Yawn Ball: The Game & The fragility of phatic communication.
Hello friends!
Among the hundreds, nay thousands, of terrible things men do on dating apps, is the strangely common proclamation of hating small talk. The worst of them insist that they’d prefer to immediately engage in the nebulous and vaguely terrifying activity of “deep talks”, which I think is bro-speak for “having an actual conversation” but could very well also be you burying me alive while crying about your shitty dad. Making hating small talk part of your personality leads me to believe that A) you don’t and won’t give a shit about making me or anyone else feel comfortable and B) you would likely ghost if I obliged and instantly began talking about my family’s history of cancer instead of asking how you’re doing today. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT CURTIS??? IS IT??
What I’m trying to say is that “hating small talk” is insane. It’s so baked into how we communicate that it doesn’t make sense to have an opinion about whether it’s good or bad. It’d be like hating eating. Sure, you can find it occasionally inconvenient, but ultimately you need to do it in order to do anything else. Another word for small talk is phatic communication or communion, or the phatic, if you’re nasty. Phatic communication refers to all types of communication that serve a social function more than it conveys information. From an abstract of an article I didn’t read: "Phaticity is a multidimensional potential for talk in many social settings, where speakers' relational goals supercede their commitment to factuality and instrumentality". Things like commenting on the weather, social media likes, the whole hihihowareyou?goodyou?goodthanks back and forth and letter/email sign-offs are examples of the phatic. It’s essentially all the stuff we say to seem normal in a ~ SoCiEtY ~ , which may seem pointless (what even is normal when everything is on fire and all the houses cost a billion dollars?), but really, what phatics do is play an essential role in setting the stage for actual exchanges of information and relationships. Basically, you need to do some level of small talk to convey to the other person that you’re open to talking at all (hear that, Curtis??). In this way, phatic communication is actually really exciting: at any moment, small talk can shed its strict utility and transform into meaningful connection.
It’s also kind of magical that, most of the time, we are able to partake in this mass call and response routine with everyone we meet. In episode 46 of the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosts Gretchen and Lauren compare the phatic to a ritual or a dance where everyone is supposed to know their parts and act them out accordingly. But what if you don’t dance the dance or follow the common social script? For example, “how are you?” could be both phatic and un-phatic, depending on the culture and relationship of the speakers. If they are both intending to do the usual exchange and quickly get on with their days, everything will go as phatically planned. However, if the asker means it in a phatic sense and the answerer goes into detail about their current feelings, the whole dynamic radically changes.
The fragility of phatic communication reminds me of a game I made up some time in 2020. It’s called Yawn Ball and, despite being nearly impossible to play, it’s my single greatest creative achievement. The point of Yawn Ball is to pass a yawn around like a ball. In theory, It should work since there are no clear limits on a yawn’s contagion. In practice though, yelling “yawn ball!” at someone while they’re yawning makes neither party want to yawn anymore. I think to effectively play the game, you’d need to get a bunch of sleepy people in a room and position them in such a way that they can only see one person at a time. Then, when someone catches a yawn, they can quickly turn to a new person who will catch it from them and so on. There might need to be a lighting technician controlling a spotlight in order to really keep it to one at a time. The darkness would also keep the other players sleepy while they waited their turn, so in the end, I think you’d really get your money’s worth on the theatre rental and technician fees. Phatic communication is similar to Yawn Ball because thinking too hard about it suddenly makes it go away. Yawns and the phatic are both delicate instances that require us to move through motions almost on autopilot or we risk losing out on potential satisfaction.
The other thing I like about phatic communication is that it seems to be simultaneously similar and opposite to high involvement overlapping speech (if you’re new here, that is the topic of my project). What I’m imagining is phatic communication and high-involvement communication at 2 ends of a spectrum that is horseshoe theory-ing. While both are a kind of rhythmic dance we do with communication, phatics are used to establish ourselves in relation to the other, as in a separation, whereas cooperative overlapping is used to close up any preconceived distance and weave narratives together. In both instances, participants have to mutually occupy a cooperative talk space where they have an implicit understanding of the boundaries and synchronicities of said space. This is admittedly a rather shallow assessment since you can have a very empty high involvement conversation and phatic communication could occur without you even realizing it. However, I think it’s neat that there are aspects of speech that inherently require participants to be in synch and somewhat predictable, considering how much time we spend feeling misunderstood, unheard, or let down by a response.
Please try Yawn Ball with your friends and family this weekend and report back to me about how it goes. I think it could be the next big thing. If you find yourself unable to yawn, you could also try my second greatest creative achievement, a game called, “Who Shit On The Floor?” To play, all the players must try to convince each other that they were NOT the person who shit on the floor. The main thing about this game is that it relies on everyone believing there is a human shit on the floor. It’s difficult because the more you say you didn’t do it, the more it sounds like you did.
Happy game night everyone!
*lightly slaps your butt as you leave for work in the morning*
P.S. No newsletter next week because I am doing an X-Camera talk instead. Come to it if you can! 🙂