Beginnings in the telephone

Abstract

I come to the theme of this volume – “Mobile communication, private talk, public performance” – as a student of conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction. The sort of work my colleagues and I do is focused on the “stuff” of quotidian interaction, as encountered in naturally occurring settings, as captured by modern recording devices which allow repeated examination of particular specimens, and thereby facilitate our overcoming the relentless blinders of familiarity which can keep us from seeing what is really going on, and how it gets to be that way. That is how I came some years ago to take as an analytic target talk on the telephone – the ordinary, fixed, wired telephone; it is that analytic experience which is my credential for this volume, and is the basis for what is offered in what follows. The title of this volume – “Perpetual Contact” – reminds me of a similar-sounding phrase introduced some years ago – “a continuing state of incipient talk” (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). The phrase referred to certain interactional circumstances (and a form of overall structural organization of conversation) in which the parties' co-presence is shaped by contingencies independent of the character of their talk. Familiar venues in which one finds continuing states of incipient talk are members of a family or other living arrangement sitting together in a common room; members of a car pool en route to or from their destination; seatmates on an airplane or train; and the like.

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