ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a semiotic model of "machine talk" and discusses its linguistic and social implications. It deals with the construction of the answering machine as both a cultural idiom and a social agent. The former describes its construction as a meaningful object in cultural discourse; the latter deals with its social use and the practical logic by which it operates. Both machine talk and social worlds are substitutes that have now taken on lives of their own. Both should be subject to careful examination. The technological design of the answering machine reflects longstanding conventions of communication. "Teletechnologies, considered as a cultural sphere, respond to a massive and unconfessed desire to escape partially and momentarily both from the symbolic constraints which persist in modern society and from totalitarian functionality. The spectrality of which M. Guillaume speaks is a combined outcome of both the anonymous mass society of modern times and the timespace distancing involved in telecommunications.
