This open access volume is about how to research the influence of our changing media environment. Today, there is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spreading of various technical communication media such as mobile phone and internet platforms, we are confronted with a media manifold of deep mediatization. But how can we investigate its transformative capability…
This book presents an in-depth description of information structure in Isthmus Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken by around 50,000 people in southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, and represents the first book-length treatment of information structure in a Mesoamerican language. Three main observations motivate the study: Strong documentation and a relatively large and active speaker community creat…
Letter writing was widespread in the Graeco-Roman world, as indicated by the large number of surviving letters and their extensive coverage of all social categories. Despite a large amount of work that has been done on the topic of ancient epistolography, material and formatting conventions have remained underexplored, mainly due to the difficulty of accessing images of letters in the past. Tha…
Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling,…
The author analyses computer chat as a form of communication. While some forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) deviate only marginally from traditional writing, computer chat is popularly considered to be written conversation and the most “oral” form of written CMC. This book systematically explores the varying degrees of conversationality (“orality”) in CMC, focusing in partic…
How can students be empowered to communicate professionally – as translators, journalists and CCOs? How can professionals engaged in crucial language interactions do the same – pilots, nurses, lawyers and many others? This volume gives answers to these questions, providing insights into critical situations and good practices from many years of research and teaching in a practice-oriented, r…
Participatory democracy has become an unshakable norm and its practice is widespread. Nowadays, public professionals and citizens regularly encounter each other in participatory practice to address shared problems. But while the frequency, pace and diversity of their public encounters has increased, communicating in participatory practice remains a challenging, fragile and demanding undertaking…
This book presents a Facebook study on members of the Cusp Generation, or those born before the “great digital divide” of 1995. This delineation allows for a discussion on the possible socio-cultural implications of Facebook use for people of all ages. Members of the Cusp Generation are in a unique position as “part digital natives” to easily acquire and use new media technologies, whil…
"This booklet documents the 36th Boehm-Bawerk Lecture, presented by Prof. Robin Mansell on October 31, 2017 as a ceremonial opening ceremony for the Institute of Media, Society and Communication at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. "
Context is what contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words. It provides information essential to clarify the intentions of a speaker, and thus to identify the actual meaning of an utterance. A large amount of research in Pragmatics has shown how wide-ranging and multifaceted this concept can be. Context spans from the preceding words in a conversation to the general kn…
This open access book explores cultural competence in the higher education sector from multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. It addresses cultural competence in terms of leadership and the role of the higher education sector in cultural competence policy and practice. Drawing on lessons learned, current research and emerging evidence, the book examines various innovative appro…
In this important new study, Imar de Vries take a historical and comparative approach in researching our intimate relationship with present-day mobile wireless technologies. By analyzing the full range of human expectations and behavior in regard to mobile devices, de Vries looks at how wireless gadgets have changed our ideas about communication, while at the same time he demonstrates how moder…
Brain oscillations, or neural rhythms, reflect widespread functional connections between large-scale neural networks, as well as within cortical networks. As such they have been related to many aspects of human behaviour. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated the role of brain oscillations at distinct frequency bands in cognitive, sensory and motor tasks. Consequentially, those rhyt…
Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published The need for a theory of citing —a call to arms fo…
Scholars contributing to this special issue on “Family Communication at the End of Life” have provided evidence that communication is vital for terminally ill individuals, family members, and healthcare/palliative care specialists. Overall, the fifteen articles in this special issue focus on five questions: First, what are the trends regarding different approaches for beginning the conversa…
‘An authoritative analysis of the role of communication in contemporary capitalism and an important contribution to debates about the forms of domination and potentials for liberation in today’s capitalist society.’ — Professor Michael Hardt, Duke University, co-author of the tetralogy Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly ‘A comprehensive approach to understanding and transce…
This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselv…
Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to crea…
This book introduces a novel approach to the design and operation of large ICT systems. It views the technical solutions and their stakeholders as complex adaptive systems and argues that traditional risk analyses cannot predict all future incidents with major impacts. To avoid unacceptable events, it is necessary to establish and operate anti-fragile ICT systems that limit the impact of all in…
In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of communication, through which persons organize their …