The Positive Implication Of Telephone Technology

It is undoubtedly that the introduction of telephone technology conduces to a number of positive social implications in terms of its interactions, identity and space. With regards to social interactions, one of the positive implications afforded by landline telephone is a sense of intimacy across distance. While early affordance of telephone technology was merely stressed on its business instrument and housekeeping and sociable functions, Prescott (1884)’s work supported the sense of intimacy afforded by telephone technology by stating that the use of landline telephone could truly retain and replicated the peculiarity of the speaker’s voice in which one voice is easily differentiated from another (Hopper, 1992). Thence, it is this affordance

Considering a face-to-face interactional settings, majority of researchers (e.g. Goffman, 1961; Kendon and Ferber, 1973) deemed that human interaction usually commences after passing through the social processes of ‘initial perception’ where people recognise someone on the street, ‘distance salutation’ where people intend to greet the recognised person (e.g. having eye contact), and ‘close salutation’ where people employ bodily contact such as handshakes (Kendon and Ferber, 1973). However, researcher such as Schegloff (1986) and Hopper (1992) argued that telephone technology with its lack of a visual access in the conversation opening signified the novel patterns of human interaction. By classifying four main sequences (‘summons-answer’, ‘identification/ recognition’, ‘greetings’ and ‘Initial inquiries’) happened in telephone conversation opening, Schegloff (1986) demonstrated the means in which telephone technology affords a new type of talk-in-interaction. Unlike the face-to-face conversation where ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ is normally deemed as a greeting, the first ‘hello’ in a telephone conversation, for instance, signified a reply to the summons in which expected interactants in this ‘summons-answer’ sequence can convey their requests for participating in the interaction, whereas the use of ‘how are you’ is indeed a means of presenting a first topic by either the caller or the called in a telephone interaction, since the replies to ‘how are you’ can have a systematically dissimilar forms which can resulted in a differential talk subsequently (Schegloff, 1986). While Schegloff’s research is mainly based on the use of telephone in the United States, other scholars (e.g. Carroll, 1987; Godard, 1997; Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1991) investigated the telephone conversation opening in other countries such as France and Netherlands and contrasted their