Deborah Cameron, Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. Pp. ix, 213. Hb $65.00, pb $24.95.

Abstract

Deborah Cameron's Good to talk is excellent: an innovative and insightful analysis of what she terms “communication culture” in Britain. With a few changes, it also works for the United States. Cameron analyzes how it happened and what it means that “a commonplace social activity has been transformed into a technical skill, with its own professional experts and its own technical jargon” (p. 2) – i.e., that talk has become technicized as communication. She asks two sets of questions. First, what are the ways in which people are encouraged or required to talk, what are these norms of talk, and who has established them? Second, why codify and regulate talk in these ways, and why has communication come to be seen as causal? By addressing these questions, she gives new direction to the literature on ideologies of English, beyond the examination of linguistic form and correctness issues.