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Senft also emphasizes the difference between ‘communion’ and ‘communication’. 

Malinowski never used the term phatic ‘communication’, and for a reason: 

‘communion’ stresses (a) the ritual aspects of phatic phenomena, and (b) the fact 

that through phatic communion, people express their sense of ‘union’ with a 

community. We will come back to this later on.  

When it came to explaining the phenomenon, Malinowski saw the fear of silence, 

understood as an embarrassing situation in interaction among Trobriand 

Islanders, as the motive underlying the frequency of phatic communion. In order 

not to appear grumpy or taciturn to the interlocutor, Trobrianders engaged in 

sometimes lengthy exchanges of ‘irrelevant’ talk. While Malinowski saw this 

horror vacui as possibly universal, Dell Hymes cautioned against such an 

interpretation and suggested that “the distribution of required and preferred 

silence, indeed, perhaps most immediately reveals in outline form a community’s 

structure of speaking” (Hymes 1972 (1986): 40; see Senft 1995: 4-5 for a 

discussion). There are indeed communities where, unless one has anything 

substantial to say, silence is strongly preferred over small talk and ‘phatic 

communion’ would consequently be experienced as an unwelcome violation of 

social custom. This is clearly not the case in the internet communities explored 

by Vincent Miller, where ‘small’ and ‘content-free’ talk appears to be if not the 

rule, then certainly a very well entrenched mode of interaction.  

This, perhaps, compels us to take ‘phatic’ talk seriously, given that it is so hard to 

avoid as a phenomenon in e.g. social media. And this, then, would be a correction 

to a deeply ingrained linguistic and sociolinguistic mindset, in which ‘small talk’ 

– the term itself announces it – is perceived as not really important and not really 

in need of much in-depth exploration.  

Schegloff’s (1972; Schegloff & Sacks 1973) early papers on conversational 

openings and closings described these often routinized sequences as a 

mechanism in which speaker and hearer roles were established and confirmed. 

This early interpretation shows affinity with Malinowski’s ‘phatic communion’ – 

the concern with the ‘channel’ of communication – as well as with Erving 

Goffman’s (1967) concept of ‘interaction ritual’ in which people follow 

particular, relatively perduring templates that safeguard ‘order’ in face-to-face 

interaction. In an influential later paper, however, Schegloff (1988) rejected 

Goffman’s attention to ‘ritual’ and ‘face’ as instances of ‘psychology’ (in fact, as 

too much interested in the meaning of interaction), and reduced the Goffmanian 

rituals to a more ‘secularized’ study of interaction as a formal ‘syntax’ in which 

human intentions and subjectivities did not matter too much. The question of 

what people seek to achieve by means of ‘small talk’, consequently, led a life on 

the afterburner of academic attention since then – when it occurred it was often 

labelled as ‘mundane’ talk, that is: talk that demands not to be seen as full of 

substance and meaning, but can be analyzed merely as an instance of the 

universal formal mechanisms of human conversation (Briggs 1997 provides a 

powerful critique of this). Evidently, when the formal patterns of phatic 

communion are the sole locus of interest, not much is left to be said on the topic.  

As mentioned, the perceived plenitude of phatic communion on the internet 

pushes us towards attention to such ‘communication without content’. In what 

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follows, we will engage with this topic and focus on a now-current internet 

phenomenon: memes. Memes will be introduced in the next section, and we shall 

focus on (a) the notion of ‘viral spread’ in relation to agentivity and 

consciousness, and (b) the ways in which we can see ‘memes’, along with 

perhaps many of the phenomena described by Miller, as forms of conviviality. In 

a concluding section, we will identify some perhaps important implications of 

this view. 

Going viral 

On January 21, 2012 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an update on his 

Facebook timeline, introduced by “Here’s some interesting weekend reading” 

(Figure 1). The message itself was 161 words long, and it led to a link to a 2000-

word article. Within 55 seconds of being posted, the update got 932 “likes” and 

was “shared” 30 times by other Facebook users. After two minutes, the update 

had accumulated 3,101 “likes” and 232 “shares”. 

 

 

Figure 1: Screenshot of Zuckerberg’s status update on Facebook, January 2012. 

 

Given the structure and size of the text sent around by Zuckerberg, it is quite 

implausible that within the first two minutes or so, more than 3,000 people had 

already read Zuckerberg’s update and the article which it provides a link to, 

deliberated on its contents and judged it ‘likeable’, and the same goes for the 

more than 200 times that the post had already been shared on other users’ 

timelines. So what is happening here? 

Some of the uptake can probably be explained with ‘firsting’, i.e. the 

preoccupation to be the first to comment on or like an update on social media – 

most clearly visible in the form of comments simply stating “first!”. Another 

major explanation could be ‘astroturfing’: it is plausible that many of those who 

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