Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Place Of The Answering Machine In Institutional Interaction, Julia Neikirk

Honors Papers

Telephone conversations are unusual in several ways: messages must travel a distance, communication is based only in sound (where face to face encounters draw on visual clues), generally conversations occur only in dyads (caller-answerer), the only means of entry to these encounters is a summons-answer sequence (an unusual way for a face to face encounter to begin), and talking is the primary and often the only activity taking place in such an encounter. Telephony splits sounds from other senses, splits the dyad from society, and splits communication from other activities (Hopper 1992:41). McLuban refers to the telephone as the irresistible …