** My Intellectual Flakes **

I came across a quite interesting article by Grant McCracken. He noted that the communication through social software/website such as Facebook, twitter can be characterized as  ” phatic communication” -

This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content.  Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.

In this sense, the emotional and social value of such tools are paramount. The informational value took the second place. We all have such experience ( maybe mostly women) when we vent just to get things out, not necessarily seek for advice or feedback.

This notion of “phatic communication” really resonates in me since I observed that the preservice teachers’ blogs in my study are mostly emotion-laden and social-oriented. In this respect, discussion forum is quite different. Surely there might be indicators of emotion and social interaction in discussion forum, but the level might vary drastically. This is associated with the sense of ownership.