David's thread about small talk goes on:

Piers Young

[from Monkeymagic: Small Talk & Teabreaks]

David, Suw, and Stowe are extolling the virtues of chit chat at the moment. And I completely agree that it is a virtue we need to hold on to. But the tea-break is not just about small talk. In fact, small talk is not just about small talk. It is as much about the ceremony of small talk as it is the content.

Last February I pointed to some research indicating that the tea break addressed four seemingly key elements of groupwork: social glue, relaxing, structuring work and helping. Stowe puts quite a burden of expectation on social tools, though, when he says that

"social tools are the only hope we have of holding on to the annealing benefits of small talk-ish interactions."

I think he's right to worry - very much so - but do blogs, IM and the like cannot cover all four elements?

Hmm. Not sure at all. Let's say you and your boss go for a pint after work - who buys? What does that imply (if anything)? How does that affect your working relationship? Allowing the chit chat to happen is a great, valuable wonderful thing. But there are ways of making it happen - tea breaks, beers after work and the like - that gain much of their value not just from the chit and the chat, but from the ceremony.

Piers is right in many ways. You can't get the full-on experience of hanging out in a pub through social tool mediated interactions. And as result, many of the "ceremonial" aspects of those face-to-face experiences are lost or at least diminished in the social tools context.

But the reason that I have argued that "social tools are the only hope we have of holding on to the annealing benefits of small talk-ish interactions" is really driven from an Oldenburg perspective: people in the developed world (especially North America and Europe) are increasingly less likely to vist the "great good place" on a regular basis. They are less likely -- at all age groups, socioeconomic brackets, and levels of education -- to join bowling leagues, hang out at the VFW post, or drink a pint with the boys after work. Even young single people are less likely to go to bars: its not just old farts like me doing it less. In fact, the terrifying conclusion of Putnum's important Bowling Alone is that the trend lines of social belongingness trail off to zero in the next few decades, absent some revolution at a grassroots social level.

The Internet appears to be the only source of light at the end of this particular tunnel. Every hour that people spend on the Internet -- which is increasingly shifting from a mass media experience to a social media experience -- is an hour not spent watching television. And television is social death, the core poison sapping our collective well-being.

Coupled with an increasingly dispersed and mobile workforce, the divisive effects of television's anti-glue might lead to the end of social interaction and community involvement, altogether.

So: if it is not social tools, then, what will it be? Political parties and government programs have been ineffective, and calls from the pulpit have (largely) gone unheeded: as Putnum points out, the current surge in interest in "new" Protestantism in the US is really an exclusionary exercise, with increasingly homogeneous congregations. The traditional media fail at exposing and exploring issues like the collapse of social cohesion, because these sorts of stories don't meet the tone and tempo of the 6 O'Clock News. It's like the environment: it's degrading too slowly (although all too fast) to be the top news story on any given day, unless the Exxon Valdees runs aground. Unless there is a postal worker spraying bullets into former co-workers, or a disaaffected clutch of high schoolers brewing TNT in the chemistry lab, the media are generally disinclined to prate about the unraveling of the overall social fabric, and the central role that television seems to play in it.

Do it. Shoot your TV; go online, and find something worth talking about, something worth chatting about, something worth fighting about -- anything -- and invest yourself in it. It's the only hope.

None of the existing power systems -- political, economic, media, entertainment, or religious -- have done anything in the past five decades to stem the rise of social alienation. But, somehow, people are finding ways to do so, on a bottom-up, grassroots level.

And new ceremonies, new etiquette, and forms of relationships are evolving too. So we will have new sorts of small talk -- for the time being without the same level of face-to-face interaction -- but new ways of remaining socially connected and engaged. I track the comings and goings of dozens of "equiantences" [to use Gary Turner's term] through instant messaging presence feedback, every day. I ping them: "how's the flu? Getting better?" or "Did you see Collateral yet?" or "Is there hope for Kerry?". My far-flung net of significant others helps me to find meaning and purpose in a random and chancy world, and I hope I reciprocate to some degree.

In a world trying hard to tear itself apart, we need to work hard to thread ourselves together, and social tools make it -- if not easy -- at least possible.