David Weinberger makes the case for small talk:

David Weinberger

[from JOHO]

Small talk lets you and your interlocutor take little steps until you find ground you share.

Over at Headshift, Suw picks up on David's meme, and elaborates on the loss of opportunity in today's workplace to rub antennae together in constructive ways:

Suw Charman

[from Headshift]

The demise of the communal teabreak in offices has probably done more harm that good. The habit in many offices is that people work through their breaks, including lunch, and the idea of taking a short break mid-morning and mid-afternoon is very much frowned upon. People also have a tendency not to take breaks communally anymore except for the odd lunch or drinks after work. These trends decrease the opportunity for face-to-face small talk in the workplace.

Instead, people use email, instant messaging programme or external blogs or bulletin boards in order to get their fix of chitchat. The social requirement for small talk hasn't gone away, it's just moved online.

At the Social Tools for Enterprise Symposium, Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing social software internally at the BBC. He found that a significant fraction of posts on the bulletin boards were not overtly to do with work, but either passing on experiences gained outside of work or the sort of small talk that glues communities together. But, as Euan says, "People get to trust each other through small talk, and I actively defend it against those who say it is not work related."

At Headshift we hold the same view. Implementing blogs and other social tools in a work environment allows us to provide individuals with their own voice and the opportunity to connect witwith colleagues and build relationships using, at least in part, constructive small talk. Creating a way for people to comfortably engage in small talk, and removing the stigma attached to it, will help them create and maintain the sorts of social ties that allow them to both feel more comfortable and function more effectively in the workplace.

In fact, social tools are the only hope we have of holding on to the annealing benefits of small talk-ish interactions. There is too much movement, timeshifting, and geographic dislocation to keep up with your office buddy, who was transferred to another building across town, or to another city, and the new folks that have moved into your building are likewise too time pressured for tea or beers after work. We have to wrest tiny snippets out of the flow of everyday work, note that Peter has come on line by sending a brief "wassup?" or pinging Greg with some tidbit of news. If we don't reach out through these social tools we will live increasingly isolated and less fulfilling lives.

And as David points out, finding shared ground, step by step, is why we should all be big on small talk.