« Appearances », Multiple Greetings and “coucou”

This article analyses the organization of Skype conversation openings. It shows that, apart from these openings’ apparent variability and complexity, they exhibit a sequential form of organization. This organization is based on normative expectations concerning participants’ treatment of their mutual appearance (understood as recognizable transitions in capabilities to interact) and, from a sequential point of view, revolves around the “appearance/greeting” adjacent pair. The author shows how this analytical perspective is relevant to understanding interactional openings in general, and is fertile specifically for accounting for the complexity of Skype conversational openings, and for the presence therein of : a) “multiple greeting” sequences, and b) certain types of greeting that reflexively index transitions in the modalities of mutual presence, such as the French expression “coucou” (“Hi”). The participants thus deal with the problems encountered during the opening of the videophone conversation so that so that it is achieved in what looks like a finely coordinated choreography of multiple appearances and greetings.