Available via license: CC BY 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
31
Conviviality and collectives on
social media: Virality, memes, and
new social structures
Piia Varis
Tilburg University
Jan Blommaert
Tilburg University and Ghent University
Abstract
There is a long tradition in which ‘phatic’ forms of interaction are seen as (and
characterized by) relatively low levels of ‘information’ and ‘meaning’. Yet, observations
on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such phatic
interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori determination
of the meaning. We address the issue of ‘virality’ in this paper: the astonishing speed
and scope with which often ‘empty’ (i.e. not a priori determined) signs circulate online.
We address ‘memes’—signs that have gone viral on the internet—as cases in point.
Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises specific issues about signs, meanings,
and functions, prompting a shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘effect’. This effect, we can see,
is conviviality: the production of a social-structuring level of engagement in loose,
temporal, and elastic collectives operating in social media environments.
Keywords: phatic communion; social media; virality; memes; meaning; function;
community; identity
1. 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
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):31-45
32 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
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)
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
social media, for example. 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 not always
perceived as really important or in need
of much in-depth exploration.
33
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
Schegloff ’s (1972; Schegloff
and 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 communicationas 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.
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 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
important implications of this view.
2. GOING VIRAL
On January 21, 2012 Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg posted an update
on his Facebook profile, 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’.
Given the structure and size of the
text posted 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
‘like’ and ‘share’ Zuckerberg’s update are
in fact Facebook employees deliberately
attempting to increase its visibility. We can
guess, but we simply do not know. What
we do know for sure, however, is that as
a consequence of a first level of uptake—
people liking and sharing the post—there
34 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
are further and further levels of uptake, as
other users witness this liking and sharing
activity (some of it may already be showing
in the figures here), and consequently
make inferences about the meaning of the
post itself, but also about the person(s) in
their network who reacted to it. Further
layers of contextualisation are thus added
to the original post, which may have an
influence on the uptake by others.
Different social media platforms
offer similar activity types: YouTube
users can ‘view’ videos and ‘like’
or ‘dislike’ them, as well as adding
‘comments’ to them and adding videos
to a profile list of preferences; Twitter
users can create ‘hashtags’ and ‘retweet’
tweets from within their network; similar
operations are possible on Instagram as
well as on most local or regional social
media platforms available throughout
the world. Each time, we see that specific
activities are made available for the
rapid ‘viral’ spread of particular signs,
while the actual content or formal
properties of those signs do not seem
to prevail as criteria for sharing, at
least not when these properties are
understood as denotational-semantic or
aesthetic in the Kantian sense. We shall
elaborate this below. The ace of virality
after the first decade of the 21st century
is undoubtedly the South-Korean music
video called Gangnam Style, performed
by an artist called Psy: Gangnam Style
was posted on YouTube on 15 July, 2012,
and had been viewed 2,345475395 times
on 30 May, 2015. Professional as well as
lay observers appear to agree that the
phenomenal virality of Gangnam Style
was not due to the intrinsic qualities,
musical, choreographic or otherwise,
of the video. The hype was driven by
entirely different forces.
The point to all of this, however, is that
we see a communicative phenomenon of
Figure 1: Screenshot of Zuckerberg’s status update on Facebook, January 21, 2012
35
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
astonishing speed and scope: large numbers
of people react on a message by expressing
their ‘liking’ and by judging it relevant
enough to share it with their ‘friends’
within their social media community. At
the same time, in spite of Zuckerberg’s
message being textual, it was not read
in the common sense understanding
of this term. The ‘like’ and ‘share’
reactions, consequently, refer to another
kind of decoding and understanding
than the ones we conventionally use in
text and discourse analysis—‘meaning’
as an outcome of denotational-textual
decoding is not at stake here, and so
the ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ is best seen as
‘phatic’ in the sense of the terms discussed
above. Yet, these phatic activities appear
to have extraordinary importance for
those who perform them, as ‘firsting’ and
‘astroturfing’ practices illustrate: people
on social media find it very important
to be involved in ‘virality’. People find
it important to be part of a group that
‘likes’ and ‘shares’ items posted by others.
It is impossible to know—certainly in the
case of Zuckerberg—who the members
of this group effectively are (this is the
problem of scope, and we shall return
to it), but this ignorance of identities of
group members does seem to matter
less than the expression of membership
by means of phatic ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.
What happens here is ‘communion’
in the sense of Malinowski: identity
statements expressing, pragmatically
and metapragmatically, membership of
some group. Such groups are not held
together by high levels of awareness and
knowledge of deeply shared values and
functions—the classical community of
Parsonian sociology—but by loose bonds
of shared, even if superficial interest or
‘ambient affiliation’ in Zappavigna’s terms
(2011: 801), enabled by technological
features of social media affording forms
of searchability and findability of ‘like’-
minded people.
We need to be more specific though,
and return to our Facebook example.
‘Liking’ is an identity statement directly
oriented towards the author of the
update—Zuckerberg—and indirectly
inscribing oneself into the community
of those who ‘like’ Zuckerberg, as well as
indirectly flagging something to one’s own
community of Facebook ‘friends’ (who
can monitor activities performed within
the community). Patricia Lange (2009:
71), thus, qualifies such responsive uptake
activities (‘viewing’ YouTube videos in her
case) as forms of ‘self-interpellation’: people
express a judgment that they themselves
belong to the intended audiences of a
message or sign. ‘Sharing’, by contrast,
recontextualizes and directly reorients this
statement towards one’s own community,
triggering another phase in a process of
viral circulation, part of which can—but
must not—involve real ‘reading’ of the
text. Also, ‘liking’ is a responsive uptake
to someone else’s activity while ‘sharing’ is
the initiation of another activity directed at
another (segment of a) community. So, while
both activities share important dimensions
of phaticity with each other, important
differences also occur. These distinctions,
as noted, do not affect the fundamental
nature of the interaction between actors and
signs—‘sharing’, as we have seen, does not
presuppose careful reading of the text—but
there are differences in agency and activity
type.
This is important to note, because
existing definitions of virality would
emphasize the absence of significant change
in the circulation of the sign. Limor
Shifman (2011: 190), for instance,
emphasizes the absence of significant
change to the sign itself to distinguish
virality from ‘memicity’: memes, as
opposed to viral signs, would involve
36 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
changes to the sign itself. We shall see
in a moment that this distinction is only
valid when one focuses on a superficial
inspection of the formal properties of
signs. When one takes social semiotic
activities as one’s benchmark, however,
things become more complicated and
more intriguing. We have seen that
significant distinctions apply to ‘liking’
and ‘sharing’. In fact, we can see both
as different genres on a gradient from
phatic communion to phatic communication:
there are differences in agency, in the
addressees and communities targeted by
both activities and in the fundamental
pragmatic and metapragmatic features of
both activities.
To clarify the latter: ‘sharing’ an
update on Facebook is a classic case
of ‘re-entextualization’ (Bauman and
Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban
1996) or ‘re-semiotization’ (Scollon
and Scollon 2004). Re-entextualization
refers to the process by means of which
a piece of ‘text’ (a broadly defined
semiotic object here) is extracted from its
original context-of-use and re-inserted
into an entirely different one, involving
different participation frameworks, a
different kind of textuality—an entire
text can be condensed into a quote,
for instance—and ultimately also very
different meaning outcomes. What is
marginal in the source text can become
important in the re-entextualized
version, for instance. Re-semiotization,
in line with the foregoing, refers to
the process by means of which every
‘repetition’ of a sign involves an entirely
new set of contextualization conditions
and thus results in an entirely ‘new’
semiotic process, allowing new semiotic
modes and resources to be involved
in the repetition process (Leppänen
et al. 2014). The specific affordances
for responsive and sharing activities
offered by social media platforms are
thus not unified or homogeneous:
we can distinguish a gradient from
purely responsive uptake to active and
redirected re-entextualization and
resemiotization, blurring the distinction
made by Shifman between virality and
memicity.
Let us have a closer look at memes
now, and focus again on the different
genres of memic activity we can discern.
3. THE WEIRD WORLD OF
MEMES
As we have seen, Shifman locates the
difference between virality and memicity
in the degree to which the sign itself is
changed in the process of transmission
and circulation. Memes are signs the
formal features of which have been
changed by users. For her definition,
Shifman draws on Richard Dawkins,
author of The Selfish Gene (1976), who
coined ‘meme’ by analogy with ‘gene’ as
‘small cultural units of transmission (…)
which are spread by copying or imitation’
(Shifman 2011: 188). We have already
seen, however, that even simple ‘copying’
or ‘imitation’ activities such as Facebook
‘sharing’ involve a major shift in activity
type called re-entextualization. Memes,
often multimodal signs in which images
and texts are combined, would typically
enable intense resemiotization as well, in
that original signs are altered in various
ways, generically germane—a kind of
‘substrate’ recognizability would be
maintained—but situationally adjusted
and altered so as to produce very
different communicative effects. Memes
tend to have an extraordinary level of
semiotic productivity which involves very
different kinds of semiotic activity—
genres, in other words.
Let us consider figures 2-4, and
5-7. In figure 2 we see the origin of a
37
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
successful meme, a British World War II
propaganda poster.
A virtually endless range of
resemiotized versions of this poster have
gone viral since the year 2000. They can
be identified as intertextually related by
the speech act structure of the message
(an adhortative ‘keep calm’ or similar
statements, followed by a subordinate
adhortative) and the graphic features of
lettering and layout (larger fonts for the
adhortatives, the use of a coat of arms-like
image). Variations on the memic theme
range from minimal to maximal, but the
generic template is constant. Figure 3
shows a minimally resemiotized variant
in which lettering and coat of arms (the
royal crown) are kept, while in figure 4,
the royal crown has been replaced by a
beer mug.
In figures 2, 3, and 4 we see how one
set of affordances—the visual architecture
of the sign and its speech act format—
becomes the intertextual link enabling
the infinite resemiotizations while
retaining the original semiotic pointer:
most users of variants of the meme
would know that the variants derive from
the same ‘original’ meme. The visual
architecture and speech act format of the
‘original’, thus, are the ‘mobile’ elements
in memicity here: they provide memic-
intertextual recognisability, while the
textual adjustments redirect the meme
towards more specific audiences and
reset it in different frames of meaning
and use.
Figure 2: British wartime propaganda
poster
Figure 3: Keep calm and call Batman
See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keep-calm-and-carry-on for figures 2-4
38 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
The opposite can also apply,
certainly when memes are widely known
because of textual-stylistic features: the
actual ways in which ‘languaging’ is
performed through fixed expressions
and speech characteristics. A particularly
successful example of such textual-
stylistic memicity is so-called ‘lolspeak’,
the particular pidginized English
originally associated with funny images of
cats (‘lolcats’), but extremely mobile as a
memic resource in its own right. Consider
figures 5, 6, and 7. Figure 5 documents
the origin of this spectacularly successful
meme: a picture of a cat, to which the
caption ‘I can has cheezburger?’ was
added, went viral in 2007 via a website
‘I can has cheezburger?’. The particular
caption phrase went viral as well and
became tagged to a wide variety of other
images – see figure 6. The caption, then,
quickly became the basis for a particular
pidginized variety of written English,
which could in turn be deployed in a
broad range of contexts (see figure 7).
The extraordinary productivity of this
meme-turned-language-variety was
demonstrated in 2010, when a team of
‘lolspeak’ authors completed an online
translation of the entire Bible in their
self-constructed language variety. The
Lolcat Bible can now also be purchased
as a book.
The different resources that enter
into the production of such memes can
also turn out to be memic in themselves.
People, as we said, are extraordinarily
creative in reorganizing, redirecting, and
applying memic resources over a vast
range of thematic domains, addressing
a vast range of audiences while all the
same retaining clear and recognizable
intertextual links to the original memic
sources. This fundamental intertextuality
allows for combined memes, in which
features of different established memes
are blended in a ‘mashup’ meme. Figure 8
shows such a mashup meme.
Figure 4: Keep calm and drink beer Figure 5: I can has cheezburger?
See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/
sites/cheezburger
39
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
Figure 6: President and a possible voter having cheezburger.
See http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2008/04/18/barack-obama-yes-you-can/.
Figure 7: I has a dream.
See http://memebase.cheezburger.com/puns/tag/martin-luther-king-jr.
40 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
We see the familiar template of
the ‘Keep calm’ meme, to which a
recognizable reference to another meme
is added. The origin of this other meme,
‘then I took an arrow in the knee’, is in
itself worthy of reflection, for it shows
the essentially arbitrary nature of memic
success. The phrase was originally uttered
by characters in the video game ‘Skyrim’
(figure 9). The phrase is quite often
repeated throughout the game, but this
does not in itself offer an explanation
for the viral spread of the expression way
beyond the community of Skyrim gamers.
The phrase became wildly
productive and can now be tagged to
an almost infinite range of different
expressions, each time retaining a tinge
of its original apologetic character, and
appearing in mashups, as we saw in
figure 8.
What we see in each of these examples
is how memes operate via a combination of
intertextual recognizability and individual
creativity—individual users adding an
‘accent’ to existing viral memes, in attempts
to go viral with their own adapted version.
The work of resemiotization involved in such
processes can be complex and demanding.
Mashup memes, for instance, involves
elaborate knowledge of existing memes,
an understanding of the affordances and
limitations for altering the memes, and
graphic, semiotic, and technological skills
to post them online. The different forms
of resemiotization represent different
genres of communicative action, ranging
from maximally transparent refocusing
of existing memes to the creation of very
different and new memes, less densely
connected to existing ones.
Two points need to be made now.
First, we do not see such resemiotizations,
even drastic and radical ones, as being
fundamentally different from the ‘likes’ and
‘shares’ we discussed in the previous section.
We have seen that ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are
already different genres characterized by
very different activity patterns, orientations
Figure 8: Keep calm and remove the arrow from your knee
See https://www.facebook.com/pages/Keep-Calm-and-remove-the-arrow-from-your-
knee/254461191300457.
41
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
to addressees and audiences, and degrees
of intervention in the original signs. The
procedures we have reviewed here differ
in degree but not in substance: they
are, like ‘retweets’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’,
re-entextualizations of existing signs, i.e.
meaningful communicative operations
that demand different levels of agency
and creativity of the user. Second, and
related to this, the nature of the original
sign itself—its conventionally understood
‘meaning’—appears to be less relevant than
the capacity to deploy it in largely phatic,
relational forms of interaction. This again,
ranges from what Malinowski described
as ‘communion’—ritually expressing
membership of a particular community—
to ‘communication’ within the communities
we described as held together by ‘ambient
affiliation’. ‘Meaning’ in its traditional sense
needs to give way here to a more general
notion of ‘function’. Memes, just like Mark
Zuckerberg’s status updates, do not need to
be read in order to be seen and understood
as denotationally and informationally
meaningful; their use and re-use appear to
be governed by the ‘phatic’ and ‘emblematic’
functions often seen as of secondary nature
in discourse-analytic literature.
4. Conviviality on demand
But what explains the immense density
of such phatic forms of practice on social
media? How do we make sense of the
astonishing speed and scope with which
such phatic forms of communion and
communication circulate, creating—
like in the case of Gangnam Style—
perhaps the largest-scale collective
communicative phenomena in human
history? The explanations, we hope to
have shown, do not necessarily have to
be located in the features of the signs
themselves, nor in the specific practices
they prompt—both are unspectacular. So
Figure 9: Skyrim scene ‘Then I took an arrow in the knee’. See http://knowyourmeme.
com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee.
42 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
perhaps the explanations must be sought
in the social world in which these phatic
practices make sense.
In a seminal paper, Alice Marwick
and danah boyd (2010: 120) distinguish
between email and Twitter. They have
this to say on the topic:
(…) the difference between Twitter
and email is that the latter is
primarily a directed technology with
people pushing content to persons
listed in the ‘To:’ field, while tweets
are made available for interested
individuals to pull on demand. The
typical email has an articulated
audience, while the typical tweet
does not.
The statement demands nuancing, for
we have seen that even minimal forms of
activity such as ‘sharing’ involve degrees
of audience design—the seemingly
vacuous identity statements we described
above, lodged in social media practices,
are always directed at some audience, of
which users have some idea, right or wrong
(cf. Androutsopoulos 2013). Imaginary
audiences are powerful actors affecting
discursive behaviour, as Goffman and
others have shown so often (e.g. Goffman
1963), and Marwick and boyd’s early
statement that ‘Twitter flattens multiple
audiences into one’—a phenomenon
they qualify as ‘context collapse’—is
surely in need of qualification (Marwick
and boyd 2010: 122). The intricate social-
semiotic work we have described here
certainly indicates users having diverse
understandings of audiences on social
media. Different social media platforms
offer opportunities for different types
of semiotic and identity work and users
often hold very precise and detailed views
of what specific platforms offer them
in the way of audience access, identity
and communication opportunities, and
effects (cf. Gershon 2010).
At the same time, Marwick and boyd
are correct in directing our attention
towards the kinds of communities in
which people move on social media.
In spite of precise ideas of specific
target audiences and addressees, it
is certainly true that there is no way
in which absolute certainty about the
identities (and numbers) of addressees
can be ascertained on most social media
platforms—something which Edward
Snowden also made painfully clear. In
addition, it is true that lump categories
such as Facebook ‘friends’ gather a range
of—usually never explicitly defined—
subcategories ranging from ‘offline
friends’ and close relatives to what we
may best call, following Goffman again,
‘acquaintances’. Goffman (1963), as we
know, described acquaintances as that
broad category of people within the
network of US middle class citizens with
whom relations of sociality and civility
need to be maintained. Avoidance of
overt neglect and rejection are narrowly
connected to avoidance of intimacy and
‘transgressive’ personal interaction: what
needs to be maintained with such people
is a relationship of conviviality—a level
of social intercourse characterized by
largely ‘phatic’ and ‘polite’ engagement
in interaction. Acquaintances are not
there to be ‘loved’, they are there to
be ‘liked’. Facebook is made exactly
for these kinds of social relationships
(van Dijck 2013), which is perhaps also
why a discourse analysis of Facebook
interaction reveals the overwhelming
dominance of the Gricean Maxims, that
old ethnotheory of ‘polite’ US bourgeois
interaction (Varis forthcoming).
But let us delve slightly deeper
into this. The communities present as
audiences on social media may be at once
over-imagined and under-determined:
while users can have relatively precise
ideas of who it is they are addressing,
a level of indeterminacy is inevitable in
43
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
reality. This means, in analysis, that we
cannot treat such communities in the
traditional sense of ‘speech community’
as a group of people tied together by
clear and generally shareable rules of
the indexical value and function of signs
(Agha 2007). Indexical orders need to
be built, as a consequence, since they
cannot readily be presupposed. Virality,
as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, might
be seen as moments at which such
indexical orders—perceived shareability
of meaningful signs—are taking shape.
The two billion views of Gangnam Style
suggest that large numbers of people
in various places on earth recognized
something in the video; what it is exactly
they experienced as recognizable is
hard to determine and research on this
topic—how virality might inform us on
emergent forms of social and cultural
normativity in new and unclear large
globalized human collectives—is long
overdue.
Some suggestions in this direction
can be offered, though. In earlier work,
we tried to describe ephemeral forms
of community formation in the online-
offline contemporary world as ‘focused
but diverse’ (Blommaert and Varis 2013).
Brief moments of focusing on perceived
recognizable and shareable features
of social activity generate temporary
groups—think of the thousands who
‘liked’ Zuckerberg’s status update—while
such groups do not require the kinds of
strong and lasting bonds grounded in
shared bodies of knowledge we associate
with more traditionally conceived
‘communities’ or ‘societies’. In fact, they
are groups selected on demand, so to
speak, by individual users in the ways we
discussed earlier. People can focus and
re-focus perpetually, and do so (which
explains the speed of virality) without
being tied into a community of fixed
circumscription, given the absence of
the deep and strong bonds that tie them
together, and the absence of temporal
and spatial co-presence that characterizes
online groups (cf. Maly and Varis
forthcoming on ‘micro-populations’).
A joint ‘phatic’ focus on recognizable
form or shape offers possibilities for
such processes of groupness, while the
actual functional appropriation and
deployment of signs—what they actually
mean for actual users—is hugely diverse;
the infinite productivity of memes—
the perpetual construction of memic
‘accents’—illustrates this. Here we begin
to see something fundamental about
communities in an online age—the
joint focusing, even if ‘phatic’, is in itself
not trivial: it creates a structural level of
conviviality, i.e. a sharing at one level of
meaningful interaction by means of a
joint feature, which in superficial but real
ways translates a number of individuals
into a focused collective. Note, and we
repeat, that what this collective shares
is the sheer act of phatic communion
(the ‘sharing’ itself, so to speak), while
the precise meaning of this practice
for each individual member of the
collective is impossible to determine.
But since Malinowski and Goffman, we
have learned not to underestimate the
importance of (seemingly) unimportant
social activities. Memes force us to think
about levels of social structuring that we
very often overlook because we consider
them meaningless.
This neglect of conviviality has
effects. In the superdiversity that
characterizes online-offline social worlds,
we easily tend to focus on differences and
downplay the level of social structuring
that actually prevents these differences
from turning into conflicts. Recognizing
such hitherto neglected levels of
social structuring might also serve as a
corrective to rapid qualifications of the
present era as being ‘postsocial’—a point
on which we disagree with Vincent Miller.
44 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
There is a great deal of sociality taking
place on social media, but this sociality
might require a new kind of sociological
imagination. We will look in vain for
communities and societies that resemble
the ones proposed by Durkheim and
Parsons. But that does not mean that
such units are not present, and even less
that they are not in need of description.
REFERENCES
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social
Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2013. Networked
multilingualism: Some language
practices on Facebook and their
implications. International Journal of
Bilingualism 0 (0): 1-21.
Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 1990.
Poetics and performance as critical
perspectives on language and social life.
Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.
Blommaert, Jan and Piia Varis. 2013.
Life projects. Tilburg Papers in
Culture Studies, Paper 58. <https://
www.tilburguniversity.edu/
upload/c37dcccf-242d-4fca-
b79f-d3d366b0a505_TPCS_58_
Blommaert-Varis.pdf>
Briggs, Charles. 1997. Introduction: From
the ideal, the ordinary, and the orderly
to conflict and violence in pragmatic
research. Pragmatics 7 (4) (special issue
on Conflict and Violence in Pragmatic
Research, ed. Charles Briggs): 451-459.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of
Connectivity. A Critical History of Social
Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gershon, Ilana. 2010. Breakup 2.0.
Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public
Places. New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual:
Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. New York:
Doubleday Anchor.
Hymes, Dell. 1972/1986. Models of the
interaction of language and social life.
In John Gumperz and Dell Hymes
(eds). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication. London:
Blackwell. 35-71.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and
poetics. In Thomas Sebeok (ed). Style
in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
350-377.
Lange, Patricia G. 2009. Videos of affinity on
YouTube. In Pelle Snickars and Patrick
Vonderau (eds). The YouTube Reader.
Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.
70-88.
Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna
Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen and Elina
Westinen. 2014. Entextualization
and resemiotization as resources for
identification in social media. In Philip
Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (eds). The
Language of Social Media: Identity and
Community on the Internet. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan. 112-136.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923/1936. The
problem of meaning in primitive
languages. In C.K. Ogden and I.A.
Richards (eds). The Meaning of Meaning.
London: Kegan Paul. 296-336.
Maly, Ico and Piia Varis. Forthcoming.
The 21st-century hipster: On micro-
populations in times of superdiversity.
European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd. 2010.
I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately:
Twitter users, context collapse, and the
imagined audience. New Media & Society
13 (1): 114-133.
Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media,
networking and phatic culture.
Convergence 14: 387-400.
Schegloff, Emanuel. 1972/1986. Sequencing
in conversational openings. In John
Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds).
Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication. London:
Blackwell. 346-380.
Schegloff, Emanuel. 1988. Goffman and the
analysis of conversation. In Paul Drew
and Anthony Wootton (eds). Erving
45
Conviviality and collectives on social media
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order.
Oxford: Polity Press. 89-135.
Schegloff, Emanuel and Harvey Sacks.
1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 8:
289-327.
Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2004.
Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging
Internet. London: Routledge.
Senft, Gunter. 1995. Phatic communion.
In Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman
and Jan Blommaert (eds). Handbook
of Pragmatics 1995. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. 1-10.
Shifman, Limor. 2011. An anatomy of a
YouTube meme. New Media & Society 14
(2): 187-203.
Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban. 1996.
Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Varis, Piia. forthcoming. Facebook and the
Gricean maxims.
Zappavigna, Michele. 2011. Ambient
affiliation: A linguistic perspective on
Twitter. New Media & Society 13 (5):
788-806.
