How much of your day is consumed with the likes of Facebook or Twitter? Initially, these social networking sites were the kind of thing that I would instantly baulk at and was always on hand to castigate any ‘real’ friend of mine for wasting their time taking ridiculous quizzes (‘Are You Clinically Insane?’ – I’m a sociopath apparently) and recklessly adding school friends who were never really friends in the first place.

Fast forward two years and I have found myself in a race with someone to the first 300 friends, once spent a whopping eight hours in one evening chatting to the same person on the Facebook chat facility, and find myself considering every move in terms of a Facebook status update (e.g. ‘Colm is going to stand up in a minute’; ‘Colm is against poverty’), Facebook and Twitter may position themselves at the forefront of modern communication, but is this really communication?

The Facebook status update and, by proxy, Twitter, are prime examples of phatic. Phatic communication has been described as language that serves to “establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information,” or language used “for establishing an atmosphere rather than for exchanging information or ideas.”  So, in short, the next time you are at the opening of an exhibition or some dreary launch and you are cornered by some over-exuberant schmoozer, bear in mind that they are not really communicating with you, they are simply establishing an atmosphere for their own benefit – phatic.

The term phatic was coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s and comes from the Ancient Greek φατός (fatos) ‘spoken’, from φάναι (fanai) ‘to say’. Other terms for these types of expressions include small talk and grooming talk – one theory is that humans developed phatic language to replace grooming, an activity that takes up quite a lot of time for our ape relatives and ancestors.
And this is where Facebook and Twitter come in; the sheer ubiquity of a status update, telling the ‘public’ what one is thinking, doing or about to do right now, signify an almost Derridean descent into the death of language.

What does phatic language itself represent? The constant usage of phatic in terms of status updates does represent a dialogue being entered into, but it results in a parallel discourse as opposed to real discourse. Essentially, people are talking at one another, or an ill-defined notion of the ‘public’. It was Soren Kierkegaard who maintained that the public is people in general, but no one in particular. It is the thing that has the majority interest, the received wisdom, the widespread urge. It is a major force in our lives and thoughts, but no one is it. You can’t pick out a single person and say that they are the public.

Heidegger took this one step further. His big idea was to say that Das Man (the ‘public’) is actually who we are most of the time. Most of us are so “lost” in Das Man that we are completely oblivious to it. We flee ourselves, says Heidegger, by hiding in Das Man. Mostly we hide from Death, but it also relieves us of the burden of real discourse, turning it into what Heidegger called idle chatter — faceless, buzzing talk that focuses on reaching a consensus that is uttely meaningless.

So, is this idle chatter the way of the future? Nietzsche once said ‘soon everyone will learn to read and write, and that will be the death of language’. Is his prophecy coming true? Perhaps but I have no more time to ponder this, I no longer know I am doing until my status update informs me accordingly and Facebook is calling. ‘Colm is bemoaning the death of language’; ‘Colm will never succumb to phatic’, etc. etc

Colm McAuliffe