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Article published In: Skype and domestic settings: Interpersonal video communication as a site of human sociality
Edited by Richard Harper, Rod Watson and Christian Licoppe
[Pragmatics 27:3] 2017
► pp. 351–386

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Skype appearances, multiple greetings and ‘coucou’

The sequential organization of video-mediated conversation openings

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 October 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.3.03lic
Abstract
This paper analyses the organization of ‘openings’ in Skype video-mediated conversation. It uncovers order in their apparent complexity by showing the relevance of a particular sequential adjacent pair organization, the appearing/noticing sequence, and its particular instantiation as an appearance-for-the-first-time greeting. The paper shows how this is a crucial resource in establishing a joint video interactional frame for the parties involved. This accounts for the occurrence of some specific phenomena in Skype openings, such as multiple greetings, and for the use of greetings which reflexively index their being occasioned by an appearance and related greeting, such as the French ‘coucou’, even when these do not occur at the start of Skype calls. When analysed this way, Skype openings, though complex, can be seen as an accomplished ‘dance of appearances and multiple greetings’.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysis
    • 2.1Pre-beginnings and the collaborative assemblage of a social scene for video-mediated encounters
    • 2.2Multiple greetings
    • 2.3Analyzing various actual instances of multiple greetings in the opening of Skype conversations
    • 2.4Multiple greetings and the embedding of video-mediated communication in larger communicative ecologies
    • 2.5Not only appearing, but appearing in a certain way
    • 2.6A subtly orchestrated choreography of multimodal appearances and greetings
    • 2.7‘This is not to be seen as the beginning’: Designing visual appearances and greetings so as to neutralize some of their sequential implications
    • 2.8A sequentially frustrating succession of finely coordinated appearances and withdrawals
    • 2.9Actually beginning the video conversation: A third greeting sequence
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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