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focus is lifted, each participant can return to an entirely different set of 

alignments based on entirely different features. Imagine, just for fun, that when 

the managers in Figure 4 end their meeting and walk off, the young man in the 

picture asks the blonde woman whether she would be interested in going to a 

Dire Straits concert together – he can get tickets; an entirely new set of features 

would become the stuff for coagulation at that point. And if they get to that 

concert, entirely different features of their identities will enable them to focus on 

the event, and will contribute to, again, a colossal robustness as a group. They 

will cheer simultaneously with thousands of other people, and they will even 

sing “Sultans of Swing” along with, and in precisely the same beat as thousands 

of people otherwise entirely unknown to them. All of these features were already 

present around the meeting table in Figure 4. 

Contrary to Goffman, thus, we see no reason why we should consider such 

focused-but-diverse groups to be fundamentally different from (or for that 

matter, inferior to) “thick” (Durkheimian) communities such as, for instance, 

“nations”, “ethnicities”, “religious communities” or what not. In the kind of 

empirical heuristics we try to develop here, focusing around such ‘big’ and ‘thick’ 

identity elements is not necessarily more frequently or more intensely done than 

focusing around mundane events (such as train delays or a Dire Straits concert). 

We are not saying that features such as nationality or ethnicity are absent when 

people start chatting on a railway platform; we say, however, that they do not 

provide the triggers for focusing as a group at that moment, and that it is good to 

take that empirical point de repère seriously in our analyses of contemporary 

identities. Other features of identity can become relevant in the eyes of 

bystanders or after the fact – imagine two young people falling in love with each 

other and starting a relationship, which turns out to be solid gossip material for 

others because both are active politicians attached to parties that are otherwise 

each other’s ideological adversaries. As we emphasized, the diversity 

characterizing the group does not disappear during moments of intense 

focusing; it remains a potential for multiple readings and interpretations that can 

be exploited at any point by anyone who can recognize the relevant features. 

Refocusing by others – here is the crucial aspect of uptake and ratification again 

– is also perpetually possible. 

If we now briefly return to the consumption culture we used as our point of 

departure here, we see how multiple “light” groups are continuously formed 

around shared aspects of individual life projects. All BMW drivers, in spite of 

enormous and fundamental differences between them, share a potential focus 

with each other: the brand of their cars. If they do not do this focusing 

themselves, others can (“oh hell, there’s another arrogant BMW driver!!”). People 

sharing a preference for particular brands can find each other, even during very 

short moments, in very focused “brand fan” groups on social media. The “like” 

button on Facebook is that medium’s sublime instrument for brief moments of 

focusing, in which people otherwise unrelated or unconnected can find 

themselves liking, at the same time and in the same space, the latest iPhone type 

or the new album of Shakira for instance. 

It is not likely that we will understand, and be able to realistically generalize, 

contemporary “identity” unless we take into account these complex, ephemeral, 

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layered, dynamic and unstable patterns of identity construction, identity 

ratification and group formation. Even more: we risk not understanding it at all 

when we fail to address patterns of identity processes that dominate enormous 

segments of our lives and are, empirically, clearly objects of intense concern for 

enormous numbers of people, who invest amazing amounts of resources and 

energy into them. Social and cultural phenomena should not be too quickly 

dismissed as irrelevant because they do not appear on our theoretical and 

analytical radars at present; if they occur and prove to be of significance in the 

social and cultural life of people, we at least need to examine them critically. 

 

References 

Barthes, Roland (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. 

Becker, Howard (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. (New 

York: The Free Press, 1963) 

Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis (2011) Enough is enough: The heuristics of 

authenticity in superdiversity. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 2. 

Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis (2012) Culture as accent. Tilburg Papers in Culture 

Studies 18. 

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 

Foucault, Michel (2007) Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave 

Goffman, Erving (1961) Encounters. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. 

Marcuse, Herbert (1964 [1991]) One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge 

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Chapter 5: 

Conviviality and collectives on social media: 

Virality, memes and new social structures 

 

Introduction 

In a very insightful and relatively early paper on the phenomenon, Vincent Miller 

(2008) questions the ‘content’ of communication on social media and microblogs 

(Facebook and Twitter, respectively), and concludes: 

“We are seeing how in many ways the internet has become as much about 

interaction with others as it has about accessing information. (…) In the 

drift from blogging, to social networking, to microblogging we see a shift 

from dialogue and communication between actors in a network, where 

the point of the network was to facilitate an exchange of substantive 

content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network itself has 

become the primary focus. (…) This has resulted in a rise of what I have 

called ‘phatic media’ in which communication without content has taken 

precedence.” (Miller 2008: 398) 

Miller sees the avalanche of ‘empty’ messages on new social media as an 

illustration of the ‘postsocial’ society in which networks rather than (traditional, 

organic) communities are the central fora for establishing social ties between 

people. The messages are ‘empty’ in the sense that no perceptibly ‘relevant 

content’ is being communicated; thus, such messages are typologically germane 

to the kind of ‘small talk’ which Bronislaw Malinowski (1923 (1936)) identified 

as ‘phatic communion’ and described as follows: 

“’phatic communion’ serves to establish bonds of personal union between 

people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not 

serve any purpose of communicating ideas.” (Malinowski 1923 (1936): 

316) 

For Malinowski, phatic communion was a key argument for his view that 

language should not just be seen as a carrier of propositional contents 

(“communicating ideas” in the fragment above), but as a mode of social action the 

scope of which should not be reduced to ‘meaning’ in the denotational sense of 

the term. In an excellent paper on the history of the term ‘phatic communion’, 

Gunter Senft notes the post-hoc reinterpretation of the term by Jakobson (1960) 

as ‘channel-oriented’ interaction, and describes phatic communion as  

“utterances that are said to have exclusively social, bonding functions like 

establishing and maintaining a friendly and harmonious atmosphere in 

interpersonal relations, especially during the opening and closing stages 

of social – verbal – encounters. These utterances are understood as a 

means for keeping the communication channels open.” (Senft 1995: 3) 

 

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