TPCS 39: “Hallo hoe gaandit, wat maak jy?”: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context

By Fie Velghe

Introduction

Imagine walking down the road in your neighbourhood and the old lady at the corner who usually greets you when you walk by suddenly not answering your friendly greeting anymore. You open your front door and your neighbour, with whom you do not exchange much more than some friendly, formalised ‘small talk’ such as ‘hello, how are you’ and ‘such bad weather today, isn’t it?’ ignores your routine interaction. You send a text message to a friend you did not hear from for a long time, just to say you are thinking of him and that you hope that everything is alright, but you do not get a text message or call back. You post a – in your opinion quite funny – status on your Facebook wall and none of your 300 friends replies with a ‘like’. Your friend, who usually posts an uncountable and sometimes irritating amount of non-interesting Tweets on his Twitter account every day, is suddenly very quiet on this medium. 

All the abovementioned situations probably would make you feel uncomfortable and make you wonder: did I do something wrong? Did I upset my neighbour or the old lady in my street without realizing? Is my friend angry with me for some reason? Was my Facebook wall post maybe not so funny after all? Is my Twitter friend ok or did something happen to him? It’s only when such daily, mundane and seemingly pointless social interactions cease to take place that we realize or appreciate their actual importance. When they disappear, we suddenly are left with a feeling of worry or of being unheard and unappreciated. We probably think of the other person who infringes the reciprocity of such social interactions as impolite, rude, pretentious or egocentric. This is because such communicational exchanges that do not necessarily intend to inform or exchange any meaningful information, such as the examples of social interactions mentioned above, do have another, not less important purpose: a social one (Malinowski, 1923). With ‘phatic communication’, one aims to express some kind of sociability and to maintain social connections and bounds (Miller 2008). Even though you never exchanged many more words with the old lady in the street than ‘Hello how are you’ and know nothing more about her but the fact that she is an old lady living in your street, those simple greetings do give you the feeling of being connected with her in some way. The friendly greetings to your neighbour have made it possible for you to go and ask him, without any feeling of guilt, if you can borrow his drill when you are doing some little jobs in the house. Although you have not seen your friend for a very long time, an SMS every now and then does however give you the feeling of being in touch with him and being updated about his life. 

In this article, we will look at how the mobile phone has become a means through which such phatic communication is being expressed; a text message, a short call, a short comment on someone’s Facebook wall, a chat on the very popular South African instant messaging programme MXIT, etc., all “becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence” (Miller, 2008: 395). We will see how, in an impoverished community like the research site Wesbank in South Africa, ‘phatic communication’ and ‘maintaining a connected presence’ are vital strategies of social networking. In a context of severe and desperate impoverishment, loneliness, chronic unemployment and boredom, the exchange of phatic communicational gestures is much more than merely being friendly and human. We will see how those phatic gestures form part of one of the many coping strategies that the residents in Wesbank employ to face up to the harsh conditions of a life determined by poverty and insecurity.

Keywords: Phatic communication

How to quote: Velghe, F. (2012). “Hallo hoe gaandit, wat maak jy?”: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 39).

Read the full working paper here: “Hallo hoe gaandit, wat maak jy?”: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context.