The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
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Donald N. Anderson
Donald N. Anderson (b. 1969) is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona 〈dna@email.arizona.edu〉. His research interests include mobile interaction, urban ethnography, ethnomathematics, and communicative technology. His publications include “Major and minor chronotopes in a specialized counting system” (2011); and “The spy in the cab: The use and abuse of taxicab cameras in San Francisco” (2012).
Abstract
The forms of emblematic gesture and other communicative moves used in hailing taxicabs are shaped by the urban built environment and by the micropolitics sparked by what Goffman called the “loose coupling” of the interaction and social orders. Cabdrivers evaluate street hails and choose whether or not to stop for prospective passengers; hailers seek to communicate their desirability as passengers within the limited mode of the street hail. The conditions and constraints that underlie the practice and reception of street hailing are considered. A survey on methods used to hail taxis was sent to a listserv of taxi drivers in San Francisco, California. The drivers evaluated street hails in terms of two axes – clarity and propriety – and three levels of context: the immediate interactional context of the street; the anticipated interactional context of the cab ride; and the political context, or the political discourse framing taxicab regulation in the city.
About the author
Donald N. Anderson (b. 1969) is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona 〈dna@email.arizona.edu〉. His research interests include mobile interaction, urban ethnography, ethnomathematics, and communicative technology. His publications include “Major and minor chronotopes in a specialized counting system” (2011); and “The spy in the cab: The use and abuse of taxicab cameras in San Francisco” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
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