Abstract
As Samuel McCormick reminds us at the beginning of his book, digital talk increasingly occupies a much bigger space in our everyday lives than spoken discourse. He uses Sherry Turkle's term ‘the flight from conversation’ (p. 1) to describe this process. The picture he paints is all too familiar: ‘With mobile devices in hand, lovers now send texts from room to room, friends and families now sit and dine and stare at screens together, and colleagues now spend meetings looking down, emptying their inboxes in unison … Alone together and always elsewhere – this is how we experience the flight from conversation. In our rush to connect, we neglect to converse’ (pp. 1–2). McCormick also reminds us that online chats often create expectations about intimacy and raise questions as to whether they constitute conversations. His book is focused on conversation ‘as a practice of everyday life and an object of learned concern’ (p. 2). The two key questions he asks in his book are: ‘What happened to conversation … in the intervening century and a half? And what does this tell us about the flight from conversation today?’ (p. 2). His book offers a conceptual history of everyday talk defined as ‘the ordinary, habitual, and frequently recursive kind of communicating that occurs in private and public settings alike’ (p. 4). McCormick acknowledges the fact that the concept itself has always been marginalised in the history and philosophy of communication, including in the work of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, which he builds upon. The book is split into three parts, each of which contains three chapters. Part I, ‘Chatter’, explores Kierkegaard's work on chatter. Part II, ‘Idle Talk’, then focuses on the work of Heidegger. Part III, ‘Empty Speech’, is then devoted to Lacan's notion of empty speech. All in all, this is an intriguing and very well-written book, which is definitely worth a read.