Why do you keep talking nonsense to maintain the atmosphere?

Camus' masterpiece The Outsider has such a description: I (Musso) went to a restaurant to eat, and I had already eaten. A strange little woman came up to me and asked me if I could share a table with me. I agreed. She sat down, took off her coat, looked through the menu and ordered in a hurry. While waiting for cold dishes, I took out a pen and paper from my handbag, calculated the meal expenses, took out the meal expenses in my wallet and put them in front of me with a tip. After serving, wolfed down. Between each dish, take out a magazine, look through it, and take notes in circles from time to time. After dinner, put on your clothes and leave neatly. All this time, there has been no communication with me. And I think she is really strange, curious and secretly followed her for a while.

I smiled when I read this passage. She is an "outsider" who is more eccentric and self-centered than the protagonist Musso, an outsider in the secular sense. For most modern people, this mode of getting along in the bone marrow is just imagination, which makes people feel on pins and needles. And more often, we will use constant communication to avoid this embarrassing situation.

So, why do we keep talking nonsense to maintain the atmosphere? Or, what drives us to communicate constantly?

Duan Yifu, a human geographer, once distinguished "chatting" from "talking" in theory.

"Dialogue refers to a conversation with substantive content about relevant events and opinions, and it is a speech act in the field of public affairs; Chatting is the exchange of gossip information, which is basically used to maintain unity among people who exchange information. "

Based on this, in order to maintain the atmosphere, "embarrassing chat" has a justified living soil.

When the leaders in the company group speak, there are always positive colleagues who "bring a wave of rhythm" and a bunch of uniform praises, applause and 666 are uniform.

In the group of seven aunts and eight aunts, a photo of "food" without composition and filter is also sought after because of the relationship-"it looks delicious", "the best in the world" and "Auntie, your cooking is really good!" .

The theme of a certain issue of New Weekly is to discuss the embarrassing state. As the most representative "embarrassing chat", there is a description, which largely summarizes the current communication situation in the current social environment.

In order to fight against loneliness, people's inner desire for * * * is powerful, but many times, we will amplify this self-drive and ignore the great influence of emotions and environment on our decision-making.

There is a famous "dangerous bridge effect" in social psychology. A beautiful female researcher plays an investigator and accosts all the subjects who pass by her (the experimenters are young single men) and asks them to help them complete a questionnaire. When finished, she will leave her contact information to the other party. After the experiment, the number of phone calls made by men was counted. The results show that the number of phone calls received by female researchers is much higher than that received in safer scenes (parks/low wooden bridges, etc.). ).

This kind of heartbeat acceleration caused by "dangerous situation" confuses the charm of the object itself and produces a psychological effect similar to love. Some product design functions that people talk about in social software are addictive through accurate insight into people's psychology and behavior. The following two examples are representative-

Psychology: curiosity

Function: unread message prompt

When you turn on the message push of your mobile phone, those unread messages will remind us with the little red circle in the upper right corner. Every time we click on those red circle app icons, we expect the content behind them to be "what's interesting and important". It is undeniable that useless information in these push messages accounts for a large proportion, but disappointment also makes it more difficult for us to expect more red circles.

Psychology: gaining recognition

Function: like it

Facebook's "like"

This is the most successful and iconic feature of facebook. Now, when we talk about Facebook, we often directly use the little thumbs-up hand instead.

Ask yourself, how many people didn't expect to be praised by others when we posted a sentence, a photo, an article and a video on social platforms?

Soon, all social media standards were approved. Then, with the prosperity of the circle of friends, we have another relationship-"like friends."

Edward Twitchell Hall Jr, an anthropologist, put forward the concept of contextual culture in his masterpiece Beyond Culture and divided it into high-context communication and low-context communication.

Specifically, high-context culture mainly relies on people's pre-set and ancestor-oriented procedures to transmit information, such as many unwritten traditional habits, self-evident values and universally recognized behavior patterns. Low-context culture emphasizes rationality and logic, that is, it draws logical conclusions based on rational practice and conveys clear information through clear language. At the national level, the representatives of oriental cultures, such as China and Japan, are representative countries in a high context. The United States, a country where immigrants are integrated, is a representative of low context.

Under the background of high context, communication is implicit, people are very sensitive to implicit information, and individuals have learned to explain these implicit information accurately since childhood. The premise of communication is that everyone has a very high understanding of the background of communication with each other.

The rapid development of Internet has subverted China's high context. This is especially obvious when you start socializing with strangers online. There are obvious intergenerational differences between the post-80s and post-90s contexts. The recent popular STEM-"I'd rather you surf the Internet" vividly outlines the demise and changes of online buzzwords.

However, due to the subtle influence of "high-context countries" for thousands of years, it is a common social state to quickly identify "peers" and eliminate "old people" in the low-context environment of the Internet. Although rude, it can significantly save the cost of chatting.

If you chat with a person, the other person's mantra is still "Hehe" and the expression "smile" is used from time to time, it is easy for you to label the other person as "post-70s and post-80s". You should know that the popularity and disappearance of online buzzwords in this era are so rapid that the "high context state" formed by a buzzword can't even be maintained for several months. The once-popular Power of the Wild, Little Fist Beating the Chest and Exquisite Pig Girl are long out of date. Young people who follow the trend are constantly abandoning old buzzwords, but at the same time, they are also discovering new buzzwords (such as the joke about wandering earth by the Transportation Bureau) and using it as a "joint code" to open their own high-context topics.

Sometimes, we get pleasure by socializing, and sometimes, we draw strength by being alone. There is no contradiction between the two. You can be happy. In short, this peace of mind is my hometown.