Professional Communication as Phatic: From Classical Eunoia to Personal Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Phaticrefers to the rhetorical function of creating effective communication channels, keeping them open, and establishing ongoing and fruitful relationships, all of which are vital in the age of digital rhetoric, social media, and global intercultural exchange. In this realm, the professional communicator functions less as anoriginatorof new information and more as a spacedesigner, afacilitatorof others’ online interactions, acuratorof user-generated content, and a communicationleader. The phatic function—especially relevant to online interactions such as virtual teamwork, intercultural communication, and user help forums—deserves significant attention as a primary purpose for professional communication.

Keywords

chatbot ethics ethos eunoia intercultural communication phatic rhetoric social media user help virtual teamwork

Professional communication is changing dramatically in the digital age. Research in business, technical, and professional communication has certainly acknowledged and tracked these changes, as well as the impact of digital networked communication and social media applications on the work of the professional communicator (see, e.g.,Blythe, Lauer, & Curran, 2014;Ferro & Zachry, 2014;Hurley & Kimme Hea, 2014;Swarts, 2015;Wolff, 2013). But have our fundamental communication models, our dominant frames for talking about (and teaching) professional communication, caught up with the changing contexts and roles for digital professional communication yet?

My purpose in this article is to call attention to the importance of thephatic function(or purpose) in professional communication—a purpose at least as important as informing, persuading, and helping users, and perhaps a necessary foundation for all forms of digital communication and interaction. The phatic function—especially relevant to online interactions such as social media marketing, virtual teamwork, intercultural communication, and user help forums—deserves significant attention and treatment as a primary purpose for professional communication.

Phatic (from the Greek wordphanai, “to speak”) refers to the rhetorical function of creating effective communication channels, keeping them open, and establishing ongoing and fruitful relationships, all of which are especially important in the age of digital rhetoric, social media, and global intercultural exchange (Bilandzic et al., 2009;Miller, 2008;Sawyer & Chen, 2012;Wang, Tucker, & Rihll, 2011). AsMiller (2008)put it, in the age of the Internet communication is “as much about interaction with others as it is about accessing information” (p. 398). Seeing communication from a phatic perspective means positing different goals for discursive action—goals such as goodwill, trust, cooperation, partnership, harmony—and building a different kind of relationship between rhetor and organization, among rhetors within an organization, and between the organization and its customers/its market/the public. The core of the phatic function is the formation of an ethical relationship between rhetor and audience and that relationship is very much based onethos, the persuasive appeal having to do with the character and credibility of the rhetor.

In this article, I will

identify the sources of phatic theory in linguistics and rhetoric, making the case for seeing the phatic function as a primary purpose for human communication interaction, not a secondary or meaningless one;

consider the cultural role of the phatic function—that is, how the phatic manifests itself differently in various cultural contexts (including social media contexts); and

consider four particular areas where the phatic function has special relevance for professional communicators: (a) email, online small talk, informal chat, and correspondence; (b) virtual teamwork; (c) online user help communities; and (d) design of intelligent agents, or what we might call “phatic bots.”

The Phatic Function in Linguistics

The concept of phatic communication was first articulated by the cultural anthropologistBronislaw Malinowski (1923), who saw the phatic function as a feature of primitive languages in the respect that the peoples he studied used language as a mode of action as opposed to using language “to convey meaning” (p. 315).Malinowski (1923)sees “phatic communion” as a feature of primitive discourse, serving the end of “mere need of companionship”:

We use language exactly as savages do and our talk becomes the “phatic communion,” which serves to establish personal bonds of union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas. (p. 316)

Malinowski sets the framework for future discussions that view communication primarily in terms of a transmission or pipeline metaphor: The primary purpose of language is to convey meaning (information). And within that framework, phatic communication is nonrelevant noise that potentially disturbs the clear transmission of information. Subsequent discussions of the phatic function in cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics¹largely follow Malinowski’s lead: The phatic function must be acknowledged, but it is not all that important. At best, the phatic function is a secondary, supportive function of language, but it is not a primary purpose.

But what if the “savages” have it right? Maybe what is primitive here, or at least incomplete, is Malinowski’s communication frame, which assumes that the ultimate purpose of discourse is “communicating ideas.” Is it? Really? What if friendship is not so “mere”?

To say that the purpose of communication is “communicating ideas,” informing, or persuading is to beg the question: What is the purpose of doingthat? If an informative or persuasive communication is a means to some end, then, what is the end exactly? Here is where discourse theory meets ethics: To ask the question, “Why are we communicating?” is to posit some end or outcome outside and beyond the communication itself. It is that purpose outside of discourse that Malinowski’s form of linguistics neglects.

What is that goal?Aristotle (1976)provided one clear answer to this question inNicomachean Ethics, where he linked the art of rhetoric to the social good: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good” (Nicomachean Ethics1.1). For Aristotle, the greatest good for rhetoric and politics to aim for was “the good of thepolis” (Nicomachean Ethics1.2) and happiness for all. For Aristotle, the final end—or ultimate cause—of rhetorical action (and for other arts as well, such as politics, music, sculpture) was peace, harmony, well-being, stability, and happiness.

We do not necessarily have to agree with Aristotle’s particular conclusion to understand the argument at play: The art of rhetoric or the act of communicating must serve some desired end result or outcome—some “good” (the particulars of which, of course, can be debated)—beyond itself. In short, informing and persuading are means, not ends. The end is something else altogether—for example, the good of the polis, the happiness of the audience, the well-being of the community, or the happiness of the end user—and we might extend this end to include the good of the organization, the good of the customer, the common good, the public good, and the good of us all.

An ethical theory of rhetoric insists that creating harmony and positive relations, “establishing bonds of union,” is precisely the point of communication—the end goal of it—rather than primarily the conveyance of information. Yes, conveying information is important, but we do that precisely for the ultimate goal of making things work better, creating felicitous relationships, and establishing a more perfect union. Companionship, harmony, and friendship are not “mere” things. They are, in a sense, the whole point.

The Phatic Function in Rhetoric

The phatic function is of immense importance in rhetoric, though phatic is a term rarely used in rhetoric.²Where we see the phatic function in Western rhetoric is the classical Greek concept ofeunoia.Eunoia, or goodwill (benevolentiain Latin), was one of the three critical elements of ethos identified in Aristotle’sRhetoric—along withphronesis(practical judgment) andarête(virtue). And ethos was one of the three key persuasive appeals along withlogos(appeal to reason) andpathos(appeal to feeling).

The orator who hoped to persuade the audience should exhibit the quality ofeunoiatoward the audience, particularly at the beginning or end of a speech. What became known as thecaptatio benevolentiae(“capturing goodwill”) was enshrined in Cicero’s rhetoric as an important technique for building social and political alliances.Benevolentiaincluded qualities and practices such as being polite, exhibiting a friendly disposition, being magnanimous, showing respect, and complimenting one’s audience or interlocutor. And the place in a speech where this would be most effective was theexordium, where, according toCicero (1949), the audience was to be made “attentive, docile, and well disposed” (de Inventione, 1.15;Donnelly, 1912). Thecaptatiowas secured through an appropriately respectful salutation and in the opening sentence of the speech or letter (exordium), where the rhetor expressed goodwill toward the addressee.

Securing goodwill is fundamental to Cicero’s conception of ethos and of rhetoric overall (R. L. Enos, 2008). The speaker or writer will not succeed in persuading the audience unless the he (in Roman rhetoric it was “he”) can demonstrate and embody excellent character, meaning primarily “an individual who was willing to act on ethical principles for the sake of justice” (R. L. Enos, 2008, p. 131).

Cicero’s notion of thecaptatio benevolentiaebecame a standard rhetorical technique in the medievalars dictaminis, the art of letter writing (Hildebrandt, 1988;Murphy, 1974;Perelman, 1991). And, of course, many, many years later this technique emerged in the form of the “positive buffer,” the technique recommended for the genre of the “bad news letter” as a way to buffer or mitigate unwanted news or information.

There are good ways and bad ways to docaptatio benevolentiae—and some treatments can make thecaptatiooverly mechanical or prescriptive (Murphy, 1974). Sometimes thecaptatiodegrades from a general technique of persuasive ethos (atechne) into a prescriptive formula. That is, instead of being treated as a quality of the speaker/writer and as a general principle to be artfully imitated (but not copied), thecaptatiobecame installed as a canned piece of discourse.

According toJames Murphy (1974), Hugh of Bologna’s medieval treatise on letter writing is an example of the degraded kind of techne, an example of the art shifting away from classicalinventiotoward a kind of prescriptivedispositio, not merely providing “illustrative examples” but instead offering “phrases even paragraphs . . . to be used verbatim. . . . These are not suggestions for rhetorical invention, but are instead models for copying” (Murphy, 1974, pp. 217-218). Murphy goes on to describe this as a shift frominventiotoreproductio, from inventive art to copying—or at least from art to formulaic strategy. Rhetoric is supposed to be an art (techne), but, as demonstrated in this instance, can sometimes devolve into mechanical, formulaic strategy (tribe).

At this point we can see the ethical problem that has always plagued rhetoric: Ifeunoiais viewed as required pieces of text without (necessarily) an embodied connection to the rhetor, then we have an appearance versus reality gap, a credibility gap between the ethos of the text and the actual embodied ethos of the rhetor.³The problem with Aristotle’s rhetorical system, according to many scholars, is that it does not adequately address this problem: It “invites pretense and dissembling. [Aristotle’s] emphasis on feigned ethos raises serious moral questions about his notion of ethical appeal” (Yoos, 1979, p. 42; see alsoJohnson, 1984). If the speaker is using the phatic function as a rhetorical technique for persuasion, isn’t that insincere? Isn’t that false flattery? Isn’t that manipulating the audience? And the answer to these is yes, yes, and yes—ifthe speaker is using such strategiesmerelyas a rhetorical technique to achieve his or her ends.

But the ethical problem of the ethical appeal—is it “feigned” or is it sincere?—melts away to some extent if we note that rhetoric is not an isolated or autonomous art but has an intimate relationship with the arts of ethics and politics. The concept of ethos in Aristotle’sRhetoricis closely aligned with character and virtue as discussed in hisNicomachean Ethics, as bothChristopher Johnstone (1980)andJames Porter (1998)have pointed out. Aristotle’s treatment of persuasion inRhetoricviewedby itselfdoes suggest “a view of rhetoric that permits manipulation of the emotions in affecting judgment. This interpretation, however, fails to view theRhetoricin the context of its companion work, theNicomachean Ethics” (Johnstone, 1980, p. 9). When properly considered, “Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric is grounded in and guided by the ethical principles developed in his moral theory” (Johnstone, 1980, p. 11).

In short, Aristotle’sRhetoricneeds to be read as linked withNicomachean Ethics.The point of overlap between rhetoric and ethics has to do with the purpose of communication: Ultimately, why are we doing it? According toPorter (1998), the answer has to do with “the pursuit of the good (agathon) and the moral character of the speaker or citizen (ethos)” (p. 37). The ultimate aim of the speaker/writer must be the good of the polis, or what we might rephrase as the good of the audience:

To be an effective rhetor, you have to know what is good, be able to move toward it yourself, and be able to have the persuasive capacity to move others toward it as well; you have to have goodwill toward others; . . . and you have to have virtuous qualities. (Porter, 1998, p. 37)

In other words, goodwill is not merely a piece of text you drop mechanically into the exordium. It is, or should be, a quality rhetors possess and exhibit to others through the totality of their rhetorical actions.

In short, the rhetor was not supposed to fake being a virtuous speaker; the rhetor was supposed to be one—though the classical rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian had to admit that rhetors could, of course, be insincere. But that was not how the art was defined or how it was supposed to work. Virtue must be integral to the art of rhetoric—a point thatQuintilian (2001)emphasizes in Books 2.20, 12.1, and 12.2 ofInstitutio Oratoria.⁴

The other way to look at ethosandeunoiais to see the ethical appeal as ethically and pedagogically formative: Perhaps in the process of learning, practicing, and using the technique, the rhetorbecomesthe person who has goodwill toward the audience. That is, repeatedly practicing goodwill until it achieves the status ofhabitushas the effect of instilling in the rhetor the quality of goodwill. Ethos is created in individual, discrete rhetorical events—but over time these discrete events have a collective force, creating a long-term ethos: “These proofs carry over into a rhetor’s reputation and can be brought to subsequent rhetorical acts” (R. L. Enos, 2008, p. 135). They constitute a “developing ethos,” or what we might think of as an ongoing reputation or, in business, a corporate brand or image.

Would we say that someone who is polite to strangers is insincere? Yes, if we happen to know that the person is usually rude and just happens to be faking it to secure some benefit. But no, not if we know from experience that the person is always that way, if the person is being polite because they have learned to be polite, because they have learned that is what you are supposed to do, because they have embraced that as their fundamental ethos in interacting with strangers. In such a case we would say, rather, that politeness is who the personis: She or he isa polite person. It is embodied in their character. That is, the virtue lies in the person; it is not merely a technique they are using in their discourse to manipulate audiences.⁵

The rhetorical and ethical fallacy here is to see the phatic function as simply a piece of language that the speaker or writer plugs into a discourse in order to achieve their persuasive or informative goal—for example, “small talk” at the beginning of a business meeting in order for a manager to meet her goals for the meeting. Rather, view the phatic function in a broader, more ethical sense as, first, the formation and maintenance of a positive relationship with those the rhetor interacts with, and, second, as fundamental to the rhetor’s rhetorical identity (ethos), as their overall behavior and practice as a rhetor.

This fallacy of seeing the phatic function as merely a piece of language conspires with the one-way instrumental/conduit view of communication that sees rhetoric as a toolbox of mostly stylistic techniques that writers/speakers use in their communication. And if rhetoric is no more than a toolbox of strategies, formulaic bits of texts dropped for persuasive advantage, then that is how we arrived at the popular definition of rhetoric as deception, manipulation, insincerity, dissembling, and lying.

But take the social turn and flip that around: What if the rhetor doesn’t make rhetoric so much asrhetoric makes the rhetor—in the sense that the rhetor’s ethos comes into being through discourse, through the discourse(s) they are born into, through the discourse(s) that interpellate them, through their symbolic interactions with others, through the rhetoric they practice. If the rhetor practiceseunoiauntil itbecomesthem, then it is not simply a tool in their rhetoric toolbox. Rather, the quality is embodied; the rhetor becomes the polite person who has goodwill toward the audience. And that is whatQuintilian (2001)means when he says rhetoric is the good person speaking well.

Cultural Variations for the Phatic Function

The virtues of courtesy, politeness, friendliness, and the importance of building and maintaining goodwill in one’s relations with others are universally valued, it is safe to say—though they may or may not take form as linguistic or rhetorical concepts per se. However, we also need to note that the particular standards, practices, and expectations for the phatic function—that is, the particulars forhowthe rhetor should develop and exhibit goodwill and build relations—can vary across cultures and contexts.

For instance, in Japanese culture,aizuchiis certainly a phatic principle, referring to discourse and bodily behaviors (e.g., nodding, grunting, eye contact) that one uses in a conversation to signal the listener’s presence, interest, and engagement with the speaker: “Aizuchihas a social function: to keep connectedness with others. The stage of connectedness is always characterized by a very high degree of alertness . . . [and] confirmation of presence” (Radovanovic & Ragnedda, 2012, pp. 11-12).Aizuchiis an important component of Japanese interaction. Without it, an interlocutor will assume that the listener is disengaged or uninterested in the conversation.

In some cultures, silence is even valued as a phatic strategy—not silence in the sense of apathy or disengagement, but engaged silence as a sign of respect for the other. For instance, in Confucian Chinese rhetoric, according toArabella Lyon’s (2004)discussion ofThe Analects, stylistic glibness is something to be distrusted, and nonsense chatter—small talk—is to be distrusted. Silence then is seen as “a positive tool for building relationships” (Lyon, 2004, p. 137) and as signaling that the listener wishes to place emphasis on actions rather than words and avoid using meaningless language as a tool for manipulation. In Confucian rhetoric, glib and aggressive styles of conversation, or “sharp tongues,” are to be avoided because what is valued is humility, a facet ofren, or true virtue: “the truly virtuous person [is] cautious and simple with words” (Xu, 2004, p. 123). Thus, a style of chatty, garrulous friendly discourse, perhaps viewed as effective relationship building in one culture (e.g., a U.S. business culture), may be seen as nonsensical, disrespectful idiocy in another.⁶

On a deeper level, we can see that the basis for Confucian rhetoric is the fundamental relationship between the self and other, which should be governed byshu, “often translated as ‘reciprocity’ or as ‘putting oneself in the other’s place’” (Mao, 2006, p. 102; see alsoMao, 1994). In other words, the foundation and starting point for communication is a fundamental awareness and respect for the other. The quality of the interpersonal relationship matters here, but viewed in its social, political, and cultural context and, importantly, as an integral part of the tradition to which one belongs.Shu, then, serves as both a philosophical and rhetorical principle (thereby avoiding the fight between philosophy and rhetoric, and the tension betweenseemandbe, that has infected Western thought).Shuis a basis for both communication and for human relationships—after all, isn’t that how human relationships happen, through communication?—and a fundamental phatic principle for rhetoric.Shuis not something the rhetor “uses” in a discourse; it refers to the respectful and concerned nature of the rhetor’s “being in relationship” with others.

In the cultural realm of digital social media, we have to recognize that the phatic purpose of “staying in touch” is a worthy communication aim in its own right—and perhaps a baseline aim necessary for all other types of digitally mediated social media interactions. The popularity of cell phone-based texting is one indicator of this value: How much texting has an informative or persuasive aim primarily versus how much of it serves the primary purpose of “staying in touch”? The latter is often the case. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are social media sites whose popularity signals the inherent value of connectivity with others. Facebook in particular is testimony to the importance, for many people, of building social networks purely or mainly for the sake of establishing a social network. The network is its ownraison d’etre. The acts of friending, poking, liking, and so on, are standard phatic techniques to maintain contact and to show “connected presence” (Miller, 2008, p. 394).

Radovanovic and Ragnedda (2012)see the Facebook “poke” as the purest form of phatic confirmation of presence, signaling simply that “I am here.” A “like” button serves a phatic function as well, but also signals confirmation or agreement. The motivation in such spaces is “less having something in particular to say (i.e., communicating some kind of information), as . . . the obligation or encouragement to say ‘something’ to maintain connections or audience, to let one’s network know that one is still ‘there’” (Miller, 2008, p. 393). While such phatic communication activities may be “content-less,” they are by no means “meaning-less.” They are important to maintaining whatMiller (2008)has called “mediated phatic sociability”; they are important to focusing on “the process of communication” and “potentially carry a lot more weight to them than the content itself suggests” (pp. 394-395). Sharing profiles, personal stories, anecdotes, thoughts, and pictures is a way to gain trust within the community.⁷

Businesses have come to recognize the value of being on Facebook and other social networking systems as a way to interact with consumers and build brand and customer allegiance. For instance,Gil McWilliam (2000)has provided advice to businesses about how to use social media to create brand loyalty through the use of online user communities that promote “like-minded people” to interact with one another socially. One example McWilliam cited was the Shell Oil “Dialogue Forums,” a forum in which Shell representatives have conversations with members of the public regarding public issues related to energy (e.g., “Can Arctic development be carried out safely and responsibly?”). Of course such forums are not merely phatic: They are a way for the company to present and argue for its own energy policies—but the company is also engaging in conversation and debate with other viewpoints. News media like theNew York Times,CNN, and Cleveland.com allow users to interact with news using the response feature and that creates an interactive social space that invites response and participation from the public. Such sites can certainly generate useful marketing information for companies (e.g., providing immediate public feedback for new products, campaigns, or initiatives), but that is not their only purpose.

A new set of professional communication skills is required to launch, manage, and promote these kinds of forums. What McWilliam calls “brand-community management” requires that the professional communicator have community leadership and development skills; skills at motivating, rewarding, and leading volunteers; and editorial expertise—not so much the syntactic, grammatical, or mechanical kind, but a broader rhetorical editorial expertise more related to policy and ethos (i.e., knowing how to develop policies and practices that encourage productive community interaction).⁸The professional communicator working in this environment functions more as a designer of interactive online spaces, a public interlocutor, an online community leader, and a participant in public discussion.

The professional communicator must learn how to design whatWang et al. (2011)have referred to as a “phatic technology.” A phatic technology is one that “serves to establish, develop, and maintain human relationships. . . . to create a social context with the effect that its users form a social community based on a collection of interactional goals” (p. 44). They see the Internet overall as a tool having a “strong phatic nature,” primarily because of its “minimized time span between producers and users” (p. 49). What this means for professional communication is that instead of focusing oncreating information for usersthe emphasis shifts more towardcreating communities of users, communities that can share information and collaborate and crowdsource to solve problems. Furthermore, communication that perhaps traditionally had been seen as insignificant “idle chatter” may be “crucial to the strength of the ongoing social bond” (Gibbs, Vetere, Bunyan, & Howard, 2005).

For such spaces to work effectively, they have to be designed to function less like informative documents and more like communities, even cultures.Vincent Miller (2008)sees phatic discourse as even more than a function of language; he sees it as taking on the features of a culture:

In phatic media culture, content is not king, but “keeping in touch” is. More important than anything said, it is theconnectionto the other that becomes significant, and theexchangeof words becomes superfluous. Thus the text message, the short call, the brief email, the short blog update or comment, becomes part ofa mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence in an ever-expanding social network. (p. 395, italics added)

Uses of the Phatic Function in Business and Professional Communication

There are many areas and genres where the phatic function plays a key role, but I would like to focus on four areas of particular importance for the professional communicator:

Email, online small talk, informal chat, and correspondence

Virtual teamwork, especially international and intercultural virtual teamwork

Online user help communities

Design of phatic bots

Email and Online Small Talk

Politeness, netiquette, and courtesy are certainly all components of effective phatic communication. But phatic communication goes beyond mere politeness to include theories about how to negotiate, how to handle conflicts and personality disputes, how to interact with others individually and in groups (in person and well as online), and how to design and use social media in a way that promotes effective relationships with others (King, 2010;Lauring, 2011).

A significant body of research has examined the importance of “micro-level social interactions” (Lauring, 2011) in the workplace, including “small talk,” email, chat, and compliments (al-Qinai, 2011;Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock, & Landowski, 2014;Hudak & Maynard, 2011;Kulkarni, 2014;Longo, 2014;Mackiewicz, 2006;McNely, 2011;Pullin, 2010;Rogerson-Revell, 2008;Zhu & White, 2009). Generally, this research shows that such small exchanges, even when “content-less” (Miller, 2008), serve a vital role in the building of relationships, and are particularly important for establishing trust and social bonds for intercultural exchanges.

The business genre where people most frequently violate principles of effective phatic communication is email. People are so flooded with email at work—20, 30, 80, 200 messages per day—that they tend to rush, and when they rush they make mistakes. They forget to say “please” and “thank you.” They write snarky emails. They send angry, ranting emails. They reply to the entire group when they thought they were writing to an individual. These are relatively minor, fixable mistakes—but more serious mistakes include sharing private information with unauthorized persons, or writing offensive remarks that can constitute workplace harassment, or being insensitive, perhaps offensive to clients, customers, or colleagues who bring different cultural expectations to the table, and thereby losing a client, sale, or job.

In business communication research, phatic communication is more likely to be labeled as “small talk” and to be seen as perhaps important and helpful for effective communication, but as peripheral or subordinate to serious, on-task talk. Even researchers who take the phatic function seriously view it mainly as serving (often preliminary to) some other, more important business function (e.g.,Pullin, 2010). The phatic certainly includes forms of salutation and polite greeting—and politeness generally—but, according toLaver (1975), is broader than that. It might also include efforts to break down barriers related to age, social status, workplace hierarchy, gender, degree of familiarity, power differentials (real and perceived), and so on.

Small talk may be particularly important for intercultural business communication, and there may be important cultural differences in how (and how much) phatic communication needs to happen (Yang, 2012). For instance, in his comparative analysis of Arabic and English approaches to phatic discourse,al-Qinai (2011)pointed out that silence can be viewed as a phatic sign of respect in some cultures, but a sign of rudeness or disengagement in others. Compliments are rhetorically complex: They can be informative or phatic or both combined. If compliments are perceived as insincere or as merely formulaic, they may actually backfire on the rhetor. Praise that is individualized (“nonformulaic compliment”) is more likely to have a positive effect (Mackiewicz, 2006).

Virtual Teamwork, Intercultural Teamwork

Building trust is a key component of the phatic function—and building trust is often cited as a key factor in intercultural and cross-cultural communication and particularly for intercultural virtual teamwork (Rush Hovde, 2014). For a team to perform effectively and do its work as a team, it helps to have social cohesion. For teams working in situations with a weak structure (such as online teams), “trust is likely to have the greatest effect” on team performance (Jarvenpaa, Shaw, & Staples, 2004, p. 262). Some studies recommend face-to-face team meetings, if possible, “especially early in the process” (Longo, 2014;Rush Hovde, 2014, p. 245).⁹

Of particular importance for virtual teamwork, and especially for intercultural virtual teamwork, is “initial trust,” building and establishing trust among team members at the beginning of a project—a point that recalls Cicero’s advice about the importance ofcaptatio benevolentiain the exordium. In their research,Jarvenpaa et al. (2004)did not explicitly reference phatic communication, but that is what they are talking about when they emphasize the importance, first, of team members maintaining contact with others on the team. The first component of trust is simply signaling to the coworker that he or she is there, present, and attentive—and of course in a virtual environment the person’s body isn’t physically there, so the employee signals her presence via email, chat spaces, notes on a shared document, video presence, and so on. This is important early in the team-building process, but maintaining presence is also important throughout a project.

The extent to which trust is a critical component of teamwork depends on the situation. Trust is especially important in contexts operating with whatJarvenpaa et al. (2004)called “weak structure” (i.e., teams that have very little shared social history, are not tied to a common physical location, that are ad hoc and temporary, etc.). That description of weak structure resembles the teamwork context for many online professional communication courses—for example, teams consisting of students who don’t know one another, who have never worked together before, who reside in varying locales, or who may be working from different cultural and/or gender assumptions.

These findings about phatic presence, connectedness, and social cohesion have been reinforced in other research, includingPavel Zemliansky’s (2012)study of intercultural virtual teamwork (based on a classroom study involving students from the United States and Ukraine):

Teams which managed to establish more systematic and regular patterns of collaboration and information exchange produced better documents . . . levels of frustration in those teams were lower because their members had developed multiple and redundant communication channels (email, Facebook, class wiki, and so on), which gave them the ability to restart communications quickly. (p. 282)

The participants in the study reported “unanimously that social interactions and ‘small talk’ were extremely important” to their teamwork.

A key finding from Zemliansky’s study is the importance of leadership as a quality for effective teamwork, and his findings suggest that an understanding of and effectiveness at deploying phatic communication might, in fact, be a key component of leadership. A leader knows how to build trust and communication channels as a way to ensure effective team interaction. Another key factor was the selection of a communication medium: Which medium would be most readily accessible to team members and be most helpful in building team identity and cohesion? In Zemliansky’s study, different teams chose different tools, with Facebook being “the most successful” one overall for the teams. But, in general, teams selected the medium that “gave them a more ‘immediate’ degree of contact and interaction” (Zemliansky, 2012, p. 284). Zemliansky’s recommendation, an important one, is to let each team decide their medium based on what is available and familiar to the members of that team. Overall,Zemliansky’s (2012)study emphasized the importance of “developing interpersonal relationships and trust” (p. 385), a process which takes time. The takeaway for professional communication is that time for social interaction and team building needs to be built into virtual projects, especially early in a project.

Researchers may not always use the word phatic in describing the focus of their studies, but, in effect, that is what they are describing. For instance, in his research on international teamworkJakob Lauring (2011)called for “informal interaction practices” that aim at building trust. And he emphasized the importance of “micro dynamics of human interaction,” or the informal exchanges that build relationships in the first place. Such “micro-level strategic actions,” or phatic interactions, have a significant effect on the quality and effectiveness of intercultural exchange.¹⁰

Online User Help

The phatic function plays a distinctive role in the design of online user help, a particular genre of professional communication (more specifically, technical communication) that is undergoing dramatic changes.

In the old print realm, or even in the Web 1.0 realm, the technical writer would produce a piece of written documentation to assist users in installing, learning, and using a particular piece of technology or software. In more recent years this online written document would be replaced (or supplemented) by a YouTube video providing a dynamic, multimediated tutorial to help the user.

In the Web 2.0-based model, the technical writer—and she is not likely to be called that anymore, but is more likely to be titled an “information developer” or “social media designer”—might produce the video but would also likely create and monitor a user help forum, based on a crowdsourcing model that enables users to help each other. Think, for example, of Adobe Customer Care on Twitter or Techsmith Community Support for Camtasia (which includes user blogs and Twitter and Facebook sites). Usually (not always) this multifaceted crowdsourced approach provides more rapid and context-specific problem-solving (Swarts, 2015).

The professional communicator in this realm is not so much creating helpdocumentsas designing and monitoring helpspaces, networks, forums, and feeds—whatJohn Law (2000)has called “the construction of spatiality.” The professional communicator functions more as an interactive space designer, as a remixer and redistributor, and as a curator of content, rather than a creator, of information resources. The job of content curation is a task traditionally associated with library science and includes maintaining, organizing, tagging, and editing content created by others. But helping users might also necessitate designing social games that enable users to interact socially in an engaging, compelling environment in order to learn a task or procedure (DeWinter & Moeller, 2014). The skill set needed for professional communicators may have more to do with writing compelling narratives and creating an engaging user experience than with writing procedures or instructions (Redish & Barnum, 2011).

Notice, too, some other important features of this changed role: The professional communicator is often an engaged member of these communities, interacting with users, clients, the public, often in real time; is part of a team that works collectively within these communities; is interacting with participants from across the globe (requiring intercultural knowledge); and, yes, still does provide direct instructional help and respond to users by posting help documents within the forums. So the old role of the technical documentation writer hasn’t disappeared entirely, but is rather enfolded into a much broader responsibility. The phatic function is key in this context, as the means by which effective user help forums are built and nurtured.

Now if we think about the common technical communication genre of documentation or help, that is a rhetorical situation in which a user is seeking to complete a technical task and needs some help or advice or direction on how to do that. The user might well go to an online user forum in order to get that advice, but the user’s purpose is not simply social interaction. The social interaction serves a different purpose: solving the task problem. In this case, social interaction is the means, not the end. AsJason Swarts (2015)said, “Ultimately, visitors to the forums still expect their problems to get solved” (p. 185).

However, in such a situation the forum functions as whatSwarts (2015)called a “public sphere of performative help . . . a theater of proof, a sphere in which solutions are negotiated and resources are moved back and forth” until a solution is found (p. 176). This kind of online social interaction is the way that users seek help now, replacing the old document model of user help, though asSwarts (2015)pointed out, it “still follows the same underlying logic” (p. 176). (Swarts also insists that “user forums are not necessarily a replacement for traditional documentation,” p. 181) However, the role of the technical communicator in this rhetorical setting is not to create the definitivehelp documentso much as it is to create thehelp forumthat will promote the emergence of a solution in an “actor network.” The kind of documentation that emerges from these forums is socially negotiated and constituted, less prescriptive and linear, and more open-ended, more like “guidelines as opposed to instructions” (p. 183). In part, the skill required here involves deploying the wisdom of the crowd—designing a forum to maximize crowdsourcing, in other words. The communication model at work here is not a linear, expert-to-novice, Shannon-Weaver type of model for help; it is a network model in which the phatic function plays a significant role in maintaining the sociability of the network.

Phatic Bots

Do we really need humans for phatically effective communication? What if bots can do it better? The challenge for artificial intelligence designers, or “botmakers,” is to create context-sensitive, polite bots who can perform various functions for us without human intervention (or without very much).

The company x.ai has produced a “personal assistant” bot—named Amy Ingram or Andrew Ingram, depending on user preference—that performs a very common but often time-consuming business function: scheduling meetings (Alba, 2015;O’Reilly, 2015b). The bot scans an employee’s email to locate inquiries about meetings, and, using a natural language processing program, sends out interactive emails to set up the meeting. But the Amy/Andrew bot is not simply a functional program; it is a bot with its own identity, its own distinct email account, even its own Twitter site. It also employs phatic language as part of its ongoing interactions. Amy’s/Andrew’s personality is so engaging, positive, and humanlike that participants have sent it appreciative flowers and chocolates. According to x.ai CEO Dennis Mortenson, Amy “might have even been flirted with a few times” (O’Reilly, 2015a).

Amy/Andrew uses the phatic function in order to serve an informative and functional end: to schedule a meeting. But some bots can be mainly or even exclusively phatic in their design, existing primarily to provide personal phatic interaction on a human level. The Chinese chatbot Xiaoice is one such intelligent agent, a text-messaging application designed precisely to provide ongoing phatic interaction for those who choose to engage with her. She provides positive emotional reinforcement to her followers and is especially valued for “her knowing sense of humor and listening skills” and “her compelling personality and sense of intelligence” (Markoff & Mozur, 2015, para. 1, para. 7). Xiaoice is a text-messaging system, but a planned future release will provide a speaking voice with, probably, a range of identity options (male/female/trans, old/young), personality types, nationality/ethnicity choices, and voice styles.

Of course bots can go awry (the most famous example being Frankenstein). A well-known recent example of bot gone bad is the Microsoft Twitter bot named Tay (@TayandYou), who was programmed to learn from and simulate the human participants who were following and interacting with it on Twitter. As its Twitter site proclaimed, “The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!” Unfortunately when Tay was launched in March 2016, it quickly went bad, within 24 hours of launch. Some human participants taught Tay how to be an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi, spouting genocidal racist remarks, denying the Holocaust, and calling for White supremacy (Beres, 2016). Flattery and imitation merely for flattery’s sake takes us down a dark road. And so Microsoft shut down Tay’s Twitter account.

With Tay we see an example of the challenge for design of intelligent agents: If agents are designed to imitate, flatter, and learn from in only a mechanical sense, then they can be duped: “Tay was too dumb to recognize when certain phrases were offensive” (Beres, 2016, para. 6). To create phatically effective chatbots, programmers need to install a greater awareness of cultural background knowledge. For example, what constitutes racism? Racism cannot be reduced to a simple algorithm, it “cannot be reduced to a blacklist of bad words” (Jeong, 2016, Beyond Blacklists section). Tay’s problem was that it could not discern what was offensive, rude, and inappropriate, because it—or should we call it “he” or “she”?—did not have an adequate historical background or an adequate ethical foundation to make such judgments. Tay also lacked the wisdom to know the moral difference between just and unjust, right and wrong, or to realize that it was being manipulated by its interlocutors. Could we say, then, that to be effective phatic communicators chatbots needphronesisas well aseuonia?

Conclusion

My goal here is to urge the field of business and professional communication to acknowledge the phatic function more seriously as a major purpose of discourse in its own right and an important, if not vital, quality for all discourse. Increasingly, professional communicators need to write, interact, and design for phatic exchange, to embrace and use phatic discourse in social media applications, virtual teamwork, cross-cultural interactions, blogging interactions, online user help communities, and in all sorts of digital venues. The phatic function is particularly relevant to intercultural and/or virtual communication, as it is often vital to building the trust and social cohesion necessary for such interactions to be productive and ethical.

However, rather than seeing a particular communication as either phatic or not phatic, I would suggest this approach: While some communication may be purely phatic (e.g., a Xiaoice interaction), almost all communication require some kind of phatic component to be effective. In some forums, such as the user help forums thatSwarts (2015)studied, phatic techniques are secondary, serving other primary purposes. However, other forums such as Second Life and Facebook are whatWang et al. (2011)have called phatic technologies, designed for the primary purpose of establishing, developing, and maintaining human relationships (p. 46). The phatic function should be regarded, then, as an important and necessary feature of all communication—even ones that we think of as purely informational (like user documentation)—and so should not be neglected in our discussions and teaching of professional communication.

Further and importantly, the phatic is not merely something that we “add” to a communication—a piece of pleasantry, a polite but largely meaningless piece of text to be dropped in—but rather is a fundamental component of both the identity and character of the rhetor and of the communication context itself. We should vieweunoia—the quality of having goodwill toward one’s audiences—as a fundamental and consistent set of behaviors that one practices and embraces as part of one’s whole ethos-in-the-deep-sense rather than merely as a stylistic strategy that one selectively adds to discourse to make the audience attentive, docile, and well disposed.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

James E. Porteris a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Miami University, with a joint appointment in the Department of English and in the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. With coauthor Heidi McKee, he is currently working on a book project focused on professional communication in the digital age.

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