in the Sutta Nipata. These canonical sources give the bare text and make no references to the occasion on which it was recited. The latter evidence comes from the commentaries on the canon written in Pali and Sinhalese. I shall use three major commentarian sources: the commentary on the sutta by Buddhaghosa, the famous Indian scholar who lived in Ceylon in the fifth century; the Pujavali, a popular thirteenth-century Sinhalese commentarian volume on the Buddha; and the famous Sanskrit (Chinese-Mahayana) text, the Mahavastu. (Obeyeskere 1969: 211-212)

We tried reading the Mahavastu because it's available on archive.org but didn't make it far past the preface because it's all about the layers of hell and other unpleasant things in the very beginning. More context is needful, and hopefully I'll get to read a recent book on early buddhism come fall.

Lewis, I. M. 1962. Historical Aspects of Genealogies in Northern Somali Social Structure. The Journal of African History 3(1): 35-48.

In this system of shifting genealogical attachment the most stable units are the so-called 'dia-paying groups'. These are composed of men descended from a common ancestor from four to eight generations removed from living men. The members of a dia-paying group are bound by a formal treaty or contract, today often recorded in writing and lodged in District Offices, according to which they pay and receive blood-compensation (Arabic dia : Somali mag) in concert. A dia-paying group is thus politically and legally a corporation; an external act of aggression affecting or committed by any member of the group implicates the group as a whole. The male strength and fighting potential of dia-paying groups varies between a few hundred and a few thousand individuals and in 1958 in a population of 650,000 souls in what was then the British Somaliland Protectorate there were over 360 separate dia-paying groups. (Lewis 1962: 38)

This is reminiscent of two distinct, but interrelated, tidbits. First is the concept of alpha male, which turns out to be not simply the leader of the pack but basically the father amongst his immediate offspring. The second is the islamic proclamation of unity through this exact ethos of hurting one of us is tantamount to hurting all of us.

Somali discuss the expansion of lineages and lineage segmentation in terms of the birth of sons, for as they say, 'when a son is born the patrilineal line extends'. Each child takes his father's first name as his own surname and is given an new first name. Thus, for example, Maḥammad has a son Jaamaa, whose full name is then Jaamaa Maḥammad; and when he in turn has a son Aḥmad, the latter's full name is Aḥmad Jaamaa and his genealogy to his grandfather Aḥmad Jaamaa Maḥammad. In this way the genealogies are built up as with population increase lineages expand over the generations. At as young an age as five or six years children are capable of reciting their full genealogy to their clan-family ancestor. Knowledge of the complete genealogical tree of any large group, however, is restricted to old men and elders for whom such information has direct political importance. (Lewis 1962: 40)

After reading this, I briefly considered changing my name and taking my father's first name on as a last name. The reason for doing so lays in in my familial name being one of the most popular in Estonia and my first name being the most popular male name given to newborns in nearly all counties in my country; consequently there are 4-5 other persons named with my current name.

Lonsdale, J. M. 1968. Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa. The Journal of African History 9(1): 119-146.

Historiographical controversies surrounding revolutions and other periods of rapid political change and concerned in part with the interactions of the 'spontaneous element' of popular initiative and the 'conscious elements' of direction and control by intellectual and political leadership. Debate on the relative importance of these two elements is in most cases likely to prove sterile, for they are interdependent. Nevertheless there may well be such a debate with reference to African national revolutions, for emphasis on the one or the other element will derive from contrasting assumptions about the nature of African nationalism as a whole. Studies of the conscious element, the political élite, will tend to stress the extent to which a nationalist movement is a revolutionary exotic in its reaction to colonial rule, and its dependence on European ideas and organizational models. (Lonsdale 1968: 119)

The spontaneous element, so called, amounts to dissatisfied young people, as is revealed in Vincent Miller's (2015) paper on the role of social media in recent social uprisings (especially the Arab Spring).

It was in the religious field that corporate action on a lowly social plane retained most vitality in the years that followed the collapse of armed African resistance and rebellion. Independent churches and indigenous sects were of many kinds, fulfilling as many social needs. Some sought relief for the oppressed poor in confused millennial dreams; some aimed at social sanity and order at a humble level on earth; others saw salvation in educational schemes as ambitious as any offered by the mission churches in which, as may tend to be forgotten, many political leaders continued to find 'a place to feel at home'. (Lonsdale 1968: 137)

Calling out all social sanity warriors!

Improved education did not remove the colour bar, but it did help to remove a sense of cultural inferiority. The secondary school-leaver was better equipped than the barely literate to distinguish between the material and cultural aspects of the West. (Lonsdale 1968: 141)

Probably the race-equivalent of glass ceiling.

Wein, Hermann 1957. Trends in Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology in Postwar Germany. Philosophy of Science 24(1): 46-56.

[...] the actually new results of this young discipline, especially at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, are arrived at by means of team work by anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, which in Germany has not been the case so far. The overall thesis of the following account is this, that today the science of man in Germany is moving toward just this type of interdisciplinary cooperation based on the idea of a new knowledge of human nature as a totality. (Wein 1957: 46)

Semiotics is situated at the convergence of these disciplines, also including philosophy, history, and logic. The latter bit is reminiscent of the efforts of the Unified Science movement (begot by a semiotician, Charles Morris).

And yet it is not merely the fusion of Frobenius' ethnology and the Kulturkreis-theory, not the Paideuma- and Kulturseelen-theories, but more generally the approach concerned with understanding primarily in the sense of the humanities, from which it is so difficult to bridge the gap over to the approach of ethnological cultural theory as developed outside of Germany within the last decade. (Wein 1957: 47)

I should look into what's the polemic on Verstehen really about. It's still used in hermeneutics, isn't it? Then why did some unnamed author claim that it's a forsaken term?

One of the founders of the new cultural anthropology in America and England, B. Malinowski (born in Krakau), was himself still directly influenced by Wundt's "psychology of nations" ("Völkerpsychologie"). (Wein 1957: 48)

Likewise with Jakobson, who spoke of the linguistic capabilities of aphasics and the naturvölker in the 1940s.

The basic category of English and American cultural anthropology, the concept of "culture," which is not identical with the German concept of "Kultur," was defined in a book entitled Primitive Culture by the British ethnologist E. B. Tylor (1871). Tylor spoke of a "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom," but in addition to these "any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as members of society." (p. 43) It may sound paradoxical, but it can be shown that this definition of the concept had appeared previously in the work of none other than Hegel. Montesquieu had already spoken of an "esprit général d'une nation." But only Hegel more accurately spoke of the "communal character" of "legal systems, morality, customs," but also of "science, art, and technical skills." (Wein 1957: 48)

It may very well be that Roman Jakobson's early notes on natural man's disposition towards phaticity was influenced equally by Malinowsky and Wundt, with whom he may have made contact in the Prague Linguistic Circle (Wundt made a presentation in their midst, if I'm not mistaken).

According to Hartmann's theory of layers ("Schichtentheorie"), man is distinguished first of all by the fact that the following layers, principally, operate within him: the biological-somatic, the psychic, the subjectively mental, and the objectively mental. Kroeber names four levels: body, mind, society, and culture. (Wein 1957: 49)

I'll take into consideration to read Primitive Culture before his Anthropology, which appeared a decade later. Hegel is still outside of my purview, though good to know.

In the course of a seminar in Berlin, in 1939, Nicolai Hartmann said: "The objective mind is nothing but homogeneous formation ("gleichartige Formung"), with only this difference, that the individual does not impose it on himself but takes it over." Using the term "Volksgeist" (national mind) in Herderian and Hegelian tradition, Hartmann continues: The national mind "encompasses the most heterogeneous things, from the trifles of politeness and social intercourse to the various forms of political fanaticism and party partialities, in fact down to the predominant opinions, prejudices, value judgments or even the biases of approval or disapproval." The two formulations just quoted, from the most recent German theory of the objective mind, might almost have been translations of formulas of the most recent American cultural anthropologists, such as Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard. The phrase "homogeneous formation" would there read "patterning." (Wein 1957: 49)

Such is the case for the current trend towards Americanization and learning English as a lingua franca all across the world - I've moled over this before: the youth is currently driven towards these by "taking it over" whilst Soviet russification was apparently felt more as an imposition.

"The trifles of politeness and social intercourse amounts to phaticity. Curiously, I'm less interested in these trifles than I am in the meta-theoretical ones concerning the athropo-linguistic theories about these trifles. These "biases of approval or disapproval" touch upon the bonds of sympathy and antipathy mentioned by Malinowski in his essay.

Both theories agree that no man creates his own language, his own ethos, his own morality, his own law. In both theories, it is the fact that man reaches into the sphere of the objective mind of culture, respectively, that constitutes his unique distinction within the cosmos. (Wein 1957: 50)

Johannes Aavik would not agree, and his example proves that an individual can at the very least contribute immensely to the development of a language. Issues of actual private languages I'll leave be; I still believe in individual selection of active vocabulary and the such.

Kroeber, Linton, and Kluckhohn, too, for instance, ascribe to the influence of the individual the creation of the new in culture. Nicolai Hartmann's more general theory, however, goes considerably beyond that, in the phenomenon of the "incidence of planning" in history. Only the human individual endowed with consciousness is able to plan. Planning consists of the basic anthropological functions: fore-sight, purposeful action, the setting of goals, the discovery of values, autonomous assignment of meaning. This is a hierarchy of functions which far transcends the American "theory of action." (Wein 1957: 51)

Juri Lotman should be included amongst these names, though his propositions were made even after this piece of writing, and in addition he did append the issue of untranslatability between languages and cultures to this question. The "autonomous assignment of meaning" is the other side of the coin of individual selection of active vocabulary; i.e. individual association of ideas.

The great achievements of A. Gehlen's Der Mensch ("Man"), first published in 1939, was that in it the most recent developments in anthropology are shown to be founded upon those of biology (Lorenz, Storch, Portmann, et al.). That which is typically human beings before the "mental" sphere, in the biological elements of man, his motor impolses, his sphere of incentive and observation, etc. (Wein 1957: 52)

Was Gehlen the influence for Jakob von Uexküll whose books are still untranslated and difficult to find in original German? If so, then the analogy between "incentive/observation" and Uexküll's Merkwelt/Wirkwelt" would make a lot of sense. Incentive is another synonym for conation, isn't it?

Plessner's idea implies that man does not merely have the same relationship as do other living things to that which is "outside" him but in addition stands "above" this relationship, i.e., he appears to himself as one so related. (Wein 1957: 54)

Man is self-reflexive, cf. also the concept of meta-cognition.

Needham, Rodney 1960. Descent Systems and Ideal Language. Philosophy of Science 27(1): 96-101.

Biological relations are indeed universal, but descent systems are interesting in that they are structurally and conceptually different from biological necessities or possibilities. The logical space is a category within a system, the properties of which are not determined by biology; and the genealogical specifications co-ordinate with the category may be practically innumerable. (Needham 1960: 98)

The kinship systems where the de facto paternal caretakers are mother's brothers instead of biological fathers, is a case in point.

Feuer, Lewis S. 1953. Sociological Aspects of the Relation between Language and Philosophy. Philosophy of Science 20(2): 85-100.

Again, we might ask what has been the philosophical bearing of the phenomenon of double or cumulative negation. Language as varied as those of Russian, Spanish, Magyar, and Bantu exhibit this syntactical form. (Jespersen [The Philosophy of Grammar] 1924: 332-333 & Jespersen [Mankind, Nation and Individual from a Linguistic Point of View] 1935: 118s119). Two negatives in these languages do not cancel each other; on the purely linguistic level, it is not true in their syntaxes that not-not p =/= p. Do these languages then promote some special alternative logic or metaphysics? Not at all. As Jespersen says, the function of double negation is not as a logical, but as a psychological device. A layer of negative coloring is spread throughout a whole sentence instead of being localized in one part. (Jespersen 1924: 337). Where repeated negatives are not used for emphasis, they may serve to convey attitudes of hesitancy. "This is not unknown to me" conveys a reticence not present in "I know this." Double negation can thus express either a strengthened negative or a weakened positive. (Feuer 1953: 87-88)

A man could almost feel happy if he wasn't careful.

Many languages, furthermore, have no future tense, and make use of such devices instead as the use of the present tense to convey futurity. (Jespersen 1935: 160). There is no evidence that the people who use these languages have therefore confounded the present with the future in a metaphysical sense. (Feuer 1953: 88)

Estonian language, reportedly, "has no future". Whether Estonians consequently confound present and future, I, as a futurist, am not sure.

"In primitive culture people speak only about actual experiences. They do not discuss what is virtue, good, evil, beauty; the demands of their daily life, like those of our uneducated classes, do not extend beyond the virtues shown on definite occasions by definite people, good or evil deeds of their fellow tribesmen, and the beauty of a man, a woman, or of an object. They do not talk about abstract ideas. The question is rather whether their language makes possible the expression of abstract ideas. It is intstructive to see that missionaries, who in their eagerness to convert natives have been compelled to learn their languages, have had to do violence to the idioms in order to convey to the natives their more or less abstract ideas, and that they have always found it possible to do so and be understood. Devices to develop generalized ideas are probably always present and they are used as soon as the cultural needs compel the natives to form them." (Bentwich 1910: 141-142). (Feuer 1953: 89)

The exact wording, "our own uneducated classes", appears in Malinowski's passage on phatic communion, too (PC 4.3). It is related to the metaphysical aptitudes of primitive peoples, on which some hold that they are not the most remarkable metaphysicians. But the latter portion is more in line with Jakobson, who similarly wrote (a bit later than this here) that if Einstein's theory of theory of relativity need be translated into South African clicking languages, for example, it could be done.

When Grescas discusses the existence of God, his terminology has an empirical flavor. "God exists" is translated "haeloh nimtzah," that is, "God is found." (Wolfson 1929: 130) There is no simple verb "to exist" in classical Hebrew; in that language, things are found or not found, and the verb "matzoh," to find, is one of homely human action. The absence of the abstract verb "to exist" was no barrier to the discussions of the proofs for God's existence. The diffusion of metaphysical culture thus takes place across boundaries of syntax. (Feuer 1953: 91)

Some additional depth to the common expression, "finding God". Either you find him, and think him to exist, or not.

We may venture the hypothesis, furthermore, that the intensity of Chinese family life, the "we-feeling", kept the sense of reality and involvedness with things strong. The Chinese individual was not afflicted with loneliness or emotional isolation; it is striking that epistemologic subjectivism begins to torment philosophers with the onset of the age of economic individualism. (Feuer 1953: 93)

This we-feeling (although not unfamiliar) is usually rendered as a sense of togetherness or sense of belonging. The general point adds to the assumption that modern psychological problems are exactly that, modern.

But [William] James made use of a metaphor of the American language which brought friends to his philosophy among the citizenry at large. He spoke of the pragmatic method as a way of realizing the "cash value" of words. Sensitive to the American idiom, he had also described his God as one who does a retail, not a wholesale business. And James' call for confidence in God, for a faith akin to that which wins a man "promotions, boons, appointments" smacks of a salesman turned theologian, who writes his theology with the help of phrases from a manual on "How to Win Friends and Influence People". These were linguistic metaphors, but James found to his consternation that his philosophy was henceforth linked to them. (Feuer 1953: 93)

This very same "salesmanness" is a boon upon body language discourse, which for all intents and purposes did begin with Dale Carnegie's book (at least with the portions of it dealing with handshakes and smiling, for example).

Different languages emphasize different relations of men to nature, but each segments which are emphasized do not define incommensurable universes. Each culture can be informed in its own language concerning the limitations of its experience; if it wishes to, if it needs to, it can add to the resources of its language. The Hebraists in Israel have thus taken an ancient language, and expanded its vocabulary so that textbooks of electro-dynamics can be written in the idiom of the prophets. The "principle of linguistic relativity" argues that there are incommensurable cultural universes. An incommensurable cultural universe would be an unknown one. The fact of linguistic communication, the fact of translation, belies the doctrine of relativity. (Feuer 1953: 95)

Exactly Jakobson's point. Curiously, also the same example (Einstein's theory of relativity). When finding pieces such as this, it incites suspicion whether it's just another case of timely convergence or if one has found an uncited source.

The "will to be untranslatable" grows during an era of cultural regression and ethnocentrism. (Feuer 1953: 95)

Somewhere I found a similar tidbit about mythology making a comeback at a time of cultural regression. So, seeing that both the will to be untranslatable and the creation of modern myths is apparent in Estonia, is Estonian culture currently regressive?

The "principle of linguistic relativity" is an instance of a phenomenon among thinkers which we might call "illegitimate diffusion". When the theory of physical relativity acquires its world renown, there was a tendency for theorists in other departments to run riot with the words of "relativity". The psychological and social sciences, for instance, began to discover "frames of reference" everywhere. Economic classes, social observers, different philosophies, - all of these were variously denoted as "frames of reference". The immense prestige of the physical theory of relativity was the covert, emotive argument for the adoption of these "relativities". As a matter of fact, none of these usages have any significant analogy to the physical theory. (Feuer 1953: 96)

I'm taking this. No ifs, ands or buts. Phatics present a veritable case of illegitimate diffusion, evident in the apparent confusion between various subtypes of interpretations of phaticity. It even seems like some disciplines "run riot" with "phatic" so much so that one could just as easily coin a new term (like symphatic) ta make the conceptual diffusion explicit. The "prestige" of "phatic" is also justifiable - it was the brain-child of "the famous English anthropologist", after all, and the symphatic notions of phatic technology studies, for example, do indeed veer so far off from the original conception that no "significant analogy" can be found.

The literary classical language, on the other hand, has led a life immured in monasteries, dissociated from the practical concerns of men. No wonder that this dissociation of language from the controls of action finally produces a situation, as Veblen says, where "classical learning acts to derange the learner's workmanlike aptitudes." (Veblen 1926: 395). So that Descartes wrote in his momentous linguistic manifesto: "If I write in French which is the language of my country, rather than in Latin which is that of my teachers, this is because I hope that those who avail themselves only of their natural reason in its purity may be the better judges of my opinions than those who believe only in the writings of the ancients." (Discourse on Method, Part IV). The change from Latin to the vernacular, as Morris Cohen once said, reveals the emptiness of received systems. (Feuer 1953: 99)

Something similar is evident in my own use of English versus Estonian. There is so much I have gathered here in English which I cannot (or will not) put into Estonian because it would lose its point. In the near future I'll attempt to put this assumption to test by writing free-form Estonian notes on these very passages in this series.

Sjoberg, Gideon 1955. The Comparative Method in the Social Sciences. Philosophy of Science 22(2): 106-117.

The Bases of Comparison. As Clyde Kluckhohn (1953) has observed, "...genuine comparison is possible only if nonculture-bound units have been isolated." Certain "invariant points of reference" or "universal categories" are required which are not merely reflections of the cultural values of a particular social system. Comparable and relatively stable units must be consciously perceived if comparative study is to progress. Only through the use of invariant points of reference is it possible to test adequately various hypotheses in a cross-cultural setting. (Sjoberg 1955: 106-107)

Relevant for the intercultural assumptions about phatic communion and other politeness behaviour. Japanese scholars have frequently pointed out that the forms of interaction held universal by the likes of Brown and Levinson, for example, simply do not work in the Japanese context. So it is still under debate how universal phatic communion actually is.

Certainly if any theory is to be of value in comparative research the universal categories employed must be established in a manner which will permit their use in the testing of specific hypotheses. Although it is apparent that for some time to come much of cross-cultural research will be dependent upon rather loose and somewhat impressionistic conceptualization, social scientists must strive for a more rigorous approach. (Sjoberg 1955: 110)

Sadly it would appear that there are no "hypotheses" to be tested with regard to phatic communion. It is more often than not "borrowed without evaluation". It is also a matter of debate whether phatic communion constitutes a "theory" in the sense of something that can be tested. Presently it seems more like a "frame of interpretation", like feminism, marxism, and psychoanalysis. Add phaticism to this series.

Possibly the greatest advances have been in the field of microscopic research - i.e., the study of small groups - where the situational factors seem somewhat more easily controlled. Nevertheless, some crucial aspects of the problem of standardizing observations, especially in cross-cultural research, remain relatively untouched. There is particular need for standardizing and objectifying the procedures by which imputations are made concerning the "subjective" aspects of human experience, data which are not directly observable. Just how to standardize the imputation of meaning to human action is a pressing issues in all the socio-cultural sciences. When a person enters a place of "worship," just what "meaning" is to be attached to his action? One can observe and record the act easily enough, but imputed meanings to it is another matter. (Sjoberg 1955: 113)

In other words, is there "mind-reading" involved in gauging the meanings of "situational factors"? Perhaps it is due to the point of phatic communion stemming from Spencer's comparative psychology (of man) that so much of it is psychologistic: how to you quantify "social bonds" or, in more modern lingo, "tie-strength"?

Spiegelberg, Herbert 1951. Supernaturalism or Naturalism: A Study in Meaning and Verifiability. Philosophy of Science 18(4): 339-368.

"Matters of definition" are rarely, if ever, merely matters of definition. Behind them stand, asa rule, different views of the phenomena and of their intrinsic articulation, if not an unwillingness to face the facts and to analyze them conscientiously. Nor would I go so far as logical positivists like Ayer (1936: 75), who consider supernaturalistic theism so meaningless a position that he is not even prepared to call himself an atheist, offering the theists the ice-cold comfort that "theism cannot be invalid since it cannot be valid." (Spiegelberg 1951: 339)

This is what I believe about phaticity. It is not only the case that the definitions of phatic communion, phatic communication, and phatic function are different and consequently inspire different vocabularies and approaches but they also pertain to widely different phenomena. The problem is, I think, that these differences have not been articulated explicitly enough - even the best as they come, e.g. Haberland, only go so far, and generally remain under the radar. In the near future I'll have to write a separate piece on each of the concepts of phaticity listed, and specify their distinctness from each other.

One first minimum sense of the term "meaning" has apparently not yet been fully brought out. As soon as a phonetic utterance does no longer stand merely for itself but points beyond itself, it has already some kind of meaning, even if such pointing does not lead to any definite or clear referent. I propose to call such meaning sound-transcending or more briefly pointer meaning. Meaning in this sense have even magic formulae or code words to the one who does not know their specific meaning, yet knows that they have meaning. They are expressions pointing somewhere, however vaguely and unintelligibly, even though the speaker fails to know "what he is talking about". Meaningless in this minimum sense are only phonetic exercises, the notorious meaningless syllables of psychological experiments, fillers in cryptograms or garbled telegram "words." (Spiegelberg 1951: 349)

This "pointer meaning" is, in short, the understanding that a given word of phrase has a definite meaning, but marred by unknowing about what exactly it could or should be. This is a problem I'm very acutely aware of when reading phenomenologists who use extremely abstruse terminology, for example.

Expressions with presentational meaning have, as a rule, both denotation and connotation, taking the term "denotation" here in the sense of "things consistently thinkable" or "comprehension," as distinguished by Professor C. I. Lewis from "actual denotation." While actual denotation may be absent, as in the case of extinct animals, comprehension or potential denotation is indispensable for this type of meaning. (Spiegelberg 1951: 350)

More on the difficulties with the pair of terms, denotation and connotation, which I take to mean something analogous to empirical and logical meaning: denotation signifies an actual existence whereas connotation the possibility of thinking of an existent or non-existent thing. To put it bluntly, "horse" denotes and "unicorn" connotes.

Thus, since they function usually as more than mere noises, all of them have at least sound-transcending or pointer meaning. Likewise, since they occur in the standard dictionaries of the major modern languages, they have at least that much linguistic meaning. (Spiegelberg 1951: 353)

In this sense, pointer meaning comes close to John Austin's "phatic acts" - the use of which transcends mere sounds, since the sounds are recognizable as "words" (belonging to a certain vocabulary) but may lack a definite sense and reference.

According to J. N. Keynes (Keynes 1928: 58), the basic characteristic of negative concepts is that they express the "absence of one or other of certain specified attributes." Now, there is considerable argument about the meaning of "negative names" of the formal type not-A, e.g., not-white. (Spiegelberg 1951: 354)

Phatic communion, as Malinowski ("apophatically") defines it, is definitely a negative concept. Not only does he negate the three primary (faculty-bound) linguistic functions but in my opinion he even negates in the coining of the word by removing the sym- from sympathy or em- from empathy (I'm veering towards the former because empathy was not as commonly known and used back in 1923).

The "not-natural" remains a check made out in an unknown currency without any established exchange value. The only positive denotative complement could conceivably be supplied by Rudolf Otto's "feeling content" (Otto 1928), a content which is, however, totally indescribable in conceptual positive terms and can therefore not be shared and communicated. (Spiegelberg 1951: 354-355)

Feeling content, in other words, can be communized but not communicated. Understanding it must originate from personal experience, as no amount of mediation can fully convey it.

Whoever asserts that a certain event is supernatural also asserts that he has complete knowledge of the field marked off as nature as well as full knowledge of what is and what is not possible within it. (Spiegelberg 1951: 358)

This is well exemplified by the Christian "televangelist" Kirk Cameron who made the argument that God created all of nature for human use because the banana neatly fits into the human hand, unaware that the fruit he held in his hand was an outcome of human tampering with nature. His phrase, "the maker of the banana, the almighty God" ironically attests to the notion that God is a figment of human imagination: both marketplace banana and the supernatural deity are human creations.

Feuer, Lewis S. 1957. The Principle of Simplicity. Philosophy of Science 24(2): 109-122.

The Scientific Principle of Simplicity. We are all acquainted with persons who seem to have a talent for making things over-complex, persons who invent exceedingly devious explanations for what can be simply explained. Such individuals strike us as hardened violators of Occam's Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily. We shall say briefly that such persons goropise. To goropise. The word has never come into use, though it should, since it fulfills a need. It was invented by Leibniz under interesting circumstances. Goropius, a scholar of the sixteenth century, maintained that Adam spoke a dialect of German. He tried to prove that all other languages were derived from their Teutonic prototype. Goropius' hypothesis was not unlike another widespread view according to which all languages originated from Hebrew. Leibniz regarded all such theories as virtual nonsense; they led into "strange and often ridiculous etymologies", with "too many leaps from one nation to another far distant without having good verifications." He added that these extremely complicated etymologies were without "concurrent evidence." Goropius' name became to Leibniz synonymous with a type of scientific malpractice (Leibnitz 1916: 303). To multiply auxiliary hypotheses is to goropise. (Feuer 1957: 109)

Richard Lanigan's treatment of Jakobson immediately comes to mind, though, admittedly I may have been immature (in my jakobsonianism) when reading it and might do better this time around.

Ernst Mach, for instance, did interpret the principle of economy so that it verged upon the anthropomorphic. He held that science was a labor-saving device, a short-hand summation of Nature's operations which enables you to deal with situations more easily (Machs 1893: 6; 78; 490). Occam's Razor was traced to the laziness of men, to their propensity to do things with the least effort. The "line of least resistance", formulated as a principle of scientific logic was taken to coincide with the principle of economy. Occam's Razor, from this standpoint, is a projection of laziness into scientific method. F. C. S. Schiller therefore declared that the principle "occurs to us because we have a brief span of life in which to effect our scientific purposes; to a non-human mind that was not pressed for time but disposed of all eternity it would be unmeaning or repugnant" (Schiller 1915: 402). (Feuer 1957: 117)

This made me add something to my incoate short story about "cultural AI-robots" who, when their human visitors are asleep, tend to and cultivate the land because machines don't require sleep and lack "the laziness of men". The idea also originates from Stargate, where replicator spaceships can take the longer route because to machines, time is not as pressing an affair.

There are symptoms of neurosis in the behavior of the goropisor and the roundabout-man. Persons who think over-complicatedly are usually fixated upon certain institutions and dogmas. When they look upon objective facts and problems, they must at the same time bear in mind institutional dogma. The prolix person is trying, as he writes, to solve some inner anxiety concerning his ability to communicate. The more institutional fixations and anxieties he has, the more complex will be his way of thinking and writing. From the psychoanalytical standpoint, the goropisor and circumlocutionist are also trying to work out a simplest possible solution. But their problem is more complex, because they have added unverifiable and unknowables to the equation which they must solve. (Feuer 1957: 118)

Does this apply to me? Am I prolix due to some inner anxiety concerning my ability to communicate? It could very well be because I much prefer typing away rather than speaking face to face. Consequently, I put more effort into writing than speech. Though, on the other hand, I at least attempt to be as clear as I can in my writing and detest writers who do their best to obnubilate, instead of clearing up, a point.

Hartung, Frank E. 1951. Science as an Institution. Philosophy of Science 18(1): 35-54.

By "scientism" is meant the transmutation of science into a modern form of magic. The practitioners of scientism are largely popularizers of science and advertising agencies. They have tended to develop the stereotype of the scientist as a person of handsome and distinguished appearance who is disembodied, absent-minded, brilliant, infallible, and slightly grey at the temples, and who comes from behind the King George beard he wears while touting "medical" products to appear clean-shaven in his role of salesman for other gadgets. (Hartung 1951: 35)

Funnily enough this paper preceded the inception of scientology by a few years or so. The term is valuable enough, and very applicable when describing body language discourse, which indeed popularized some early and sometimes faulty findings of early research (1950s-1960s) to such an extent that half a century later it is still difficult to combat that nonsense. The latter portion of the quote appears to describe the popular image of the lone scientific genius, i.e. Albert Einstein, the first Dr. Who, "Doc" Brown, Rick Sanchez, etc.

Judged by our present detailed knowledge and exacting standards, he [contemporary primitive man - as well as ancient man] is a very crude physicist, chemist, surgeon, geographer, mathematician, psychologist and sociologist. He is these insofar as he uses fire, cooks food, heals wounds, knows his physical environment, counts, and controls his own behavior. All this is knowledge derived from the analysis of experience. (Hartung 1951: 38)

This is an odd cybernetic understanding of "sociology". Looking up etymoloy I found what I expected, that socius is Latin "friend" (and consequently socialis is "allied") but also that in Faliscan (old Italian language) socia meant "girlfriend, companion". Also, Latin socius is more generally "partaking, associated; partner, associate". And altogether the Proto-Indo-European *sokʷ-yo- ("companion") originated from *sekʷ- ("to follow"). In any case, it should properly read that the primitive/ancient man was a sociologist insofar as he followed his companions.

Ordinary knowledge is derived from what Northrop refers to as the natural history stage of scientific inquiry. The techniques used are direct observation, description, and classification. These techniques yield what Northrop terms concepts by inspection, such a concept being one whose meaning is given by immediate apprehension. Theory is present in this stage of inquiry to the extent that the observed facts are subsumed under such concepts; and the observed phenomena are in constant and direct relation. (Hartung 1951: 41)

Again applicable on phatic communion, which was derived from participant observation, anthropological description and linguistic classification. Consequently, this explains why the concept is so intuitive - everyone can look around and take note of the language used in casual social intercourse.

The last level of scientific training is almost invariably that of intimate contact with a teacher, contact which today perhaps most often occurs at the university level. In this contact, the training is both formal and informal. Formality exists in watching the teacher make his choice of problems and developing techniques; in participating in the evaluation of successes and failures, and in the discussion of work being done in the field. Informality exists in the friendship which develops, and the incessant bull-sessions through which some of the hunches, devotion, and enthusiasm of the teacher are transmitted to the pupil. This is why great pupils so often follow great teacher. It is possible to trace this pupil-teacher relationship for generations back. (Hartung 1951: 46)

An addition to the notion found circulating the discourse on teaching in general, that a teacher does not so much teach the subject matter as incite personal interest towards it. Here, the list is expanded from simple enthusiasm to other types of "feeling content" (cf. Spiegelberg 1951: 354-355, above).

The term self is used here in Cooley's sense, as indicating that system of values and objects, organized through association with others, which we regard as peculiarly our own. When science has thus become part of his self, it has also become an aspect of the scientist's conscience, and controls him with all the authority which conscience possesses. This is not an unusual use of the term conscience; it has been firmly established in Cooley's analysis of the social aspect of conscience. (Cooley 1922: 358-401). (Hartung 1951: 48)

A reminder to read Cooley. This sort of selfhood is pretty common in social psychology, i.e. the self as that part of a person conditioned "through association with others", e.g. the super-ego, if I'm not off with my freudianisms.

We are continually confronted with an indefinite number of impulses and stimuli, which we attempt to assimilate into a whole. The process of dealing with these impulses and stimuli includes deliberate reasoning. It also includes considerable symbolic manipulation of which we are unaware, and which tends to organize the materials of our thoughts into a whole - it accepts some and rejects others. (Hartung 1951: 48)

Filtering.


Phraseological findings

Few historians would, I imagine, accept a genealogy as an entirely neutral historical document unaffected by the social milieu in which it is conserved. (Lewis 1962)
There the Gordian knot of the problem of body and soul was to be cut, not undone. [...] Surely no one in cultural philosophy before Spengler and Toynbee, Misch and Jaspers can be said to have taken seriously the equality of rank of other cultural spheres. (Wein 1957)
[...] but in this case the references to social anthropology are so erroneous that a rejoinder is called for. [...] Indeed, in the preamble to his argument he claims authority for his approach on the ground that the study of descent systems is an important and well developed part of the discipline. [...] The will usually be concordant to some degree, but the defining character of descent systems is social. [...] I have been perturbed by a philosopher trying to tell other philosophers what an important topic in social anthropology is about, [...] (Needham 1960)
Aristotle was imported into Western Europe with Semitic bills of lading. There were some misrepresentations of Aristotle's ideas which arose as they were refracted from one linguistic medium to another, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin. [...] He inclined to agree with the view of a Chinese thinker that the alphabetical civilizations are fickle and lack solidity. [...] And in their primitivity and innocence, they value what they thus immediately apprehend. (Feuer 1953)
Nevertheless, social scientists nowadays are evincing increased interest in comparative studies. They are coming to realize that many of their generalizations may be found wanting when tested in the laboratory of world cultures. [...] The preceding discussion serves as an introduction to some pertinent observations. [...] It should be stressed that the isolation of invariant points of reference is not an end in itself. Nor should these be used simply to classify various social phenomena. [...] This is just one example of the social scientist's capture by culture-bound concepts; still others could be enumerated. (Sjoberg 1955)
Evene the great minds of the past, who were innocent as yet of this philosophical two-party system, are being herded into one pen or the other. [...] What is needed in this respect is an unbiased readiness and effort to face and accept without fear or favor the phenomena with all their shades and depths, with their striking and their receding aspects, with their continuities and discontinuities, with their meaningful and their perplexing characters. [...] Naturalists tend to give to their catch-all term a much wider field and consequently less content (connotations), while supernaturalists try to reserve everything good and noble to their supernatural realm and strip nature of all its more endearing qualities, thus giving it a fuller, but rather unflattering connotations. [...] It is to serve merely as a point of departure for a better understanding of the supernaturalist doctrine. [...] "...it is obvious that the two terms in question are merely negative and exclusive attributes with reference to "nature" and the "world" or cosmos respectively." (Rudolf Otto) [...] Moreover, it is interesting to see that Thomas Aquinas himself approves of the negative definition of eternity given by Boethius, who uses the word "interminable," if only for the reason that eternity is supposedly simple and that simple things can be defined only by negation. [...] But its primary sense involves not more than an overnatural "mighty deed," i.e. one of overnatural degree, or, to put it in modern garb, a record feat. [...] There are those who, with Moritz Schlick and J. A. Ayer, declare that meaning attaches only to terms which can be "verified" by experience, though only in principle, and that unverifiable terms are plain nonsense. [...] But this provides normally no criteria for situations other than telephonic contact and has therefore no sense meaning. [...] The supernaturalist certainly does not mean to ascribe to the supernatural a hodgepodge of all conceivable properties with the one exception of the natural. [...] It has always been a rather embarrassing situation for religious orthodoxy that there are so many false gods, false prophets, false Messiahs, delusions of the devil, "devil's works" and similar religious pseudophenomena, all dressing up as the real thing and making exactly the same claims to authenticity. [...] What aggravates the situation even more is that this is not just a matter of re-identifying an entity that we had met once before, much after the manner of the Platonic anamnesis. [...] However, as I will suggest in conclusion, they make me wonder whether it would not be preferable to start all over again with a clean slate and forget all about the outdated controversies and oversimplifications that cling to the old terminology. [...] One striking weakness of the recent naturalistic conceptions of nature is that, by making nature "the all-inclusive category" (Krikorian 1944: 357) which embraces everything, from the physical to the spiritual realm, the naturalists have built a catchall that, while taking care of everything, is no longer capable of excluding anything. [...] How widely or how narrowly are we to understand it? [...] Contrary to the old a priori adage "natura non facit saltus" the empirical evidence confronts us with any number of "jumps," from sub-atomic phenomena up to biological mutations, a fact already anticipated by C. S. Peirce's thycism. And every genuine novelty implies at least a qualitative jump. [...] "even for Mr. Dewey it is manifest that this is the nub of the matter" [...] What is the upshot of all this faultfinding? (Spiegelberg 1951)
Knowledge is a groping process in which the direction remains indeterminate and the goal unknown. (Feuer 1957)
None of man's major activities, like science, art or religion can be captured and pinned down on a dissecting tray with one single phrase. [...] The history of science is replete with conflicts of interpretation. [...] The history of science presents plenty of instances of errors of omission and commission. [...] Would that it were so!(Hartung 1951)

Lexical findings

Herbal medicines and decoctions may be given, but they are ancillary to the main treatment which is the placation and banishment of the agents causing the disease. [...] Though the ritual may be held under the primacy of one of the four demons, most major demons, as stated earlier, have to be propitiated. [...] Thus if a woman is afflicted by the sensual demon Kalu Kumāraya (Black Prince), one may perform a sanni ritual, but in addition one may have an image (bali) of Kalu Kumāraya and special invocations and oblations to him. [...] With a graceful movement of his hands he performs gestures of obeisance in the direction of the other altars. [...] kendi pāliya, 'the spectacle of the water pot' where the altars of the gods are lustrated with tumeric water and the patient blessed and 'cleansed' with it; [...] Two persons drawn from the audience stands holding two pestles, in the manner of a barrier. [...] His swords breaks. He comes up to the drummer crestfallen. [...] This view, however, meets with a serious linguistic objection for according to the normal rules of the Sinhalese language one cannot elide pāta from the Sanskrit san-ni-pata and simply form a new noun from the two Sanskrit prefixes san-ni. [...] The Malayalam work Sahasrayooga has a list of eighteen, thirteen of which are diseases produced by san-ni-pāta and partially duplicated in the Tamil list while five are pyrexias caused also by the upsetting of the three humours. [...] The three stages as phases of inclusion are also found in puberty rites for females in Hiniduma. On achieving menarch a Sinhalese girl is excluded in a hut (kiligē) in the bush outside the house; after a few days she is brought into a hut almost adjacent the house; and finally she is brought into the house and included again with the family in the status of marriageable female. [...] Pestilence and famine were the results of the depredations of the Sanni demons. (Obeyeskere 1969)
Moreover, the same process of genealogical elision has been shown to occur in other tribal societies, and is in my view the only reasonable explanation. [...] I refer now to the apices of clan-family genealogies where descent is traced to noble Arabian families, and particularly to those closely connected with the Prophet. [...] Again, as with Sheikh Daarood, there are a number of published hagiologies in Arabic which describe not only the Sheikh's movements and life and works in Somaliland but also his peregrinations in Arabia before his arrival among the Somali. (Lewis 1962)
In the ideal case the political communicator, king or chief, whether traditionally legitimate, traditionally recognizable as usurper, or jumped-up mercenary and buccaneer, remained also a social communicator, in close relationship with his tribesmen or peasants. [...] But in order to mollify the newly articulate educated men, administrators had 'strained to the utmost the loyal support of the old chiefs, by demanding the inclusion of younger men' in tribal councils, [...] For within the society were many strata ranging from the conservative, collaborating Arab élite, to the radical 'Maniema' townsfolk, originally the social detritus of the slave-trade. [...] Together, they both obviated the need for a continuing, committed presentation of mass problems before the colonial authority, [...] Early in 1959 the Luo African District Council of Central Nyanza, acting under strong local pressure, voted itself into dissolution rather than accept government terms for the management of an afforestation scheme. (Lonsdale 1968)
It may be most convenient if I proceed simply by dealing individually, and briefly, with points as they arise seriatim in Gellner's paper. (Needham 1960)
Value attitudes, emotional projections, social perspectives, - these are the founts which nurture the diverse modes of metaphysical ideas. [...] Free from the atomicities and unstable transciences of the alphabetical language, it would be predisposed to see unchanged solidities in things, [...] In vain, he protested against the description of pragmatism "as a characteristically American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately." (Feuer 1953)
Under the spell of this triple inspiration recent naturalism has often fallen into an uncritical idolatry of nature, into mere braggadocio about the triumphs of natural science, and into cheap ridicule of the "mysticism" of the poor benighted supernaturalists. [...] How, without that much of a sifter, can we possibly hope to soperate the grain from the chaff? [...] The rearguard action of ever so many supernaturalists in defending every inch of miracle territory against scientific explanation hardly suggests that they appreciate this fact, [...] witness Professor Krikorian's prefatory formulation of their "common agreements" [...] (Spiegelberg 1951)
Meta-scientific simplicity is thus regarded as an asymptote to which the sciences draw ever closer. [...] What determines our choice, as scientists, among the rival claimants is our practical judgment concerning the character of their underlying respective methods of theory construction. [...] it explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colour. [...] The belief in an external world independent of the percipient subject is the foundation of all science. (Feuer 1957)
In doing so, the scientistic ideology endangers science, jeopardizes the status of the scientist, and provides antiscientists with ideological brickbats. [...] Frazer's conception of science is more acceptable not only because it makes science indefinitely more ancient than does Comte's view, but also because it makes scientific development a more tentative and crescive process. [...] the scientific attitude is inculcated in its initial stages before the scientist can have any realization that this is occurring. (Hartung 1951)

ACM Phatic 01


Sarjanoja, Ari-Heikki; Minna Isomursu and Jonna Häkkilä 2013. Small Talk with Facebook: Phatic Communication in Social Media. AcademicMindTrek '13: Proceedings of International Conference on Making Sense of Converging Media. New York: ACM, 118-121.

In this paper, we analyzed a data set of 484 unique communication events taking place in Facebook. The key contribution of this paper is the content based analysis showing that people mostly share events from their everyday lives, even if the information is repetitious or does not have any informational meaning, this practice prevailing even though most such updates were regarded as uninteresting ones. Moreover, a considerable amount of status updates was seen to fall into category of 'small talk'. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 118)

One of the interesting possibilities about reading all of these "computer machinery" related papers at once is seeing how IT-researcher reformulate (transform) the stale phatic tropes. Ideally, since it's somewhat removed from anthropology and linguistics and focused on new technology, this is where the most up-to-date correspondences should hide.

Here, "events from their everyday lives" refers to the fact that people "post what they know", but the outcome is tantamount to the "primitive"-s situation of talking about what's in the immediate surrounding environment. That this information is "repetitious", i.e. reduntant, likens it to the "noise" in the channel. There are statements by linguists about how every person's everyday speech is tinted with repetitious linguistic material, lines of thought, etc. brought about by people being fixated with their mundane issues and using conversation, in a way, to cope and overcome them.

The results show that the communication through Facebook has strong element of phatic communion, i.e. it serves the purpose of maintaining and defining social relationships and enacts social cohesiveness. Our results reveal an interesting contradiction between uninteresting content and (obviously) interesting service; and suggests that small talk type entries can be seen as a tool for increasing one's social capital by being active. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 118)

While "maintaining" is a fairly common median term (between approach/establish and terminate/close, for example), "defining social relationships" takes us into the ballpark of Gregory Bateson's mu-function, i.e. communication about relationship. It is curious how often and easily people jump intuitively to some conceptualization of this type of metacommunication when discussing phatics.

Enacting social cohesiveness (for the latter there are numerous synonyms, i.e. unity, congruence, conformity, etc. not to mention the sociological staples of assimilation and integration in the social process) is nearly the point of the original formulation, i.e. the sharing of moral sentiments through social communion. Though here it is probably meant in a more lax sense, i.e. the sense of togetherness.

The issue of social capital is somewhat problematic since I'm not sure how Bourdieu's theory would actually intermesh with phatics. On the surface it seems intuitive enough, but I'm sure there are caveats to this connection that currently elude me. What is social capital even in the internet age?

Nadkarni and Hofmann suggest that the primary motivations behind using Facebook are two social needs - the need to belong, and the need for self-presentation. Joinson has investigated the motives and uses of Facebook, and reports on seven different categories found. Here, keeping in touch was the most frequently mentioned use case by the users, followed by passive contact ('virtual people-watching').s (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 118)

The need to belong (or the longer version, belongingness) are fairly common but "the need for self-presentation" is especially interesting because this mirrors Malinowski's passing remark about "ambition", meaning something to the effect that some people engage in phatic communion to, well, increase their social capital, so to say.

"Keeping in touch" is the natural conclusion from the contact trope, followed up by the likes of Licoppe and Smoreda, for example. Now, passive contact or virtual people-watching would match with all the discourse about ambient presence, but essentially it is more closer to "lurking". It presents some theoretical interestibila in terms of information-orientation (equally in the case of people joining the casual conversation just to hear what other people are talking about - our new technologies allow for more such possibilities).

In [12], Miller argues that phatic communication is increasingly dominating the online media culture and states that the maintenance of network itself has become the primary focus rather than exchanging substantive content. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 118)

Just like I sometimes still discover something very obvious in Jakobson by how other people mediate him, this is the first time I've noticed that Miller has effectively performed a very significant act of generalization: whereas Jakobson meant the ongoing interaction (the physical channel and psychological connection of the moment), concepts like phatic media culture focus on the maintenance of the network of communication rather than a single instance of communication. This could be related to the progressive "continuation" effect of modern communications - i.e. the fact that e-mail exchanges are seen rather like a continuous conversation rather than a series of discrete messages. There was a Facebook funny pic about this circulating today - that we don't say "brb" anymore because we don't leave anymore, we live here now.

Next, the participants were asked to open their Facebook accounts by using a computer which was equipped with Mozilla Firefox, Greasemonkey extension and a script that added the rating scale below each of the status updates. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 119)

Huh, that's a really neat solution to gathering data from social media. It does require some technical know-how other researchers studying similar phenomena may not have.

Our observations indicate, that the choice of the subjective evaluation parameter emphasized the information content value, i.e. how informative or activating the users found the status updates. Therefore, the updates that included little or no information value were mostly rated not interesting. However, this might have some other, less obvious signaling value for the users, and serve the role of "social grooming" or a signal of availability through a specific channel. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 119)

What is meant by "activating"? This sounds like some cognitive-catalytic criteria, but such mentalistic stuff is obviously difficult to treat. The signalling of availability is something quite frequent in this kind of literature (especially in terms of allowances such as "X has seen your message") but here a source is given. Obviously the next step would be to start tracking the bibliography and really getting into this research (can't stay in the narrow "phatic" lane forever).

We can only estimate which kind of status updates are found most interesting, because for example tie strength have an effect to the rating. However, the rating contributes to the analysis of the role of phatic communion in SNS, especially Facebook. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 119)

I know Malinowski uses the archaic phrase "ties of fellowship" but is it ever odd to see "relationship" in terms of "tie strength". It's probably on point, though, because social ties have varying degrees of strength, much like the "circles" in Google Plus.

The largest category was clearly the everyday routines and observations. This category included status updates which told mostly about obvious or repeated events, like "Monday, Monday...", or trivial information, like "Going to sleep". The number of these non informational messages supports the theory about the significant role of phatic communication in online media culture. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 120)

I see that this paper follows the interpretation germane to corpus linguistics, which views phaticity in a pejorative sense as meaningless communication, rather than "social communion" pure and simple. In effect, the emphasis on desemantization and the like have shifted the original point of "language used for social purposes" to "empty use of language", as if they were the same thing. Effectively, nearly all the categories listed in a table are social, because it's on social media.

Although most of the content was found uninteresting, it is obviously not a critical factor in the use of the service. The status update creation culture indicates that people may have a strong need to maintain their alleged social capital. On the other hand, they might just have exhibitionistic needs. In both cases, some of the status updates have more meaning for the writer itself than to the people who read them. People have a need to express themselves or signal their existence in the service even when they really do not have anything to say. (Sarjano, Isomuru & Häkkilä 2013: 120)

This alleged social capital has a bibliographical reference which I need to follow up (Burke et al. 2010) but I think this passage is hitting the nail on the head as it comes to the difference between face-to-face interaction for which the concept was originally formulated and the abstract phatic systems (Wang et al. 2016) of modern society. Namely, we are engaging in sociality via the intermediary of screens and could have much different motivations than we do face-to-face.

Kirk, David S.; David Chatting, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard 2016. Ritual Machines I & II: Making Technology at Home. CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2474-2486.

Changing patterns of both work-related mobility and domestic arrangements mean that 'mobile workers' face challenges to support and engage in family life whilst travelling for work. Phatic devices offer some potential to provide connection at a distance alongside existing communications infrastructure. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2474)

This is the point of many recent studies of new technologies; e.g. Licoppe and Smoreda and nearly all of the phatic technologies crowd. Family life can stand for any (primary) group. (Note, should read that old paper on primary groups.) "Devices" is synonymous with technologies, and possibly even "solutions". Connection at what distance, though? Cross-national, geological, or across the livingroom?

The kinds of telecommunications infrastructure we have in place in industrialized nations offers intriguing support to the distance imposing patterns of mobile work. Consequently, visions of the network society and our living digitally are very much coming to fruition. Networked technologies such as video communication, much vaunted as a panacea to our communication problems, have a long history of critical scrutiny within the HCI community. But our research concerns have had little impact on the mass adoption of video-based services such as Skype. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2474)

Both of these sources originate from the turn of the century. Indeed, much has changed in the last 17-18 years. It might be interesting to read these sources to compare our modern digital lives to millenial visioneers in greater detail. Are there postulated ways of progress that haven't come to fruition (yet)?

In thinking through the haecceities of remate workers' lives, we became interested in the patterns, rhythms and rituals of family life. Whilst we might commonly think of 'ritual' in broadly anthropological terms we can also think of it in more prosaic, quotidian ways. For example Wolin and Bennett define family ritual as "a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time". Arguably, the work of being a family comes from an engagement in just these prosaic ritual activities. We demonstrate love for one another through shared engagement in routine domestic tasks. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2474)

The source given for rituals of family life is new but the conjunction between phaticity and rituals stems from Malinowski's original essay and possibly the elaborations of his studens (such as Firth) so that sometimes phatic routines are included amongst interaction rituals, for example, or social communion is itself studied as if it were ritualistic (James Slotta's 2015 paper about the ritual communication between the government and its subjects immediately comes to mind). The semiotic contention here is that verbal etiquette is ritualistic, in such expressions as "Hello" and "Goodbye" the referential function lapses and instead their accomplishment or consummation, as a mode of action, becomes highilighted.

It is our contention that when away from home it is these rituals, these routine activities, providing moments of prosaic familial interaction that we miss. And it might therefore be ritual activities that offer a hook through which we might re-engage mobile workers with matters of family life, when far from home. We wished to speculate on how phatic technologies might be a resource for re-engagement with these activities when travelling for work, and to further understand the contingencies of living and reconciling a life as both a mobile worker and a family member. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2474)

The underlying emphasis seems to be habit and perhaps normalization, and heading towards online ambient co-presence in rituals of family life. The recurring term re-engagement is interesting and telling: interesting because it's a contact trope specific to mobile workers and telling because of its belonging into the vocabulary of marriage rituals (i.e. marital engagement).

Equally, within the HCI community there is a large body of research that has sought to understand how we can design technologies for domestic spaces and situate them within the home often entangled with, legacy infrastructure. Our concern for phatic technologies connecting mobile workers back to family life, within the home, clearly speaks to such research agendas. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2475)

The sources refer to smart house and connected home books but this made me think of the speculative possibility that something like Malinowski's "survivals" may become a greater problem when technologies continue their fast-paced development and social relations begin to pick up; the online platform a person was socialized with may become a relevant factor. That is, not connected vs unconnected peoples, but between differentially connected people.

Connecting Through Phatics - Phatic technologies are devices that serve to express the non-verbal emphatic, emotive and paralinguistic elements of communication. There have been a variety of studies of phatic technologies (although not all would perhaps use that term), which construct points of communication and connection between people (and places) through a diverse set of technical and sensory arrangements. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2475)

Gibbs, Vetere et al. has a list comparable to La Barre's broad definition, and the last entry reads "Express emotion, not necessarily with words or text, but also in 'unspoken' ways" (p. 4). Here these 'unspaken' ways have become "non-verbal emphatic", which pretty much goes to the heart of Tylor's "natural language". Phatic technology studies seem to concul with La Barre, to a large extent, and go implicitly against Malinowski with his de-emphasized role of "feelings", and Jakobson with his all too linguistic take on intonation and the interrogative/imperative inflections that require the communication chain to continue.

These pieces eloquently demonstrate the importance of a nuanced socio-technical understanding of the context of use when developing technologies that work specifically with and for families. A more comprehensive review and critique of the broad range of phatic technologies can be found in [25]. Perhaps important to take from such discussions though is an understanding that whilst the phatics themselves are obviously designed with separated individuals (or groups) in mind they often fail to critically consider the placing of technology within the 'home' as a mobile and contingent locale and there is less emphasis on understanding the specific contingencies of the mobile worker and family-person. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2475)

I just recently recalled how my fascination with Malinowski began with Ray Birdwhistell's attribution of his own emphasis on context (e.g. Kinesics and Context) on the former's context of the situation. So it may very well be that Malinowski was among those who first pointed out the importance of nonverbal communication.

Phatics is here clearly a synonym for phatic technologies (why not phatechs?) but I'll retain my plural use on the theoretical level, referring to the different interpretations (communion, communication, function) of phaticity. In that sense, these authors use the words phatic communication very symptomatically (La Barrean, emotive line; as oppsed to J.-s conative and M.-s referential).

My home is where my equipment is. It is contingent only on my free access to a connection.

Of significant importance though is the characterization given to research in this space by Crabtree et al. (2012), who argue that our interests should lie not in designing technologies that are easier to manage but in designing technologies that allow us to better manage everyday life. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2475)

Perhaps those are converging design principles? Intuitive design patterns should lead to a greater automatization of everyday life, both figurative (e.g. the psychological habituation of William James) and literal (technological) sense.

With this concept of generating 'tactical understanding' in mind we have been drawn to the design and deployment of 'provotypes', a deployed design, an explicitly provocative prototype, which is provisional, open and possibly incomplete although allowing for the language of consumer products to be utilised. The aim of such designs is to perturb space and social dynamics to foreground implicit assumptions and concerns within a research population. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2476)

Openness, great. Perturbing space and social dynamics, great. The language of consumer products, naah.

We quite quickly focused on their reported simple shared pleasure of having a drink together at the end of the day, when Sam is finally asleep and they have done "all the serious stuff". So we began to sketch, prototype and refine designs that would allow the couple to drink together whilst apart. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2477-2478)

Another drop in the bucket titled "the role of alcohol in sociability". In this case, couples enjoy drinking by themselves for relaxation.

Jesper's Diary of a Mobile Worker gave us further insights into professional travel and accommodation in the high-end hospitality industry. Our visits and their photographs highlighted to us how carefully their home was curated. This was especially true of the living room, where choices were made exclusively by Hywell with close attention to colour and materials. While their working lives were both very busy with regular periods of sometimes-sustained separation, they told us of their frequent holidays or weekends away together, which were carefully planned and anticipated keenly. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2478)

Living room is the foremost "phatic space" in the domicile, at least the mainstream Western cultures. And planning and anticipating time spent together extends this metaphor into time (Licoppe and Smoreda were once again on point with the time-aspect, Kunreuther's radio-calls also come to mind).

While the interface could be used remotely, we became interested in how we could structure ritual acts around the achine when both were present. Using Apple's iBeacon proximity technology we were able to estimate the display between each phone and the display, this allowed us to prototype a series of proximate interactions. We enjoyed the Cold War film language of double locks and secure systems that require two people to initiate a sequence. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2479)

What a random tidbit on personal interestibilia. I like that the installation behaves differently when a pair of persons is physically present. It is likely that in the presumably coming age of wall-screens, every public space could host personalised ads for people passing by.

Our devices, Machine I and II, were both engineered to create moments of synchrony and connectedness, in parallel with (rather than replacement of) extant communications infrastructure (e.g. mobile phones, Skype etc.). The two devices leveraged notions of ritual but to varying success. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2481)

Varying success indeed. What the interview statements in this paper bare witness to is a desire for physical closeness with partner, not moments of synchrony. Everyone's already synchronous via phone calls and instant chats. It does seem that the couple testing the smart wine-pouring machine were hung up about giving off the impression of alcoholics, and probably felt that drinking via online co-presence is still "drinking alone". The other family didn't seem to be physically present for the cumbersome ticking machine, having found no need for a technologically mediated moment of synchrony.

Celebrate reunion and anticipate togetherness rather than just connection - Evidently for Holly and Craig there was value in the shared drink ritual but for them its true value was in marking that work was done and that the 'mobility' had come to an end. Machine II was already responding to this notion and worked immediately with a sense of reunion and orientation towards the future of being together, potentially having more success for that. Systems such as Rendezvous work around the remote working pattern and worry less about live connection focusing on creating shared connections - even if this might be in the future. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2482)

Evidently, indeed, as the abstention from use seems to have ostensively communicated normative behaviour towards recreational drugs. It is okay to drink when celebrating the end of a job but inappriate to relax with a bottle of wine when connected online. It may be that the traditional filter was called up be the implications of a wine dispenser (the subjects discussed it more with acquaintances than actually used it, making it a talking piece, and, in a sense a "bad object" - something to unite against, rather than with and through) or by the experimental procedure (being a subject in a "scientific experiment"), or something else. It does point to the role of traditional norms in new technology prototyping.

Our bespoke design process was a dialogic interaction between the designers and the family. They were aware that the machine we had built encoded elements of their characters and values within. The machine was presented as if a personal gift, albeit one that was to be returned to us. As such this machine would never be the result of a mass-production industrial process or be chosen by that family in a commercial context to meet a perceived need. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2482)

So, not a gift. More like a burden. This dissonance is evident in the interview section, where the family representative comes off as ambiguous and not having anything relevant to say: "I think, the project, well not the actual machine, but convrsations like this probably have done [make him reflect on work life balance], so yeah, I guess in a way, whether it has been [the machine] or conversations like this, probably yes." The amount of filler and ambiguity here is truly impressive. It is the most (Jakobsonian) phatic utterance I've ever met: not only does it prolong the communication for no good reason but it also says very little and refers to the very same instance of communication in order to prolong it. It's a lengthy equivalent of "It's been nice talking to you," when you'er actually attempting to end the conversation without hurting the conversation partner's feelings.

It exists within the home only to create moments of reflection amongst the family about their values and attitudes to separation. In this way, and akin to a provotyping strategy, each machine may be seen in part as both a sensitizing tool (as per cultural probes) and a breaching experiment seeking to provoke reflection. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2482)

This paper itself, and by proxy all kinds of theoretical discussions (even, speculative, in the scholastic sense) can be viewed a kind of reflection on the medium itself. Like how (scientific) communication becomes a marginal topic in various messages: footnotes about who helped with the writing and publishing of the article, overviews of how a piece of academic writing evolved. For example, the author of Semiotranslating Peirce wrote a very thorough overview of how a book review grew itself into a book, how various pieces of source material (e.g. translations of Peirce and Wittgenstein) were retrieved, and what conversation it tapped into, e.g. the debate held about Finnish equivalents for rare and obscure philosophical terminology. It was reminiscent of the afterword to Ender's Game where the author recounts everywhere he went and everyone he spoke with, and about what, during the period he was writing this one famous book among his many publications, about which he also went on for extra details. But there are also smaller linguistic units - Christiane Nord (2007) focused on the phatic margins in middle school textbooks in different languages.

In order to create these real moments and experiences for the families these machines had to work. Work not only technically, but also within a family's specific home environments and the space and infrastructures they move through when traveling and over a prolonged period without our maintenance. There is an inherent complexity and risk in negotiating these practical, social and technological constraints that we could only provisionally anticipate. (Kirk et al. 2016: 2482)

Where the experimental procedure was lackluster, this paper shines in provocative ideation. While it comes across as trying to market needless smart machinery to successful and suspicious white people, its implications can become very relevant for whole masses of people in the future when china has built a highway to Turkey and Turkey has finished building its air travel hub, and mobility the likes of which it is now difficult to appreciate, takes place. Digitalization is key here and it does seem that familial separation will be a major theme in a world where any of your kin could be dispersed in any location around the globe. Likewise, civil conduct in future multicultural metropoli may very well depend on the technical support for everyday munities like internet access.

Oh damn, "munity" is an obsolete word, a privilege that is granted. I thought of munipically "granted", and figured out that community is literally co-munity, i.e. granting a privilege of freedom (to members of a community). This is a kind of "false friend" etymology, stemming from my inability to grapple with the religious and historical "substance" of communion/community.

Chatting, David; David S. Kirk, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard 2015. Designing for family phatic communication: a design critique approach. British HCI '15: Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference. New York: ACM, 175-183.

Changing patterns of domestic life mean that it is increasingly common for people to work away from home for extended periods. Communications technologies are arguably positioned to help repair ensuing emotional disconnects. We are exploring the use of technology to support re-engagement in a quotidian rituals of family life to foster emotional connectedness whilst away from home. (Chatting et al. 2015: 175)

Thus far the vast majority of phatic technology studies (or "demos") have to do with emotional connection within the family. Whereas most anthropological studies amalgamate Malinowski with Jakobson, phatic technologies thus most frequently do so with La Barre and Jakobson, stemming from Vetere et al.'s first iteration, which paraphrased Jakobson very liberally.

Increasingly therefore, life is marked by significant periods of absence from home and family, and increasingly we may turn to digital technologies to help us mediate that absence. Perhaps in response, we have seen a rise in the number of 'phatic' technologies, which offer intimate emotive communication, being presented at research conferences. (Chatting et al. 2015: 175)

I doubt in this causal explanation. Does it mean that the increase of phatic studies in other fields is instigated by a similar rise in "discennectedness"?

The designs are a combination of commercial devices, research projects, concept designs, cultural artefacts and artistic pieces. We make no attempt to argue that the collection is exhaustive, but have sampled broadly from research and artistic literature, selecting artefacts that work in different ways, engage different sensory qualities and offer various different design inspirations. (Chatting et al. 2015: 176)

A list of what can be found in ACM publications.

Many designs in the collection could be explicitly described as 'phatic' technologies, although perhaps only a few of their designers would identify them as such. Phatic technologies serve to foster intimate communication between people, are usually non-verbal in nature and support more visceral and lower bandwidth communication. To date there has been little systematic review of what constitutes a phatic device. (Chatting et al. 2015: 176)

I suspect that they are usually oriented towards the nonverbal spectrum of communication because verbal communication has already been firmly established: phatic technologies capture what is left after texting or calling. It may also be the case that so many orient towards "visceral" communication because they confuse "phatic" with "haptic".

We feel that most designs have potential circumstantial utility. By this we mean that any design, be it good or bad, critical or non-critical, might have an inspirational quality, along some dimension, that serves our current design intent and the over codification of approaches to reading the 'critical' value of a design can stifle this. (Chatting et al. 2015: 176)

This is how I feel about my readings (and music). One can find something interesting in the worst or most irrelevant publications just like one can find a few seconds of bliss on an otherwise unremarkable album.

Portholes was a platform for sharing snapshot images of office and public spaces across a geographically distributed work group. Its intention was to generate a greater sense of awareness between colleagues, facilitating further communication and collaboration. (Chatting et al. 2015: 177)

The facilitation of further communication is equally a phaticism (or "contact trope") and a colloquialism to the effect of "at least it sparked discussion", which is usually said of some failed endeavour when nothing else positive is left to say.

Placing a tagged mug on on the table causes an image of that mug to be displayed on the remote table. Acculumaltions of objects are displayed as more are used on the surface. After an object is removed the image fades away over time by first de-saturating the colour and then reducing its size. Habitat seeks to create an awareness and intuition of a remote partner's rhythmic activity articulating feelings of togetherness and being "in tune". It demonstrates communication technology integrating into the practice of daily-life. The act of placing a book on the table may or may not be deliberate. The displayed image of the object on the table, closely maps to the appearance of that object. The information exchanged is an assumption of intent tied to a reciprocally observable material practice. (Chatting et al. 2015: 177)

By what I've see thus far, designers seem to approach feelings of togetherness in mighty awkward ways. Seeing a trace of an object on the coffee table might remind you that it's connected to your partner's table, but how exactly does it articulate any feelings?

It is clear that ritualistic communication designs can exist across both low and high bandwidth networks, with a variety of delays. It is worth noting that many of the early systems described were developed at a time when network infrastructure was inferior to that common today. However, the heterogeneity of networks and the finite speed of a message travelling a physical distance will necessitate some delay, increasing as the distance increases. (Chatting et al. 2015: 179)

Should general AI come into existence, all of our previous "human" designs will probably appear inferior and become unused. This might even go for our current centralizers like Facebook and Google, to be replaced by distributed, AI-designed communication systems. We must regard to technology of the present as a finality.

Over a period of use we might expect that there would be some negotiated arrangement of peeping and being peeped at, but without an indication within the home that the system is being operated this would need to happen in parallel communication channels. (Chatting et al. 2015: 180)

This would go for nearly all of these designs - they'd be much more fun to operate over the phone. They could act as play-things alongside a phonecall, rather than a replacement for it.

A radio may be typically left on in the background whilst the household move about the space, in and out of audibility. (Chatting et al. 2015: 181)

Phraseological finding equal to the "earshot" one found elsewhere (Niðurhal 03?). General topic: phatic spaces and social proximity zone.

Baharin, Hanif and Nadiah Zin 2015. Rhythmic Persuasion Model: Shifting from Phatic to Persuasion. AM '15: Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2015 on Interaction With Sound. New York: ACM, Article No. 1.

We argue that, as an aspect of phatic communication, rhythm entrainment may be used to enhance persuasive technology through inducing mimicry of desired behaviours. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 1)

define:entrainment - "Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms (only humans as a whole, with some particular instances of a particular animal) to an external perceived rhythm, such as human music and dance such as foot tapping." (Wikipedia)

Rhythm entrainment is an important aspect of human interaction. Closely tied with behavioural mimicry, it helps to establish social bonds among interlocutors - serving the phatic function of communication. Phatic function has not been widely researched in Interaction Design, however, the conative function of communication, which deals with the use of language as commands to affect the actions of the addressee, has been partly addressed by persuasive technology research. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 1)

Sounds like interaction synchronicity (a la Umiker-Sebeok 1980). Here, the authors seem to subscribe to both Malinowski and Jakobson in a way that holds true to both.

The model claims that people are more likely to comply to a behavioural request if the source is perceived as having authority, is friendly, and has similarities with the receiver, which includes similarity in behaviour, or mimicry. Mimicry and friendliness are actually intertwined. People unintentionally mimic others and those who mimicked are considered friendly. For example, people's perception of a chat robot is positively influenced if the robot mimics the typing speed of human interlocutor. Repetition of the request from the source will also increases compliance. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

Something to this effect has often been claimed throughout the 20th century with regard to linguistic similarities in phatic communion, especially by Basil Bernstein and other sociolinguists (i.e. people who speak the same slang, jargon, etc. interact more freely).

The term is constructed from the Greek 'phatos' meaning 'spoken' (and the related 'phatikos' meaning 'affirming') and 'communion' from the Latin 'communis', the secular meaning of which is 'fellowship, mutual participation, a sharing.'. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

define:communion - "the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental or spiritual level." But what did H.S. mean by "social communion"?

The language of purposeful activity - work, religion, education etc. - is high in informational content and directly connected to the current activity. But the "free aimless social intercourse' characterizing the chat accompanying but not relevant to work, or engaged in while resting, eating, passing time etc. is low in informational content and disconnected with the current activity. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

These authors choose to emphasize the purposeful/purposeless distinction, which is rather infrequent in phatic studies literature. With regard to "information content", I've moled over, since reading up on the concept of information, that it's rather symptomatic that Malinowski used the words "to inform" in an interesting way that should be analyzed separately. It might also be nice to take a look at R. Hartley's 1928. "Transmission of information", the forerunner to Shannon (and Shannon and Weaver) at Bell Systems.

Jakobson proposed a model of communication with six functional aspects: the referential, emotive, poetic, conative, metalingual and phatic functions. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

The list is in near-perfect chronological order. Only poetic and conative are switched. Or... I may actually be wrong, given the possibility that the poetic function may have first been articulated by Aristotle before the conative. So, for all intents and purposes, this is surprisingly, even exceedingly, exact.

Jakobson added to Malinowski's concept by specifying more clearly how language of low referential relevance might come to have the function of relational maintenance: phatic communication, as Jakobson styled it, is "channel-oriented in that it contributes to the establishment and maintenance of communicative contact" (Lyons 1977: 53-54) (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

Aaand... it's gone. Jakobson "styled" the phatic function. Phatic communication was "styled" by Weston La Barre some half a decade before Jakobson.

Based on the characteristics listed in the persuasive ambient intelligence model, we argue that, for persuasive technology to be effective in influencing change, phaticity has to be established between persuasive technology and its users. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

Oh wow, and it's back. This appears to be a novel use for the noun form first proposed, to my knowledge, by Coupland, Coupland and Robinson (1992).

Rhythm entrainment may be used to establish phatic function, which will then increase compliance to a request from a persuasive technology. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 2)

Aaand... We mess up again. The correct term here would be "phatic communion". The phatic function of language establishes contact, it isn't something that is itself established.

According to Knight (2009), entrainment is human tendency to synchronise to events that occur on at fixed interval. Knight gives example of studies that shows entrainment can be induced by rhythm, which in turn create a sense of communion. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 3)

I'll have to verify this for myself: Hove & Risen 2009; Hove 2008; and Wiltermuth & Heath 2009.

In speech, Knight (2009) postulates that entrainment may be induced by increasing periodicity to create rhythm, for example, prosody may be used for persuasion in political speech. This argument was made based on the premise that behavioural mimicry and synchrony are functions of phatic communion. Entrainment can extend the duration of behavioural synchrony and mimicry and therefore serves to create a sense of affiliation. (Baharin & Zin 2015: 3)

The premise itself seems fine enough. But it would be nice to dwell more on the mechanisms behind this premise. There are several conditionals (i.e. "Rhythm may cause entrainment. Rhythm entrainment may result in mimicry or synchronised behaviours [and] persuasive technology may be designed to induce entrainment which may result in the mimicry of desired behaviours." (ibid.)

McNely, Brian J. 2010. Exploring a sustainable and public information ecology. SIGDOC '10: Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. New York: ACM, 103-108.

This article explores the design and execution of an intentionally public information ecology by focusing on three of the primary communication activities (blogging, videos, and microblogging) taking place immediately before, during, and after a small international conference of digital media professionals. (McNely 2010: 103)

The "General Terms" below this abstract made me realize that Documentation is a whole category in the ACM library. This fares well for my plans to specialize in documentation, as well as my plan to build something that would let me search this blog for relevant quotes more effectively (than just Google searching in it - the corporation has removed many entries from search results, most likely due to copyright claims, and I don't know how to go about insisting on my Fair Use rights). As a sidenote, this blog is also an intentionally public information "ecosystem".

Participants in this information ecology - many of whom did not know one another prior to the conference - created organization-sponsored public blog posts, individual public blog posts, promotional materials, a public website, photographs, and videos; a subset of participants also produced over 500 public updates via the microblogging service Twitter during the conference. These communication activities - encouraged and promoted by leaders within the organization - were designed specifically to establish and then extend a public information ecology among local participants and broader publics. (McNely 2010: 103)

The phaticism of establishing contact here takes on the more abstract character of establishing a public information ecology. This should be included in the "extended" interpretation of phaticisms in library science, for example, where one can find "acquiring, maintaining, and providing access to information" (Church 2009; in Pai 2016: 116).

While Nardi and O'Day were exploring information ecologies before the proliferation of social networking applications and widespread blogging practices, their work was nonetheless prescient for considering how web-based interactions might "serve as connective tissue between and within local information ecologies" (Nardy & O'Day 1999: 185). "There is no single Internet information ecology," they argue, suggesting instead that "information ecologies are local habitations with recognizable participants and practices" (ibid., 185). And yet the enabling technologies of social networks and low barrier digital publishing potentially afford broader social interaction, such that the notion of local can be realized in terms that allow individuals to come together around ideas and activities that may "span traditional geographic or social boundaries" (ibid., 185). (McNely 2010: 103)

This is the stuff of diffusion in my vocabulary - the fact that "digital publishing" can enable interested parties from all across the world to find each other, easily get into contact, collaborate, etc. In Jakobson's terms, this concerns the explosive expansion of the radius of communication brought about by the digital age.

They argue that "people communicating their own thoughts to other people [online] is heartening," and that "not every human interaction has to meet a high intellectual standard" (Nardy & O'Day 1999: 194). In fact, findings from this study indicate that mundane and seemingly ephemeral online communication practices may actually strengthen connections within an information ecology while simultaneously evoking interest and interaction from individuals outside of that information ecology. (McNely 2010: 103-104)

This would actually serve as a perfect response to the early commentators on Malinowski's concept of phatic communion who said something to the effect that primitive men are not the best metaphysicians (implying that Malinowski's Trabrianders had no communications of "a higher intellectual standard", and that such communication is the ideal).

Of particular importance for this study is the fact that these kinds of interactions are increasingly actualized as digital (often backchannel) writing work. As such, the persistence and durability of social ties are fortuitous outcomes of many contemporary public writing practices within a given information ecology. (McNely 2010: 104)

Is... Is this what I'm doing right now? Sources invoked: McNely 2009; Zhao & Rosson 2009; Honeycutt & Herring 2009; Kellog et al. 2006; McCarthy & boyd 2005; and Swarts 2010.

One significant way that activities within an information ecology can be traced is through organizational writing work, especially writing that doesn't result in what might normally be seen as documentation - writing as manifest in microblogging updates, for example. By considering such writing work, activity theory may be productively articulated with knowledge work, where interactions are at once reflective of practices embedded within a "rich social matrix" (Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006: 9). Spinuzzi defines knowledge work as "work in which the primary product is knowledge, information that is continually interpreted and circulated across organizational boundaries" (2006: 1). (McNely 2010: 105)

Some fine day everything humans do, even leisure and entertainment, will be formulated as a type of work, because some energy is expended. The physical definition will overcome the social one.

A code particularly prevalent in conference-sponsored blog posts and videos was termed informing/selling. In these instances, the content could be seen as primarily informative, but the information provided seemed to be deployed in a way that "sold" the dominant organizational identity narrative. In other words, where the live-blogging posts contained virtually no editorializing, the informing/selling posts deployed organizational information within a frame that advertised or reinforced the merits of the information ecology. These posts and videos were explicitly designed to appeal to broader publics in ways that drew upon the strengths of the organization. (McNely 2010: 106)

This selling of "the dominant organizational identity narrative" can also be viewed in non-economic terms, such as Lotman's self-description: the members of the organization are in a way conceptualizing their own activity within the organization by reinforcing the merits of said organization. Curiously, there is no linguistic function explicitly ascribed to this kind of languaging. Actually there might be but I'm not aware of what it could be.

In direct contrast to the informing/selling blog posts and videos, 29% of conference Twitter updates were coded tummeling (whereas only 2 blog posts and no videos were coded in this way). Marks notes that the Yiddish word "tummler" is used to describe someone who is particularly adept at facilitating conversation and engagement within online communities - someone who often curates ideas and content while connecting previously unaffiliated individuals from overlapping networks. Tummeling, therefore, denotes activities sparked by a "conversational catalyst within a group, [someone] to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation" within a given online community (Marks 2008: 1). [...] Twitter's built-in addressivity (the hailing of another user enabled by the "@" sign) also facilitates tummeling moves. (McNely 2010: 106)

For this category I actually know of a precedent, i.e. what Lemon (2013) calls "phatic experts".

Digital phatic gestures were exclusive to microblogging updates (27% of all updates), and are closely correlated with tummeling activities. Phatic gestures in online communities such as Twitter are designed not to be informative, but to express social connections and understanding - even feelings of solidarity or connectedness. For example, the last conference Twitter update collected for this project is explicitly phatic, lamenting the return to normalcy and everyday academic life that must occur after the euphoria of engaging with colleagues and friends at the conference. (McNely 2010: 106)

Odd use of "designed". Likewise, how does one "express social connections"? More so, "understanding"? In greeting or taking leave, do we express social understanding?

Such updates are not particularly informative - at least not in any way similar to informing posts and videos - and they often express emotion and feelings of dis/connectedness to or from fellow conference attendees. And while phatic gestures do not demand a response, interactions around phatic posts are fairly common since they may inspire similar reactions from others in the information ecology. Phatic gestures, in fact, were often correlated with tummeling activities, since tummeling involves the kinds of direct user-to-user connections also prevalent in phatic interaction. (McNely 2010: 106)

Also odd. "Feelings of dis/connectedness" I get - sometimes phrased as feelings of belongingness or togetherness. But not demanding a response and inspiring similar reactions from others brings up a curious caveat in Jakobson's phatic function: on the one hand it is expressly formulated as a means of continuation (of the interaction) and often invoke a similar reaction because the linguistic convention requires it (i.e. "hey, how are you?" and the mandatory response "good, how are you?") and on the other hand the initiation of this ritual sometimes makes the interaction clumsy because a "false start ritual" (i.e. beginning the "finishing move" out of place, out of sync) invokes this mandatory response but may be in conflict with the natural trajectory of the interaction. This is the case, for example, of awkwardly inching towards the door when you've said your goodbyes but the other person is still going on.

Having a single conference hashtag helps establish organizational identity and makes aggregating, sharing, and finding messages much easier. (McNely 2010: 107)

define:aggregate - "a whole formed by combining several separate elements." What I need for this blog - a widget that would aggregate information from hundreds of posts.

At least four of the conference participants observed in this study may be seen as tummlers - active indiiduals who curate and share interesting ideas, who interact phatically and frequently with other members of the information ecology, and most importantly, whose influence brings outside participants into conversation with current members of the information ecology. (McNely 2010: 107)

Phatically meandering.

Baharin, Hanif and Salman Khalidi 2015. Fyro: A Symbolic-Based Phatic Technology. OzCHI '15: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction. New York: ACM, 304-308.

This paper presents a symbolic-based phatic technology system. In contrast to previous work, which explored phatic technology as abstract-, object-, and behavior-based system, we designed Fyro as a symbolic-based system inspired by the symbolic use of fire in the ritual of lighting up a candle when thinking of loved ones. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 304)

An amalgamation of "phatic techonologies" and "phatic systems". Are there phatic aspects to all listed "-based" systems?

Data were analysed using affinity diagram. Although previous research indicates that users project their own context to create meanings in phatic interactions, our results show that symbolic universal traditions may be innovated to extend its meaning into such interactions. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 304)

The semiotic question between meaning-making and meaning-loaning. This is a relatively frequent thread in phatic studies, though not all that visible since the general consensus apears to veer towards "symbolic universal traditions" pn phatics due to the ritualistic character of phatic expressions. The other side is represented by the pragmatic relevance approach, and of course in La Barrean phatics and phatic technology studies, where private emotional connotations are emphasized.

Strong and Gaver (1996) suggested design opportunities for expressive, minimal communication, in contrast to the practical, informative communication systems researched in CSCW. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 304)

The reference is a two-page technology piece but somehow the authors manage to reconstruct the formalist view of language functions: practical and poetic.

The use of text messages to send frequent trivial messages between lovels is a form of phatic appropriation of technology (Vetere, Smith and Gibbs 2009). Phatic use of technology is also evidenced in the repetitive use of social media to share mundane, everyday activities (Vetere et al. 2009). (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 304)

Wait, did Vetere discuss "appropriation"? I must go over Vetere's writings and make a more thorough comparison between Franks' ideas and those of V. Wang, who drew many fascinating avenues of research from the concept of "habituation"..

Rituals and routines are sometimes confused with one another. One primary characteristic that distinguishes rituals from routines is the present [sic] of emotions in the former. Routines are emotionless actions that do not require full attention, whereas rituals are actions that result in emotions and feelings, thus repetitive rituals may gradually become routines as they lose the emotions conveyed (Payr 2010). (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 305)

This sounds extremely insightful but also somewhat troubling, because it may turn out to be an "auxiliary hypothesis" that doesn't hold up with every use of these terms (ritual and routine). In any case I downloaded the cited paper into extra readings folder. The central issue is very similar to the diachronic dispute between Spencer and Malinowksi on the topic of feelings or sentiments.

Inspired by the ritualised aspect of phatic function of communication, we focused our design ideas on the theme of emergence of meaning through rituals by exploring the gestures of lighting up a candle in remembrance of loved ones. Symbolic use of fire was chosen because it was universal and the tradition had transmuted into different rituals throughout the ages as manifestations of varied emotional expressions. The use of fire changed humanity profoundly. It affects human emotions because it provides warmth, safety, and satiety. Therefore, it is not surprising that it is used symbolically almost universally; in religious context, to mark the celebration of public events, such as the Olympics to domestic private events of birthdays, and to make visible our thoughts and longings for lost loved ones. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 305)

How difficult it is to tap into the role of the figure of fire in phatic discourse. Two connection points that immediately come to mind are the epigraph opening The Meaning of Meaning, and the possibly etymological import of phatikos, having to do with bringing light. These may be connected to the representative anecdote of leisurely conversation around a campfire. In personal experience, it is present in Estonian mundane mythology in the form of a belief that one can garner higher truths simply by staring off into a blazing fire (cf. Jaanipäev, e.g. St. John's Day celebrations).

The three major themes, which emerged from our affinity diagram were feelings, gift-giving, and emergengy/safety. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 306)

Lexical finding: emergency and safety are useful synonyms for the two psychological states involed with the "stranger" in the aforementioned representative anecdote: a strange (unknown) man approaching a campfire of already on speaking terms people (having established a phatic communion) can view the stranger as either causing an emergency or staying within the limits of safety. The interaction contours are consequently either shaken up or remain near constant.

Most responses from the participants fall under the 'feelings' header. The gesture of lighting up a candle for symbolic meanings is a form of ritual. In Fyro, this gesture sits comfortably in the ritual of phatic communion, i.e. ritualised interactions that create social bond. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 306)

Ritualised interactions. It is still unclear whence ritualism originates or how it entered among phaticisms. Was it Firth's work, which was quoted by John Laver? Or did it come about from expanding upon Malinowski's phrase "formulae of greeting or approach"? The intuitivist explanation would be that many people view phatic exchanges as a sort of ritualistic behaviour. It may also stem from Malinowski discussing language used in ritual in the same essay. In any case, Interaction Ritual is the title of E. Goffman's 1967 book.

Creating social bonds. Here the "bond" is ambiguous, as always, because Malinowski uses it interchangeably with "ties", both descriptive of "fellowship". Note that both communion and fellowship belong to Christian terminology, which is why I've prepared a folder with some readings on communion and community.

Our results show that universal traditions laden with meanings can be used for expressive phatic interaction. This is because the participants equated Fyro usage to expression of feelings. The participants acknowledged that Fyro is a messaging system, but the message sent is the feeling of longings. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 306)

Another common but not frequently articulated undertone in phatic discourse. "Feelings of longing" are exactly what Jakobson's phatic function have to do with in the realm of poetic analysis. Notably, Jakobson did not himself employ the term "phatic function" anywhere in explicitly but did sprinkle undertones here and there. This is the case for his Polish illustrations to the use of his scheme, performed entirely upon poetic (rather than communicative) material. The phatic function was touched on at least two instances, one having to do with aesthetic attention and the other with personal sound-symbolism, which may be termed very clumsily emotive phono-semantic knots. This is the case of a poetic sound or a melody reminding you of a loved one, invoking a feeling of longingness, which is also the stuff of his "Notes on the Contours of an Ancient Japanese Poem" (1981a).

Instead of augmenting everyday objects used in daily routine with minimal communication capabilities, we have chosen to augment objects used in rituals, which stemmed from a universal tradition of symbolic use of fire. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 307)

They are, to put it bluntly, constructing phatic objects with the understanding that phaticity pertains to interaction rituals, interchanging the formulae of greeting and approach with the interactions around rituals, with man made fire at the center of its artifactual scheme. There is indeed palpable emotional symbolism in live fire but the safety concern (flammability of the prototype) beat the purpose of feeling at ease. While the person who used "phatic objects" as a name for objects constructed with a 3D printer in the process of demonstrating the machine at work viewed the outcome, the physical object, as a meaningless, perfunctiory object in the literal sense, here the sense of phaticity invoked is that pertaining to feelings and/of reciprocal expressiveness.

In retrofit phase, the participants were asked about current technologies they would use to fulfil Fyro's functions. The answers given were mobile phones and social networks. Thus, the participants viewed Fyro as belonging to the same group as these communication technologies. Perhaps this was why some participnats stated that they would use Furo during emergency or for safety, although this was not how we intended it to be used:
  • [Fyro] can be used during emergency.
  • As emergency alert or message to inform friends on Twitter.
  • To be used by older people living alone to send a message during emergency.
The participants' responses are valuable for improving Fyro design in the next iteration. (Baharin & Khalidi 2015: 306-307)

These responses are valuable indeed because they point to more intuitive and practical uses for Fyro than the very abstract feeling of longingness or sense of connection or whatever. For a future vision it even seems probable that a City and the Stars kind of A.I. would have a subroutine for automatically connecting friends and family in case of an emergency or collective threat, i.e. to let each other know that they are fine and safe, perhaps even for the very practical purpose of finding out whom the occurrence affected and how to proceed with helping the friends and family deal with it (maybe a higher dose of soma?). Yet again it feels like these people are designing technologies that may be feasible and desired in a far future. In any case, I should look into what else Hanif Baharin has published, these two papers by him here have been very insightful. // Holy shit, his Research Output is a goldmine.

Makice, Kevin 2009. Phatics and the design of community. CHI EA '09: CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 3133-3136.

Proposed thesis research uses Twitter - a young channel for phatics communication - as a catalyst to promote community awareness and strengthen connections between members. This paper examines the phatic function, or messages about the communication channel, and its growing interest in HCI research. Examples of projects are described in the context of better understanding the role phatics play in community development (Makice 2009: 3133)

One frequent problem with phatic technology studies is that their talk doesn't match their walk: the theoretical, epistemological, abstract part of the papers are all too grandiose (more general functionality that can be found or perceived in the design object is imputed onto it) and the actualy technology constructed in the empirical, ontological, concrete portion of the paper comes across as not really all that impressive. The role phatics play in the community development doesn't seem like an attainable goal when "phatics" themselves are not well defined. And vagueness, generality, and grandiosity is an inherent problem with the definitions employed in phatic technology studies, making their discussion about bettering our understanding seem much too out of place. Ritual Machines (above) is a perfect illustration: the theoretical discussion is beautifully executed but the actual performance of the experiment a clear failure. So, how should one overcome this disconnect?

Using the microblogging service Twitter as an exemplar, this research seeks to show that awareness within a community is positively associated with use of the phatic function of communication - a sort of linguistic ping that serves to maintain connection to others. Leveraging phatics in the design of physical spaces and online resources can strengthen communities. (Makice 2009: 3133)

Awareness of what? The community's self-awareness about itself? What aspect of itself? "Pinging" usually (in network terms) checks the connection, whether data can be sent and retrieved. So these are still channel operations - checking and maintaining the channel, here replaced with connection, presumably of some psychological variety. So, still, awareness of what? Awareness of whether messages can be transmitted? Whether it is possible to communicate? The bare bones of contact?

The earliest wave of research on Internet community not only distinguished between strong and weak ties but also made the latter subordinate. Relationships mediated through a computer were presumed to be inherently limited and could never gain the intimacy or value of face-to-face connection. (Makice 2009: 3134)

The implications of "intimacy" and "value" are interesting. They're very sophisticated synonyms for "expressive" and "practical". Almost as if they're the female and male orientations, aesthetic and ethical, emotive and conative. But when attempting to collapse referential and conative both under "value", it strikes immediately that intimacy also has value or is a value.

Mediated relationships are indeed inherently limited due to channel reduction but I guess it can have other "affordances". In this light the Malinowskian negation of feelings comes across as especially conflicting because of the pejorative use of "phatic" - it is both defined and understood as "limited" in some sense or other (most often in terms of "information content").

Because of their disposable nature, Twitter messages continually re-establish weak-tie connections without a commitment to a deeper interaction. This increases opportunity for a wider network of strong-tie connections to grow. (Makice 2009: 3134)

Here I would gather that there are two types of commitments: disposable and deeper. The interesting part is that in the energetic perspective some see "exchanging information" as a commitment because it may fatigue and others see "small talk" as a commitment because it is perfunctory. The weak and strong tie connection reminds me of the idea to incorporate Ruesch's discussion of popularity vs friendship systems more heavily in the future in relation with the nature of the relationship, particularly psychological connection and pseudo-phatic goals, which may involve persuasion, marketing or violence in the conative dimension, affiliation, sociability, and belongingness in the emotive dimension, and empistemological emotions, altruistic informing, and news exchange in the referential dimension.

Public display of this kind of communication further lowers barriers to individual engagement by allowing community members to understand the current state of others. Installation of public Twitter display shave shown positive effects on community awareness, leading to greater participation and empathy. (Makice 2009: 3134)

This kind of gauging the social milieu can actually serve a political or ethical subfunction: using small talk to figure out how people lean politically, what do they think of the state of affairs, what attitudes do they foster towards the social state, etc. These would be the so-called "moral sentiments".

In 1960, linguist Roman Jakobson derived six functions of language from how the message operates on each aspect of communication: context, sender, receiver, channel, common code, and the message itself. Much of the emphasis in ICT development is placed on the quality of the information (referential and metalingual functions) or identity (emotive, conative, and poetic functions). (Makice 2009: 3134)

This insightful in two regards. First, it is indeed the case that the metalingual function is a variant of referential function, i.e. referring to elements of the code. But so is poetic and phatic, in case of one the message refers to elements of the code but not in order to inform the receiver of the intended meaning of said element but in an "unsaying" or not-so-explicit way inform the receiver that the construction of the message itself is the relevant factor, and is thus meant for aesthetic enjoyment, and in the case of the other the message refers to the fact of communication (the "bare bones", the existence and working condition of communication infrastructure) in order to accomplish some communicative goal, either to "establish, extend or terminate" (ibid.) contact. And secondly, the "identity" is insightful because the first three functions indeed refer, according to Bühler's organon-model, and possibly Aristotle, to first, second, and third persons, specifying the identity or addressivity of the receiver. There is only the slight error in the poetic function included in this set, as it should be it, the third person or external object referred to, that fulfils the third, transactional, aspect of identity.

Often considered by developers to be noise, disposable or even unnecessary, phatics are about seeking connection with another person, either by requesting interaction or confirming active presence. Phatics are known to act ceremoniously, build solidarity, and convey a willingness to engage. Engagement is important when fostering community awareness because active learners are more accepting of new information than passive ones. If the goal of a community developer is to increase local awareness, then phatic functions must be part of the dynamic. (Makice 2009: 3134)

Psychological connection once again left undefined, or defined by association with synonyms (e.g. solidarity). Engagement here once again calls Spencer's social progress to mind. His point about activity was wholly different, though, because he had his own theory of mental energy, and thus viewed it in a wholly different perspective. Whereas here emotions are conceptualized positively, as something that unite people, foster feelings of togetherness, etc. Spencer viewed emotions in terms of impulsiveness, and was rather concerned with the possibility of social union to impose checks on impulsiveness, especially such basic stuff as hysteria and violence, which appeared to be more common problems a century and a half ago but are still known in the modern world. I think a short history of the change of attitudes towards emotions as such could be written on this topic alone, though much more historical context would be necessary.

As a channel for communicating the important, disposable information about individuals in a group, Twitter is inherently phatic in nature. At the heart of any post is the Are-you-there Here-I-am mission of the phatic function. My initial investigations revolve around two main endeavors involving Twitter as a platform: Twitterspaces, and stream analysis. (Makice 2009: 315)

Giving the impression that the phatic function is that of geolocation. I'm most sure I've seen this phraseology before in a textbook of some sort but can't put my finger on it. Effectively, this is "pinging", figuring out the system of communication. Feedback? In any case, this is pretty much at the core of Vincent Miller's critique of "phatic social media": it's all about letting people that you exist (look at how sads I am). The original Mowrer situation doesn't really apply very well, because you can't say "Don't go" via social media - people live there, there's nowhere to go, only temporal away periods.

One of the main characteristics of the Twitter system is the ability for each individual to craft a personal information stream (PInS) composed of self-selected content published by other authors. Current tools make use of available data to describe individuals or derive trends from collective content, but rarely do they describe the compiled stream - the best reflection of an individual user experience with the system. (Makice 2009: 3135)

This blog is also a personal information stream composed of selected quotes from others. The problem I have with collective content of this kind on social media is that the individual bits of information are not indexed or fixed. You can't cite a tweet like you can a page in a book and I'm not even sure if tweets have stable URLs. It makes navigating the twittersphere difficult if your intentions are information oriented.

Human-computer interaction continues to move from a context of individuals and objects into a space of sociability and system complexity. (Makice 2009: 3135)

Phraseological gem. Phatic space + phatic systems. Also manifest in the aspect of diffusion: the indirect radius of communication has broadened from the physical travel of a material text to the global dissemination and constricted temporally to near instantaneousness. The nature of sociability is changing as the campfire tradition recedes and alters its functions.

People crave connection. We are hard-wired for it. (Makice 2009: 3136)

[citation needed] - this is actually the troubling portion of Malinowski's allusions to sociology. I can't shake the feeling that he relegates "the herd-instinct" to a footnote because he's negating Durkheim, Simmel, and possibly others who may have something relevant to say about the topic and could give broader context to how we are hard-wired for craving connection.

In the same way early HCI research leveraged what we knew about cognitive processes to design interaction in ICT, so too can we learn from our understanding of the continuous cycle of disconnection and reconnection that characterizes human interaction. Failure to recognize the role phatic communication plays in this dance leads to user frustration and incomplete tools. (Makice 2009: 3136)

Does one a play role in a dance? A lexical oddity and a phraseological gem: the continuous cycle of disconnection and reconnection draws out the contours of human interaction and reveal the necessity of the psychological margins of interaction. This may sound poetic but I've yet to figure out how to leverage John Laver's unique maljak-ian and Goffmanian take against the more poetic Jakobsonian communication radius and varieties of contours. What is really the beauty in running away from your fiancee at the altar? - "[a] message of the variety I will not see you again" (Jakobson 1964e: 14).

Using Twitter as an exemplar, my research will continue to examine phatics in the context of strengthening community. Outcomes will be directed toward the general application of relational-cultural theory, to critique the interface design of sociable features in systems. (Makice 2009: 3136)

More on phatic systems, which basically are the sociable features of systems. But this broad of a definition can cover everything from the green-or-red light on a medical cabinet door to the role of the person greeting, checking passes or handling clothes in the entrance of an event or establishment to the human-computer interaction affordances of a digital society.

"Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) is rooted in the groundbreaking work of Jean Baker Miller ["a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, social activist, feminist, and author"], who proposed a new understanding of human development in her book Toward a New Psychology of Women (Miller, 1976). In 1978, Jean Baker Miller, a psychoanalyst [...] began meeting informally to re-examine developmental psychology and clinical practice [...] Their twice-a-month meetings were the beginning of a collaborative theory-building group that led to the birth of a revolutionary approach to understanding psychological development." - If it's a feminist social activist re-examination of psychology then you can bet that it's revolutionary.

Wadley, Greg; Frank Vetere, Lars Kulik, Liza Hopkins and Julie Green 2013. Mobile ambient presence. OzCHI '13: Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration. New York: ACM, 167-170.

A number of ambient technologies have been devised which convey social presence by transmitting awareness cues about the distant other. For example Gaver (2002) designed awareness technologies that used 'poetic' hardware design and the senses of touch and smell, and Dey and de Guzman (2006) augmented household objects to respond to the activity of remote family members. Related to this approach is 'phatic' technology, which is intended not to transfer information but to establish and maintain human relationships (Vetere et al., 2009). (Wadley et al. 2013: 167)

There's a major contradiction here. If phatic technologies are intended not to transfer information then transmitting cue, a signal, isn't phatic because it still transmits some information. This is the epistemological consequence of dismissing the etymology of phatic and instead of viewing it as linguistic communion you take it to mean communion by any means other than linguistic.

Technologies such as the 'Virtual Intimate Object' (Kaye 2006) support non-intrusive social connection through the exchange of low-bandwidth messages which convey simply that one user is thinking of another. (Wadley et al. 2013: 167)

In the meantime I have invented a new term, symphatic, which, unlike emphatic messages, convey a message and in a metacommunicative sense "instruct" the receiver about its importance, perform a "low-bandwith" operation of reminding of presence. I have a real-life example to boot. Imagine yourself typing away at your laptop when you suddenly feel some fingers on your side. Unbeknownst to you, your significant one has crept up to you and tickled you. When realizing this, you ask: "What are you doing?" and the answer is, of course, "Nothing," uttered in a sweet and clever tone. It is not emphatic because it does not make a point, and it is also not stricty phatic because it doesn't perform the social and channel operations commonly ascribed to phatic communion and function. It's not even phatic communication sensu La Barre because it's not vocal. Instead, it is symphatic, which I take as descriptive of this narrow, unique sense in which phaticity is meant in these phatic technology studies.

Thus we propose that a phone or tablet can be a personal ambient display that supports social connection by transmitting cues about activity and enabling lightweight phatic communication. Our formulation of 'mobile ambient presence' (MAP) is similar in spirit to the wearable presence devices of Williams et al. (2006), but implemented on standard consumer hardware, which is more likely to yield a widely accessible technology. (Wadley et al. 2013: 167)

It is a curious shift from speech as a mode of action to technologies that transmit cues about activity. And phatic communion is "lightweight" (in Malinowski's terms, "aimless") by definition.

However parents, while they initially expressed interest in the technology, turned out to have different requirements. They were under stress, needing to manage the child's stay in hospital on top of existing commitments. Short bursts of information-rich communication were better suited to them, with voice the preferred modality. It was in the classroom and the hospital that ambient presence was perceived as most useful in this trial. (Wadley et al. 2013: 169)

My use of "emphatic" above pertains equally to the level of intent (the importance of the message) as well as information content. Being emphatic in this sense amounts to emphatically insisting on the importance of a specific point of information.

Few technologies embodying ambient presence principles have become mass-market technologies. Traditional consumer ICTs such as the desktop PC have typically been designed for focal use and have not offered sufficiently rich I/O to detect and convey ambient presence. (Wadley et al. 2013: 169)

I guessed as much from not being able to name any on the market and from the quite frankly outlandishly "first world" feel to some new designs.

Cui, Yanqing; Jari Kangas, Jukka Holm and Guido Grassel 2013. Front-camera video recordings as emotion responses to mobile photos shared within close-knit groups. CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 981-990.

The study's results support the value of using front-camera video recordings to glean emotion response. It supports lightweight phatic social interactions not possible with comments and "Like" buttons. Most users kept sharing emotion responses throughout the study. They typically shared the responses right after they saw a just-taken photo received from a remote partner. (Cui et al. 2013: 981)

Adding to the necessity for a term like "symphatic" - there are more "lighweight" form of communization than most means of communication technologies allow for. Though on the latter point I'm not sure how more lightweight interactions are "not possible" on technologies with more affordances.

Video is a good medium for delivery of emotion responses. Some previous studies position video as a means to convey rich information. Peole use them mainly for communicating within strong-tie relationships on special occasions. Departing from previous work, we designed emotion response for phatic communications. Its purpose is to reach a social goal, rather than convey information as seen in previous work to do with video communications. (Cui et al. 2013: 981)

Unlike some dystopian movies, which imagine the future as a constant barrage of video calls, presently it is indeed more reserved for very personal interactions and sees infrequent use. It might be because the technology is not yet as ubiquitous as it might seem (setting up a webcam is somewhat tedious, internet connection might be sub par, etc.) and it might also be because people aren't always willing to "put on a face" just to have a casual chat.

Users had limited options for framing, because of the narrow view of the front camera. This explains why the user's face occupies large parts of the frame in a typical recording. While most users managed well with this, three were not comfortable in showing their "big face." One user (Jari) always avoided sharing videos featuring his face, and two other users (Mia and Alex) seldom shared emotion responses in the study. (Cui et al. 2013: 986)

Yup. It might be Estonian/Finnish aloofness, but I, too, seldom photograph my own face. Some people are not photogenic and know it.

G2 [Group 2] consisted of loosely connected friends. The members met each other at various parties and game sessions. They did not yet desire a sense of constantly being together. Emotion responses had potential to bring the group closer over time. (Cui et al. 2013: 988)

Yet. Are friends supposed to desire constant togetherness?

Emotion response, as in this study, is aimed at lightweight phatic social interaction similar to everyday greetings and small talk that include but do not focus on information exchange. (Cui et al. 2013: 989)

These guys get it! Information content is not an absolute or ultimate condition for phatic communion.

Kim, Chang Won and Tek-Jin Nam 2009. Talkative cushion: a phatic audio device to support family communication. CHI EA '09: CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2631-2634.

The 'Talkative Cushion' is a novel audio recorder which transforms recorded voices into humorous and ludicrous sounds. It is proposed as a phatic device for homes. It is designed to make people playful and funny when communicating in homes because a delightful situation makes people active to talk. In this paper, we describe why and how a cushion is selected as our target object and how the concept of phatic technologies applied to the cushion. (Kim & Nam 2009: 2631)

"Ludicrous" contains the stem ludus, making it "playful". The phraseology about delightfulness and talkativeness is formulated as clumsily as the "creates a space for violence to happen" parodied on The Simpsons but the point is valid. People are more gregarious when they feel at ease. The concept of phatic technologies is what I'm reviewing.

This project aims to improve intimacy and social bonds for families by designig of a new phatic product in domestic environments. (Kim & Nam 2009: 2632)

This usage sounds very much like the pejorative one by Stenström, who mentions a "phatic microphone" by which she meant a microphone that would go unnoticed, as her conception of phaticity was that of meaningless parts of speech.

Usage Scenario: There is an idle 'Talkative Cushion' on the sofa in the empty living room. Tom is coming home after school and sitting on the sofa. He leans back in the 'Talkative Cushion' and then some funny sounds come out. The recorded sounds are greetings from his father who is too busy to see his son often. After listening to the sounds over and over again by pressing the cushion, Tom speaks about his recent school life and worries to all family members. His father goes to the 'Talkative Cushion' to listen to the reply from his son. (Kim & Nam 2009: 2633)

This is what I meant by some of these designs being painfully "first world" objects: you have to be pretty bored and comfortable to come up with sound-recording cushions. Also, isn't talking about "school life and worries" the exact thing children detest about parents because they always keep asking?