One central theme of my contribution to this volume (chapter 18) is that inquiry into new technology – like the several technologies of “perpetual contact” – is most likely to be productive of new ideas and knowledge if the technology is examined not (or not only) as an object in its own right, but by reference to its intersection with things toward which we already have a cogent analytic stance. In the case of my own work and experience, the technology of the telephone – the old-fashioned, wired, fixed telephone – served as a prism through which were refracted the practices of ordinary talk-in-interaction. The result not only pinpointed some interactional issues that were brought to the fore on the telephone (as noted in chapter 18), but provided the impetus for noticing, registering and describing practices of ordinary talk-in-interaction that pervade conversation when persons are co-present. Seeing the ways in which these practices of talking were modified on the telephone brought their very existence into sharper focus and required an account of them in non-technologically mediated contexts to allow a specification of their transformation when implemented through a new technological medium.

The document published in Appendix B presents an example of this intersection, and one that played a role in the development of Conversation Analysis. Studying the openings of telephone calls to the police in the aftermath of a disaster provided the occasion for isolating for careful description common practices for initiating conversation in a delicate, yet “routinized,” aspect of interpersonal interaction, and, more generally still, for explicating how a great variety of practices of talking in interaction, and efforts to carry through a variety of courses of action, get organized and packaged in well-structured sequences of turns at talk.