Communication Inside the Bubble of the Automobile

A recent Semiotica (Issue 191, Aug 2012) has a themed section on communicative behaviors and the automobile. From the framing piece (Meaning and Motion: Sharing the Car, Sharing the Drive) that leads off:

"The papers of this issue are informed primarily by the insights and analytical approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), in particular for studying the multimodal nature of social interaction, for example, as represented in a recent collection in this journal (Stivers and Sidnell 2005b). In their analyses, the authors in this special issue address a range of “semiotic modalities” (see Stivers and Sidnell 2005a: 1), including verbal (language), and visuospatial and embodied modalities of gesture, gaze, body postural position and movement, facial expression, and available resources (e.g., objects) and features of car as a material setting. The papers therefore draw on the cumulative insights and approaches of over three decades of research on interaction as embodied and occurring relative to its material and spatial surrounds (especially after Goodwin 1981; e.g., see McIlvenny et al. 2009), across a huge range of both everyday and work settings (e.g., courtrooms and police work, classrooms and other sites of instruction, surgery and medical and health consultations, meetings, research fieldwork, control centers, and collaborative professional work)...The primary data for each of the papers for this issue are video/audio recordings of real-life driving journeys, from which the authors have made detailed transcriptions and taken stills. Analyses are informed by ethnographic detail. The recordings have been made across a number of countries (France, Israel, Australia, the UK, Finland, and the USA). The recordings capture people from a rich variety of different nationalities (in addition to the above, people from Norway and Slovenia), and represent individual drivers, families, friends, work colleagues, children, and teenagers. The papers therefore provide a rich selection of studies of everyday life inside the car. Together they begin to reveal something of the working and order of a particular activity site, and even about specific social relations and groupings (such as family, etc.), as they are situated and realized moment-to-moment (Goodwin 2007)."

Here are the articles:

Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive

Haddington, Pentti / Nevile, Maurice / Keisanen, Tiina

What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions and wayfinding in the family car

Laurier, Eric / Brown, Barry / Hayden, Lorimer

Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars

Haddington, Pentti

Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence

Nevile, Maurice

“Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned noticings of trouble in in-car interaction

Keisanen, Tiina

Talking and driving: Multiactivity in the car

Mondada, Lorenza

Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes

 Goodwin, Marjorie Harness / Goodwin, Charles

The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language

Keating, Elizabeth / Mirus, Gene

Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run

Noy, Chaim

September CommQuote

September's CommQuote is visual, brought to us by Salvador Dali whose late work is being featured at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through January 9, 2011. Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone (1938) is featured in the exhibit and seems to fit nicely with what I look for in good, albeit pictorial, quotes for the blog.

March CommQuote

A lyric from Mark Knopfler off his latest "album" Get Lucky is our feature for this month's quote. The song expresses a simple longing for life as lived before the car and before television. Both are indirectly impugned by the speaker's nostalgia for other forms of leisure.

Before Gas And TV

Before gas and TV
Before people had cars
We'd sit round the fires
Pass around a guitar
Remembering songs
When my daddy was home
He'd play along
On the spoons and a comb

We'd go with the flow
When the weather was fine
Sometimes we'd go
Collecting scrap iron
Then we'd sit round the fires
Pass a bottle of wine
And the tales of the road
Since time out of mind

If heaven's like this
Well, that's okay with me
Where the living is fine
And living is free
If heaven's like this
Well, then here's where I'll be
On the edge of the field
On the edge of the world
Before gas and TV.

--Mark Knopfler (2009, Get Lucky)