ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how, in his approach to greetings, Sacks’s emphasis seems to have shifted from an early interest in what makes the production of a first greeting relevant – that is, the ‘first position’ for greetings – towards a later preoccupation with greetings as a special case of adjacent pairs with a particular relevance to the overall structure of conversations. I take the phenomenon of ‘multiple greeting sequences’ in video calls as an example of the fruitfulness of revisiting Sacks’s work. Multiple greeting sequences make it necessary to understand what makes a greeting relevant in the first place and, therefore, they make vivid again Sacks’s initial concern with, and ideas about, the ‘first position for greetings’. Finally, I discuss how and why these issues may be particularly important to understand the initiation of social encounters in digital ecologies.
