Colin B. Grant – författare

Sharing a commitment to the theory of communication to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action , Grant here issues a range of challenges to it. He critiques theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in today's world.

Sharing a commitment to the theory of communication to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action , Grant here issues a range of challenges to it. He critiques theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in today's world.

This book addresses the concept and forms of dissemination in political communication and news media. It studies the new age of dissemination in global communication manifested in a new relationship between political communication and media systems.The broad aim of this study is to investigate the «media reality» of political communication in this new age. Working within the sphere of political communication and interconnected media systems, the study examines how the information in news source texts and responses to them are recontextualised and disseminated worldwide and fed back again through recursive communication. Specifically, this work also considers the ways in which the aims of the political phenomenon of Hezbollah are disseminated and connected across various news media outlets. In particular, the process of recursive dissemination of communication is analysed in three news media outlets, namely Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN.

Compared with other human and social sciences, communication theory appears to be of recent origin. Appearances deceive, however, for the antecedents of this growing field of work can be found in the classic philosophical treatises of western and non-western thinkers including Plato, Sextus Empiricus and Laozi, reaching forward through the theolinguistic tradition of St Augustine, Boethius, Averroës and Ockham before arriving at the modern age. Following Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn and Husserl’s phenomenology in the early decades of the twentieth century, we arrive at the fertile plains of semiotics, information theory, pragmatics and dialogism out of which communication theory has grown. And yet an unresolved and historically non-coincidental tension remains between the implicit transcendental claims of much of communication theory and our experiences of risk, uncertainty and dissolution in what Zygmunt Bauman has described as our ‘liquid age’. As communication theory matures, it is an opportune moment to reflect on what form a detranscendentalised theory of communication might take. In bringing intentions, understandings, meanings and interactions down to earth this book invites its readers to account for the complex communications between communications, actors and social processes without recourse to transcendental theories of understanding.