Conviviality and phatic communion?

Ben Rampton

doi:10.14426/mm.v2i1.59

Abstract

The focus on ‘unimportant’ language in this collection is driven by major contemporary questions. In conditions of superdiversity, the old binaries—minority/majority, migrant/host etc.—can no longer account for the splits and alignments emerging in globalised environments and in response, social scientists have turned their attention to informal processes, seeking new principles for social cohesion in low-key local ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy 2006; Vertovec 2007; Wetherell 2009). Along similar lines, commentators point to the decline of traditional party politics and look instead to social media and digital communication as new resources for grassroots mobilisation. So does the communication of apparently trivial matters really hold the seeds to social renewal, or are such ideas romantically over-inflated?

Highlights

The focus on ‘unimportant’ language in this collection is driven by major contemporary questions
WORKING ACROSS PROCESSES OF DIFFERENT SCALE. The papers in this collection draw on different disciplinary backgrounds— ethnographic sociolinguistics, anthropology, and sociology
In sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, it is fairly well recognised that the conditions in which people communicate are partly local and emergent, continuously readjusted to the contingencies of action unfolding from one moment to the they are infused with information, resources, expectations and experiences that originate in, circulate through, and/ or are destined for networks, media and processes that can be very different in their reach and duration (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Scollon and Scollon 2004; Blommaert 2005)

Summary

Ben Rampton

The focus on ‘unimportant’ language in this collection is driven by major contemporary questions. Commentators point to the decline of traditional party politics and look instead to social media and digital communication as new resources for grassroots mobilisation. The papers provide a range of answers to questions of this kind, and I won’t try to summarise their nuanced formulations, or to endorse or challenge their substantive claims. Whatever their conclusions, ‘conviviality’ and ‘phatic communication’ play a major part in the discussion; and in what follows, I will comment on how and where I think these notions are problematic or productive. My remarks are largely methodological, dwelling in particular on the challenges of working across social processes of different scale, though I will conclude with some notes on surveillance, a (substantive) issue that in sociolinguistics is often underplayed