Awkwardness: A Theory

Online communities can be helpful here. By extending access to conversations, support, and conceptual resources, they provide space for having difficult conversations, and allow us to hone our interactions in ways that might come in handy in future face-to-face spaces.

Rather than thinking of owning awkwardness as something we do as individuals, we might think of it as a way of collectively redistributing social capital. Awkward moments are an opportunity for social inclusion, a way to acknowledge the difficulty surrounding certain topics and share the burden of navigating them. Owning awkwardness is one way to d

Awkwardness acts as a backstop against certainty and entitlement. It prevents intrusion into certain areas of people’s lives, by keeping us unsure of whether we have standing to criticize or confront them.

awkwardness can prevent premature certainty, keeping us from landing on a moral judgment or social script before we’re in an epistemic position to do so.

Awkwardness is the “um” of feelings: it buys us time to figure out what we really want to say, and to work up the resolve to say it.

First, we can coin or co-opt a term or concept. Having a shorthand for something is a way to circumvent, or at least condense, awkward conversation and the job of describing it.

Many of the problems with awkwardness arise not from its phenomenological qualities, but from our conception of it as attaching to individuals or specific issues rather than the interaction between individuals and social norms.

The question then becomes, when we have to do things awkwardly—when awkwardness is inevitable—who bears the cost?

Consciously following a script may, in these cases, seem to make things more awkward, because we’ve internalized certain existing scripts so well. But this is a consequence of the fact that our extant scripts didn’t serve everyone, and that sometimes awkwardness is an inevitable stage in transitioning to more inclusive or fairer scripts.