Telephone conversation  

Robert Hopper

Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press;

A quick glance at the beginnings and endings of this book might make one expect something about the telephone and its impact on communication in general. What we get is quite different, and most useful as far as it goes. The book is a good overview of the achievements of the lively field of “conversation analysis” as applied to talk on the telephone. We needed a book like this: an intelligent, well-written, clearly presented, summary of the field, its main concepts and modes of proceeding, its vocabulary and methodology. Hopper offers all this matter of factly. He explains clearly the necessary jargon, with definitions and examples. This is an excellent book for entry into the dominant themes in the field.

Apart from the initial and ending chapters about the great age of the telephone, chapters that could appear in a weekly mass-market magazine, the bulk of the book is somewhat technical. We get, first, a summary of the conversational analysis of telephone talk, and, second, brief reports of research conducted by Hopper intended to test quantitatively some of the major postulates proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson about turn-taking. Hopper is particularly exhaustive explaining the complexities of turn-taking and pointing at the difficulties involved in the analysis. There is also a brief chapter about interruptions. It is mostly a commentary on West and Zimmerman’s research on male and female diads. Hopper shows how complex is the identification of an “interruption” as an interruption. He, like others, has found it difficult to use their definitions, and cannot duplicate their findings. There are two further brief chapters about topic and play. I suspect that these three chapters require earlier acquaintance with the works he is addressing. New comers may get lost.

Unwittingly, Hopper also reveals the limitations of conversation analysis, though he certainly does not suggest we should read his book this way: he is thoroughly uncritical of the great trinity of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. He talks repeatedly about the special character of telephone conversation but never wonders why the techniques he uses seem to fit the telephone so well. In fact this is not surprising since the tradition has always, in its practice, conceived of conversation as a tennis game where a pair exchange bits of information. Hopper, in an interesting aside, shows how early linguists like Saussure were fascinated by the telephone and used its imagery of two persons linked by a wire to give plastic shape to their theorizing. Further work is showing that multi-logue, conversation with a number of potential speakers is the model that we must now work with.

People outside the tradition may also be surprised to find out that conversation analysis is stronger with formal analyses of the beginnings of telephone conversations than with the possible content of the messages. There are good reasons to privilege medium over message in communication studies, but the weakness of the tradition reveals itself when it tries to address issues like power, gender, play, and the broad range of matters that social scientists discuss so much more convincingly.

It may be unfair to criticize Hopper for something he probably did not intend to do, except to the extent that the book is not quite presented as a simple summary of past work. As such it is indeed valuable, and I see myself recommending this book to my students as an entry into the much more difficult original articles.

[this was written for Discourse and Society but may never have been published}

1998