Phatic language

danah boyd in her blog discusses a report from Pear Analytics, "They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news". She challenges the assumption that 'pointless babble' is actually a bad thing. It is actually the stuff of most of our interactions, "

"Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?".

For the fluent speaker of a language, these phatic utterances are fundamental to communication. To the language learner these are baffling and are an indicator of fluency. They are the puzzle which take extra effort to learn, after you learn all those simple formulaic communicative 'back and forths'.