Is “Six Seven” Really Brain Rot?
“Thank God it’s Friday.” “It’s hot outside.” “How’s it goin’?” “Can you believe this rain?” Malinowski described such utterances as forms of “phatic” communication. This somewhat awkward term, which has been adopted by generations of researchers, comes from the Greek verb meaning “to speak out loud.” Phatic communication is like the verbal equivalent of primate grooming behavior: it’s a way for people to provide and experience connection and companionship. We’re so used to thinking in terms of written language, which almost always means something, that the idea of meaningless language might seem like an oxymoron. But when we’re dealing with what Malinowski calls “wingéd words, passing from man to man,” it’s often the case that “the conception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and futile.” If you respond to the deli guy’s “How ya doin’?” with an earnest account of your mood that day, you’re making the mistake of attributing meaning to a meaningless bit of phatic communication. It’s like thinking that, because the barista smiles at you, she’s interested.
Could meaninglessness itself be a message? In a recent exploration of “six seven” in the Times, the style reporter Callie Holtermann argues that the phrase might be seen as “a kind of gleeful obfuscation, an effort to be unknowable by a generation that has, virtually since birth, been relentlessly on display.” A writer tells Holtermann that “six seven” is meant “to frustrate the olds”—it’s a way of saying, “Let us exist in our own space.” These ideas sound plausible, but might be too centered on the concerns of adults. When a busload of elementary schoolers shouts “six seven!” between the sixth and seventh stops, are they really trying to say something to the bus driver? “There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company,” Malinowski writes. Childhood and adolescence are socially challenging. Maybe kids love “six seven” because it makes togetherness easy.
We can choose deliberately to do the things we do, or we can respond to the situation we’re in; we can get swept up in the vibe, feeling the social energy. This second way of being may be more fundamental than we realize. “We should see individuals as transient fluxes charged up by situations,” the sociologist Randall Collins proposed, in 2004. What we do depends on what others do. It’s for this reason, he wrote, that the sociological point of view emphasizes “not individuals and their interactions, but interactions and their individuals; not persons and their passions, but passions and their persons.”
What does “six seven” look like, from this perspective? In “Interaction Ritual Chains” (don’t judge a book by its title!), Collins lays out a holistic theory of human nature, centered on rituals, into which “six seven” fits nicely. A ritual, Collins explains, “is a mechanism of mutually focussed emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality.” There are big-time rituals, like communion, and small-time ones, like shaking hands, or dapping up, or standing at the front of a conference room and clearing your throat. These acts—which often involve a physical component—help make gatherings of people cohere. Rituals are “everywhere,” Collins writes, because social life is ultimately “a string of situations” which must be inaugurated, conducted, and concluded.
Rituals do more than lend structure to our days, Collins argues; they also create “emotional energy,” which is something we crave. We want to feel alive, valued, connected, “charged up.” On Sundays, in church, we experience something special when we’re all together, praying; we have “feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action.” We can’t stay in church forever, but its rituals attach their emotion to “cognitive symbols,” which we might later use to extend the good vibes. Church ends; you go home; ordinary life resumes. But, later, you see the steeple above the treetops, and you feel a surge of energy flowing from your fellows and God. “What holds society together?” Collins asks. The answer is “groups of people assembled in particular places who feel solidarity with each other”—and who then find ways of sustaining that solidarity across space and time, using symbols and rituals that help them feel it even when they’re not together.
The internet has changed society a great deal, but it hasn’t changed it completely. We’re still the same old human beings, with the same old ways of relating to one another. “Six seven” wouldn’t exist without marketing, virality, and brain rot—but it’s not reducible to those things. Earlier this week, my wife and I took Peter to an after-school program at a nearby arboretum. Along with a few other kids, whom he didn’t know, he was made to tromp desultorily through the cold grounds, collecting leaves to use in some unspecified craft project. The kids shuffled and wandered, tired at the end of a long day. Then the organizer pointed out a tree that, unusually, bore forty kinds of fruit—it was a work of living botanical wizardry created, through grafting, by the artist Sam Van Aken. “Forty-one,” Peter exclaimed. (That’s six times seven minus one.) The other kids laughed, and their gazes met. For a little while, their energy returned. ♦
