As Samuel McCormick reminds us in 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 Kiekegaard’s work on chatter. Part II, ‘Idle Talk’, then focuses on the work of Heidegger. Part III, ‘Empty Speech’, is 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.

中文翻译：

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书注：经济不平等和新闻媒体：话语、权力和再分配

正如塞缪尔·麦考密克（Samuel McCormick）在他的书开头提醒我们的那样，数字谈话在我们的日常生活中越来越多地占据了比口语话语更大的空间。他使用雪莉·特克尔（Sherry Turkle）的术语“逃离谈话”（第 1 页）来描述这个过程。他描绘的画面太熟悉了：“有了移动设备，恋人现在可以从一个房间发送到另一个房间，朋友和家人现在坐在一起吃饭，一起盯着屏幕看，同事们现在开会时低头，清空收件箱齐声……单独在一起，总是在别处——这就是我们如何体验从谈话中逃离的方式。在急于联系的过程中，我们忽略了交谈”（第 1-2 页）。麦考密克还提醒我们，在线聊天经常会产生对亲密关系的期望，并提出关于它们是否构成对话的问题。他的书专注于对话“作为日常生活的一种实践和学习关注的对象”（第 2 页）。他在书中提出的两个关键问题是：“在接下来的一个半世纪里，对话发生了什么？这告诉我们什么关于今天谈话的飞行？（第 2 页）。他的书提供了日常谈话的概念历史，被定义为“在私人和公共环境中发生的普通、习惯性和频繁递归的交流”（第 4 页）。麦考密克承认，这一概念本身在传播的历史和哲学中一直被边缘化，包括在他赖以建立的索伦·阿拜·克尔凯郭尔、马丁·海德格尔和雅克·拉康的作品中。本书分为三个部分，每个部分包含三个章节。第一部分，“喋喋不休”，探索 Kiekegaard 关于喋喋不休的工作。第二部分，“闲谈”，然后重点介绍海德格尔的工作。第三部分，“空话”，专门讨论拉康的空话概念。总而言之，这是一本引人入胜且写得很好的书，绝对值得一读。