Good to Talk?

Book excerpt: Good to Talk demonstrates powerfully why it is increasingly not so good to talk. Deborah Cameron details how talk is increasingly stylized, codified, standardized, and the subject of surveillance. Just as Michel Foucault demonstrated in the case of sex in the Victorian era, Cameron shows that there is entirely too much talk about talk' - "George Ritzer, University of Maryland " This is what an academic book should be: cool, well informed, and entertaining; a thought-provoking and dismaying study of how our everyday sense of talk as a social pleasure is now under threat from the ideology of talk as therapeutic and occupational duty' - "Simon Frith, University of Stirling