I often reminded my students that there’s no such thing as small talk. All talk is big talk!
Why? Because with our daily outpouring of talk, we create the social worlds we then inhabit. It’s sometime referred to as “the social construction of reality.”
That social world we inhabit is largely a linguistic world. Although populated by people, people talk, and we float on a sea of words from day to day. Consider this. What if you recorded all your face-to-face conversations and all your media interactions say, for a month? Then what if you sorted all that talk by subject matter. There might be lots of talk about clothing and fashion; lots of talk about food; lots of talk about sports maybe; lots of talk about relationships, for sure, romantic and otherwise; maybe some talk about the weather. You get the idea.
Richard Conville
Spread out before you, that’s the world you live in. You’ve named objects and events and emotions, you’ve conjured up verbs to capture their movement or action, and adjectives and adverbs bring it all to life. The world, from the point of view of “the social construction of reality,” is a social-linguistic world. And it’s the world you and I live in. And guess what, it’s been created mostly (but not completely) by you and me. We are the culprits. That’s why it’s big and not small.
It was and is so easy for my students, and all of us for that matter, to fall into the trap of not noticing our daily, ordinary talk. Talk, it often appears, is cheap. There’s so much of it, and it’s all around us. How can something so plentiful be so valuable? The normal rules of supply and demand do not apply to talk.
In an effort to understand this phenomenon, scholars crafted the concept of “the social construction of reality.” That is the title of a book by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. It is still in print after 60 years and still challenging our thinking. Scholars in sociology, social psychology, communication studies, anthropology, linguistics and English have used it and debated its merits.
The concept has even found its way into the field of religious studies. In his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg uses the concept to explain what Jesus was up to in his ministry. Borg argues Jesus was pushing back against the conventional wisdom of his day, for example, that calamity is a result of disobedience (see John 9:2).
“How can something so plentiful be so valuable? The normal rules of supply and demand do not apply to talk.”
Borg’s understanding of conventional wisdom is “a culture’s most taken-for-granted understandings about the way things are, … a culture’s social construction of reality.” Which is a product of our talk.
Back to small talk. You encounter a stranger, say, in a coffee shop or at local bar or in line at the grocery store or in the gym, and you fall into conversation (does that still happen?). What’s the small talk like? Safe topics at first, of course. But then later, maybe politics or religion. Or maybe their mother who is very ill or your brother who was just deployed to the Middle East. As trust builds, topics change.
First there’s the topic; then there’s the tone. Do you use the language of despair and hopelessness? Do you express anger? Does your speech reflect compassion and empathy; even optimism? Do you praise some and condemn others?
Whatever the topic and the tone of your daily stream of talk, you also are creating the social reality shared by you and the people you talk with regularly. You are — whatever else you may think you are doing at the time — building the world you will be obliged to live in. As Berger and Luckmann put it, “The product acts back on the producer.”
There’s no such thing as small talk; all talk is big talk. Handle with care!
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies and service learning at the University of Southern Mississippi and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg where he is a member of University Baptist church.