Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies – serie

This book offers a new way of thinking about communication that moves beyond normative perspectives. Exhibiting postmodern theory, communicology is an idea whose time has come. Working within the European human science tradition and the philosophy of American pragmatism, the authors included in this first anthology of its kind applies a synthesis of semiotics and phenemology to the study of the cultural and social conditions of communicative praxis. Framed by the themes of human agency and efficacy, these essays focus on the realms of conscious experience in intrapersonal communicology (the self-domain), interpersonal communicology (self-other domain), social communicology (group-organization domain), and cultural communicology (group-to-group domain, including mass media and trans-cultural communication).It is the usual case in the social sciences that communication is ignored or treated as a means to more substantative ends. More-over, much work within discourse study proceeds on implicit, deeply held, culturally embedded ontological and epistemological assumptions about communication that are positivistic. Hence, uncritical and non-reflexive approaches to communication and discourse prevail. This book provides an alternative to readers curious about the fundamental nature of human communication rather than viewing this phenomenon as a mere vehicle for referents or thoughts. A designation first introduced in the United States in the 1950s by founders of the International Communication Association, the term communicology is now used to define parameters of a unique research endeavor. At its heart is the refusal of the dominant logos of discourse as the only legitimate expression of the humane.Broadly defined as the study of human discourse, this critical-interpretive approach interrogates the reversible, reciprocal, and reflexive nature of the "expressive and perceptive body," understood as the point of mediation between us and the cultural signs and codes of discourse in which we live. Communicology i

Discourse Perspectives in Organizational Communication brings together researchers from the social sciences and humanities to look at discourse and how it shapes organizations and their social actors. Unlike others in the field, this book assumes that language creates and constitutes reality, rather than simply mirroring or describing it. This collection illustrates the variety of organizational phenomena that might be studied and the range of epistemological and methodological approaches that might be used in discourse analysis techniques.

The shift from orality to literacy that began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and which went into high-gear with Gutenberg’s printing press more than 500 years ago, helped make the modern world. Some commentators have argued that this shift from orality to literacy marked a much broader, cultural shift of cataclysmic proportions. Today, with everything from e-mail to blogs, iPods and podcasts, through Google, Yahoo, eBay, and with cutting-edge smart phones, we find ourselves developing relationships with these newest communication tools that aren’t simply allowing us to communicate faster, farther and with more ease than ever before. We aren’t just moving around ideas, data, and information at unimaginable speed and scale. Our interminglings and fusions with digital communication technologies are also altering both individual and group consciousness in fundamental ways—how we form and sustain relationships, how we think and perceive, what it means to see and to feel. We are remaking human identity once more, and manufacturing a new kind of culture along the way. The processes bound up in our digination may well be consequential to the trajectory of human evolution. That time-honored trope: the notion that technology is not the problem, rather, it’s how people use technology that’s the problem is shown to be wanting. Highlighting Marshall McLuhan’s “tetrads” or laws of media as a primary tool of analysis, R.C. MacDougall argues in line with other media ecologists that it’s not so much how we use certain tools that matters, it’s that we use them. More than any other technological form perhaps, communication technologies play particularly powerful and systemic roles in our culture, or any culture for that matter. Late adopters and even abstainers are not exempt from the psychological, social and cultural effects (and side-effects) of modern digital communication technology. While there are certainly varying degrees of immersion—that is to say, while some of us live in the high-rise downtown district, some at the city limits, and still others out in the proverbial “woods"—we all live in Digination today.

This collection of essays extends the conversation on communication ethics and crisis communication to offer practical wisdom for meeting the challenges of a complex and ever-changing world. In multiple contexts ranging from the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and family to the political and public, moments of crisis call us to respond from within particular standpoints that shape our understanding and our response to crisis as we grapple with contested notions of "the good" in our shared life together. With no agreed-upon set of absolutes to guide us, this moment calls us to learn from difference as we seek resources to continue the human conversation as we engage the unexpected. This collection of essays invites multiple epistemological and methodological standpoints to consider alternative ways of thinking about communication ethics and crisis.

Public expression in the United States has become increasingly coarse. Whether it’s stupid, rude, base, or anti-intellectual talk, it surrounds us. Popular television, film, music, art, and even some elements of religion have become as coarse, we argue, as our often-disparaged political dialogue. This book’s contention is that the U.S. semantic environment is governed by tactics, not tact. We craft messages that work—that perform their desired function. We are instrumental, strategic communicators. As such, entertainment and journalism that draw an audience, for instance, are “good.” This follows the logic that the marketplace, an aggregate of hedonically motivated individuals, decides what’s good. Market logic, when unencumbered by what some characterize as quaint human sentimentalities, liberates us to cynically communicate whatever and however we want. Whatever improves ratings, web traffic, ticket sales, concession sales, repeat purchases, and earnings is good. Embracing this communicative paradigm more fully necessitates the culture’s abandonment of collective notions of both taste and veracity, thus weakening the forces that keep individual desires in check. Our present communication environment is one that invites the hypertrophic expression of the ego, enabling elites to erode public communication standards and repeal laws and regulations resulting in immeasurable individual fortunes. Meanwhile, perpetual plutocratic rule is made even more certain by the cacophonous public noise the rest of us are busy making, leaving us incapable, disinterested, and unwilling to listen to one another.

This book honors the life and work of the late W. Barnett Pearce, a leading theorist in the communication field. The book is divided into four sections. The first section will lead with an essay by Barnett Pearce. This will be followed by sections on (1) practical theory, (2) dialogue, and (3) social transformation. In the broadest sense, these are probably the three general themes found in the work of Pearce and his colleagues. In another sense, these categories also identify three important dimensions of Pearce’s major contribution, the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning.

This book deals with matters of embodiment and meaning—in other words, the essential components of what Continental thought, since Heidegger, has come to consider as “communication.” A critical theme of this book concerns the basic tenet that consciousness of one’s Self and one’s body is only possible through human relationship. This is, of course, the phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity. But rather than let this concept remain an abstraction by discussing it as merely a function of language and signs, this work attempts to explicate it empirically. That is, it discusses the manner in which—from infancy to childhood and adolescence (and the dawning of our sexual identities) through physical maturity and old age—we come to experience the ecstasy of what Merleau-Ponty has so poetically termed “flesh.”It is rarely clear what someone means when she or he uses the word “communication.” An important objective of this book is, thus, to advance understanding of what communication is. In academic discourse, “communication” has come to be understood in a number of contexts—some conflicting and overlapping—as a process, a strategy, an event, an ethic, a mode or instance of information, or even a technology. In virtually all of these discussions, the concept of communication is discussed as though the term’s meaning is well known to the reader. When communication is described as a process, the meaning of the term is held at an operational level—that is, in the exchange of information between one person and another, what must unambiguously be inferred is that “communication” is taking place. In this context, information exchange and communication become functionally synonymous. But as a matter of embodied human psychological experience, there is a world of difference between them. As such, this book attempts to fully consider the question of how we experience the event of human communication. The author offers a pioneering study that advances the raison d’être of the emergent field of “communicology,” while at the same time offering scholars of the human sciences a new way of thinking about embodiment and relational experience.

Despite hundreds of millions of visitors each year, zoos have remained outside of the realm of philosophical analysis. This lack of theoretical examination is interesting considering the paradoxical position within which a zoo is situated, being a space of animal confinement as well as a site that provides valuable tools for species conservation, public education, and entertainment. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? argues that the zoo is a legitimate space of academic inquiry. The modes of communication taking place at the zoo that keep drawing us back time and time again beg for a careful investigation. In this book, the meaning of the zoo as communicative space is explored.This book relies on the phenomenological method from Edmund Husserl and a rhetorical approach to examine the interaction between people and animals in the zoo space. Phenomenology, the philosophy of examining the engaged everyday lived experience, is a natural method to use in the project. Despite its rich history and tradition it is interesting that there are very few books explaining “how to do” phenomenology. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? provides a detailed account of how to actually conduct a phenomenological analysis.The author spent thousands of hours in zoos watching people and animals interact as well as talking with people both formally and informally. This book asks readers to bracket their preconceptions of what goes on in the zoo and, instead, to explore the meaning of powerful zoo experiences while reminding us of the troubled history of zoos.

Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will Be Made recognizes limitations in contemporary understandings that separate history and rhetoric. Drawing together ontological and epistemic perspectives to allow for a fuller appreciation of communication in shaping lived-experience, facets of the two academic subjects are united in acts of communicative engagement.Communicative engagement draws from Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s writings on the human condition; extends the communicative praxis of philosopher Calvin O. Schrag by reuniting theoria-poíesis-praxis; expands Ramsey Eric Ramsey’s writings to provide ground for vitalizing social liberation; and includes the work of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault as well as philosophers of communication including Lenore Langsdorf, Michael J. Hyde, Corey Anton, and others who guide a recollection of the significance of poíesis in human communication. Myrtilla Miner, Mary White Ovington, and Jessie Daniel Ames dedicated their lives to being out-of-place and speaking out-of-turn to alter the way humanity was understood by members of society at large. The lived-experiences of these historical figures assists readers in recognizing how creativity (poíesis) can potentially enable liberation from restrictive social circumstances.

Public expression in the United States has become increasingly coarse. Whether it’s stupid, rude, base, or anti-intellectual talk, it surrounds us. Popular television, film, music, art, and even some elements of religion have become as coarse, we argue, as our often-disparaged political dialogue. This book’s contention is that the U.S. semantic environment is governed by tactics, not tact. We craft messages that work—that perform their desired function. We are instrumental, strategic communicators. As such, entertainment and journalism that draw an audience, for instance, are “good.” This follows the logic that the marketplace, an aggregate of hedonically motivated individuals, decides what’s good. Market logic, when unencumbered by what some characterize as quaint human sentimentalities, liberates us to cynically communicate whatever and however we want. Whatever improves ratings, web traffic, ticket sales, concession sales, repeat purchases, and earnings is good. Embracing this communicative paradigm more fully necessitates the culture’s abandonment of collective notions of both taste and veracity, thus weakening the forces that keep individual desires in check. Our present communication environment is one that invites the hypertrophic expression of the ego, enabling elites to erode public communication standards and repeal laws and regulations resulting in immeasurable individual fortunes. Meanwhile, perpetual plutocratic rule is made even more certain by the cacophonous public noise the rest of us are busy making, leaving us incapable, disinterested, and unwilling to listen to one another.

This collection of essays extends the conversation on communication ethics and crisis communication to offer practical wisdom for meeting the challenges of a complex and ever-changing world. In multiple contexts ranging from the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and family to the political and public, moments of crisis call us to respond from within particular standpoints that shape our understanding and our response to crisis as we grapple with contested notions of "the good" in our shared life together. With no agreed-upon set of absolutes to guide us, this moment calls us to learn from difference as we seek resources to continue the human conversation as we engage the unexpected. This collection of essays invites multiple epistemological and methodological standpoints to consider alternative ways of thinking about communication ethics and crisis.

The shift from orality to literacy that began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and which went into high-gear with Gutenberg’s printing press more than 500 years ago, helped make the modern world. Some commentators have argued that this shift from orality to literacy marked a much broader, cultural shift of cataclysmic proportions. Today, with everything from e-mail to blogs, iPods and podcasts, through Google, Yahoo, eBay, and with cutting-edge smart phones, we find ourselves developing relationships with these newest communication tools that aren’t simply allowing us to communicate faster, farther and with more ease than ever before. We aren’t just moving around ideas, data, and information at unimaginable speed and scale. Our interminglings and fusions with digital communication technologies are also altering both individual and group consciousness in fundamental ways—how we form and sustain relationships, how we think and perceive, what it means to see and to feel. We are remaking human identity once more, and manufacturing a new kind of culture along the way. The processes bound up in our digination may well be consequential to the trajectory of human evolution. That time-honored trope: the notion that technology is not the problem, rather, it’s how people use technology that’s the problem is shown to be wanting. Highlighting Marshall McLuhan’s “tetrads” or laws of media as a primary tool of analysis, R.C. MacDougall argues in line with other media ecologists that it’s not so much how we use certain tools that matters, it’s that we use them. More than any other technological form perhaps, communication technologies play particularly powerful and systemic roles in our culture, or any culture for that matter. Late adopters and even abstainers are not exempt from the psychological, social and cultural effects (and side-effects) of modern digital communication technology. While there are certainly varying degrees of immersion—that is to say, while some of us live in the high-rise downtown district, some at the city limits, and still others out in the proverbial “woods"—we all live in Digination today.

Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely contribution to the study of communication ethics. This series of essays articulates unequivocally the intimate connection between philosophy of communication and communication ethics. This scholarly volume assumes that there is a multiplicity of communication ethics. What distinguishes one communication ethic from another is the philosophy of communication in which a particular ethic is grounded. Philosophy of communication is the core ingredient for understanding the importance of and the difference between and among communication ethics. The position assumed by this collection is consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights on ethics. In A Short History of Ethics, he begins with one principal assertion—philosophy is subversive. If one cannot think philosophically, one cannot question taken-for-granted assumptions. In the case of communication ethics, to fail to think philosophically is to miss the bias, prejudice, and assumptions that constitute a given communication ethic.

Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest is a collection of essays that draws on concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci to examine the imagining of race in popular culture productions, political discourses, and resistance rhetoric. The chapters in this volume call for renewed attention to Gramscian political thought to examine, understand, interpret and explain the persistent contradictions, ambivalence, and paradoxes in racial representations and material realities.This book’s contributors rely on Gramsci’s ideas to explore how popular, political, and resistant discourses reproduce or transform our understandings of race and racism, social inequalities, and power relationships in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together the chapters confront forms of collective and cultural amnesia about race and racism suggested in the phrases “postrace,” “postracial,” and “postracism," while exposing the historical, institutional, social, and political forces and constraints that make antiracism, atonement, and egalitarian change so difficult to achieve.

The Reflective, Facilitative and Interpretive Practices of the Coordinated Management of Meaning: Making Lives, Making Meaning, showcases practical applications of the theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). In the facilitation section, CMM creates dynamics within groups leading toward improved ways of working together; in the interpretation section CMM offers alternative frames to interpret interactions with one another; and in the reflection section CMM is a means to reflect on experiences and interactions to deeper levels of understanding and learning. CMM is grounded in social constructionism, takes a communication perspective and provides concepts and tools for making better social worlds.

Social Networking: Redefining Communication in the Digital Age fulfills a pressing demand in social network literature by bringing together international experts from the fields of communication, new media technologies, marketing and advertising, public relations and journalism, business, and education. In this volume contributors traces online social networking practices across national borders, cultural confines, and geographic limits. The book delves into the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and professional dimensions of social networking around the globe, and explores the similarities, distinctions, and specific characteristics of social media networks in diverse settings. The chapters offer an important contribution to the scholarly research on the uses and applications of online social networking around the world and pertain to a broad range of academic fields. Overall, the volume addresses a subject matter of keen interest to academics and practitioners alike and provides a much-needed forum for sharing innovative research practices and exchanging new ideas.

Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely contribution to the study of communication ethics. This series of essays articulates unequivocally the intimate connection between philosophy of communication and communication ethics. This scholarly volume assumes that there is a multiplicity of communication ethics. What distinguishes one communication ethic from another is the philosophy of communication in which a particular ethic is grounded. Philosophy of communication is the core ingredient for understanding the importance of and the difference between and among communication ethics. The position assumed by this collection is consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights on ethics. In A Short History of Ethics, he begins with one principal assertion—philosophy is subversive. If one cannot think philosophically, one cannot question taken-for-granted assumptions. In the case of communication ethics, to fail to think philosophically is to miss the bias, prejudice, and assumptions that constitute a given communication ethic.

Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest is a collection of essays that draws on concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci to examine the imagining of race in popular culture productions, political discourses, and resistance rhetoric. The chapters in this volume call for renewed attention to Gramscian political thought to examine, understand, interpret and explain the persistent contradictions, ambivalence, and paradoxes in racial representations and material realities.This book’s contributors rely on Gramsci’s ideas to explore how popular, political, and resistant discourses reproduce or transform our understandings of race and racism, social inequalities, and power relationships in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together the chapters confront forms of collective and cultural amnesia about race and racism suggested in the phrases “postrace,” “postracial,” and “postracism," while exposing the historical, institutional, social, and political forces and constraints that make antiracism, atonement, and egalitarian change so difficult to achieve.

Beyond its elucidation and critique of traditional ‘notation-centric’ musicology, this book's primary emphasis is on the negotiation and construction of meaning within the extended musical multimedia works of the classic British group Pink Floyd. Encompassing the concept albums that the group released from 1973 to 1983, during Roger Waters’ final period with the band, chapters are devoted to Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), along with Waters’ third solo album Amused to Death (1993). This book's analysis of album covers, lyrics, music and film makes use of techniques of literary and film criticism, while employing the combined lenses of musical hermeneutics and discourse analysis, so as to illustrate how sonic and musical information contribute to listeners’ interpretations of the discerning messages of these monumental musical artifacts. Ultimately, it demonstrates how their words, sounds, and images work together in order to communicate one fundamental concern, which—to paraphrase the music journalist Karl Dallas—is to affirm human values against everything in life that should conspire against them.

Beyond its elucidation and critique of traditional ‘notation-centric’ musicology, this book's primary emphasis is on the negotiation and construction of meaning within the extended musical multimedia works of the classic British group Pink Floyd. Encompassing the concept albums that the group released from 1973 to 1983, during Roger Waters’ final period with the band, chapters are devoted to Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), along with Waters’ third solo album Amused to Death (1993). This book's analysis of album covers, lyrics, music and film makes use of techniques of literary and film criticism, while employing the combined lenses of musical hermeneutics and discourse analysis, so as to illustrate how sonic and musical information contribute to listeners’ interpretations of the discerning messages of these monumental musical artifacts. Ultimately, it demonstrates how their words, sounds, and images work together in order to communicate one fundamental concern, which—to paraphrase the music journalist Karl Dallas—is to affirm human values against everything in life that should conspire against them.

This book deals with matters of embodiment and meaning—in other words, the essential components of what Continental thought, since Heidegger, has come to consider as “communication.” A critical theme of this book concerns the basic tenet that consciousness of one’s Self and one’s body is only possible through human relationship. This is, of course, the phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity. But rather than let this concept remain an abstraction by discussing it as merely a function of language and signs, this work attempts to explicate it empirically. That is, it discusses the manner in which—from infancy to childhood and adolescence (and the dawning of our sexual identities) through physical maturity and old age—we come to experience the ecstasy of what Merleau-Ponty has so poetically termed “flesh.”It is rarely clear what someone means when she or he uses the word “communication.” An important objective of this book is, thus, to advance understanding of what communication is. In academic discourse, “communication” has come to be understood in a number of contexts—some conflicting and overlapping—as a process, a strategy, an event, an ethic, a mode or instance of information, or even a technology. In virtually all of these discussions, the concept of communication is discussed as though the term’s meaning is well known to the reader. When communication is described as a process, the meaning of the term is held at an operational level—that is, in the exchange of information between one person and another, what must unambiguously be inferred is that “communication” is taking place. In this context, information exchange and communication become functionally synonymous. But as a matter of embodied human psychological experience, there is a world of difference between them. As such, this book attempts to fully consider the question of how we experience the event of human communication. The author offers a pioneering study that advances the raison d’être of the emergent field of “communicology,” while at the same time offering scholars of the human sciences a new way of thinking about embodiment and relational experience.

Just Remembering: Rhetorics of Genocide Remembranceand Sociopolitical Judgment analyzes a set of influential discourses of genocide remembrance to explain how public memory discourses inform sociopolitical judgment. Within this explanatory context, Just Remembering additionally asks how we might remember pasts marked by genocidal violence in ways that commit ourselves to a deeper understanding and more humane practice of justice. The chapters are thematically organized, focusing on specific sites of memory to highlight symbolic inducements of memorial discourses. Chapter 2 analyzes U.S. public discourse concerning an “Armenian Genocide” resolution to elucidate the role of politics in the production, dissemination, and maintenance of memory. Chapter 3 offers a historical account of the shift in public discourse concerning the capture of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, demonstrating how and with what consequences the discourses shifted from a focus on law to a focus on morality. Chapter 4 expands this work by analyzing how competing narrative accounts of historical figures and events (Eichmann and the Holocaust) influence what we remember, how we remember, and the ends to which we apply such memories. Chapter 5 analyzes the Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust that produced the United States’ official remembrance of the Holocaust. This chapter argues that the Commission Report provides an exemplary explanation for why we should remember and provokes a complex understanding of what we are to remember. Chapter 6 concludes the book by focusing on the productive capacity of the humanitarian aims of U.S. Holocaust remembrance.

Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will Be Made recognizes limitations in contemporary understandings that separate history and rhetoric. Drawing together ontological and epistemic perspectives to allow for a fuller appreciation of communication in shaping lived-experience, facets of the two academic subjects are united in acts of communicative engagement.Communicative engagement draws from Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s writings on the human condition; extends the communicative praxis of philosopher Calvin O. Schrag by reuniting theoria-poíesis-praxis; expands Ramsey Eric Ramsey’s writings to provide ground for vitalizing social liberation; and includes the work of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault as well as philosophers of communication including Lenore Langsdorf, Michael J. Hyde, Corey Anton, and others who guide a recollection of the significance of poíesis in human communication. Myrtilla Miner, Mary White Ovington, and Jessie Daniel Ames dedicated their lives to being out-of-place and speaking out-of-turn to alter the way humanity was understood by members of society at large. The lived-experiences of these historical figures assists readers in recognizing how creativity (poíesis) can potentially enable liberation from restrictive social circumstances.

Even prior to the field’s invention, Susanne Langer implied that the arts are all subtopics of Communication Studies. This unique project has effectively allowed the author to combine his backgrounds in the interdisciplinary fields of popular music studies, cultural theory, communication studies, and the practice of music criticism. This book investigates the fascinating and important work of the British group Radiohead, named by Time Magazine among its Top 100 Most Influential People of 2008, and focuses particularly on their landmark recording OK Computer (1997), a document preserved as part of the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2015. Probing the band’s exploration of the crucial issues surrounding contemporary technological development, especially as it relates to the concern of human survival, Radiohead and the Global Movement for Change is essentially a work of criticism that in its analysis combines what is known as ‘musical hermeneutics’ with the media ecology perspective. In this way, the author delineates how Radiohead’s work operates as a clarion call that directs our attention to the troubling complex of cultural conditions that Neil Postman (1992) identifies as ‘Technopoly’ or ‘the surrender of culture to technology’—a phenomenon that must become more broadly recognized and comprehended in order for it to be successfully confronted. This book’s distinguishing features include: 1) its edifying analysis of a richly profound and celebrated musical text; 2) its extended focus upon what Martin Heidegger famously refers to as ‘the question concerning technology’; 3) its use of the media ecology scholarly tradition at whose core lies communication study; and 4) its innovative and unique deployment of the affect-script theory of American personality theorist Silvan Tomkins in the study of musical communication.

Even prior to the field’s invention, Susanne Langer implied that the arts are all subtopics of Communication Studies. This unique project has effectively allowed the author to combine his backgrounds in the interdisciplinary fields of popular music studies, cultural theory, communication studies, and the practice of music criticism. This book investigates the fascinating and important work of the British group Radiohead, named by Time Magazine among its Top 100 Most Influential People of 2008, and focuses particularly on their landmark recording OK Computer (1997), a document preserved as part of the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2015. Probing the band’s exploration of the crucial issues surrounding contemporary technological development, especially as it relates to the concern of human survival, Radiohead and the Global Movement for Change is essentially a work of criticism that in its analysis combines what is known as ‘musical hermeneutics’ with the media ecology perspective. In this way, the author delineates how Radiohead’s work operates as a clarion call that directs our attention to the troubling complex of cultural conditions that Neil Postman (1992) identifies as ‘Technopoly’ or ‘the surrender of culture to technology’—a phenomenon that must become more broadly recognized and comprehended in order for it to be successfully confronted. This book’s distinguishing features include: 1) its edifying analysis of a richly profound and celebrated musical text; 2) its extended focus upon what Martin Heidegger famously refers to as ‘the question concerning technology’; 3) its use of the media ecology scholarly tradition at whose core lies communication study; and 4) its innovative and unique deployment of the affect-script theory of American personality theorist Silvan Tomkins in the study of musical communication.

Despite hundreds of millions of visitors each year, zoos have remained outside of the realm of philosophical analysis. This lack of theoretical examination is interesting considering the paradoxical position within which a zoo is situated, being a space of animal confinement as well as a site that provides valuable tools for species conservation, public education, and entertainment. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? argues that the zoo is a legitimate space of academic inquiry. The modes of communication taking place at the zoo that keep drawing us back time and time again beg for a careful investigation. In this book, the meaning of the zoo as communicative space is explored.This book relies on the phenomenological method from Edmund Husserl and a rhetorical approach to examine the interaction between people and animals in the zoo space. Phenomenology, the philosophy of examining the engaged everyday lived experience, is a natural method to use in the project. Despite its rich history and tradition it is interesting that there are very few books explaining “how to do” phenomenology. Why Do We Go to the Zoo? provides a detailed account of how to actually conduct a phenomenological analysis.The author spent thousands of hours in zoos watching people and animals interact as well as talking with people both formally and informally. This book asks readers to bracket their preconceptions of what goes on in the zoo and, instead, to explore the meaning of powerful zoo experiences while reminding us of the troubled history of zoos.

The contributors to this collection come from disparate fields such as theology, literature studies, political science, and communication studies and are guided by a commitment to consider what we can learn from Camus as opposed to where he was wrong or misguided in his life and writing. If there is a place to consider the shortcomings of a human being, especially one as unique as Albert Camus, it will not be found within this volume.The essays in this text are built around the theme that Albert Camus functions as an implicit philosopher of communication with deep ethical commitments. The title, Creating Albert Camus, is intended to have a double meaning. First are those voices who inspired Camus and helped create his ideas; second are those scholars working with Camus’s thoughts during and after his life who help create his enduring legacy.Bringing together scholars who embrace an appreciation of the philosophy of communication provide an opportunity to further situate the work of Camus within the communication discipline. This new project explores the communicative implications of Camus’s work.

In film history, director-cinematographer collaborations were on a labor spectrum, with the model of the contracted camera operator in the silent era and that of the cinematographer in the sound era. But in Weimar era German filmmaking, 1919-33, a short period of intense artistic activity and political and economic instability, these models existed side by side due to the emergence of camera operators as independent visual artists and collaborators with directors.Berlin in the 1920s was the chief site of the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the Modernist movement in the visual, literary, architectural, design, typographical, sartorial, and performance arts in Europe. The Weimar Revolution that arose in the aftermath of the November 1918 Armistice and that established the Weimar Republic informed and agitated all of the art movements, such as Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Minimalism, Objectivism, Verism, and Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Among the avant-garde forms of these new stylistically and culturally negotiated arts, the cinema was foremost and since its inception had been a radical experimental practice in new visual technologies that proved instrumental in changing how human beings perceived movement, structure, perspective, light exposure, temporal duration, continuity, spatial orientation, human postural, facial, vocal, and gestural displays, and their own spectatorship, as well as conventions of storytelling like narrative, setting, theme, character, and structure. Whereas most of the arts mobilized into schools, movements, institutions, and other structures, cinema, a collaborative art, tended to organize around its ensembles of practitioners. Historically, the silent film era, 1895-1927, is associated with auteurs, the precursors of François Truffaut and other filmmakers in the 1960s: actuality filmmakers and pioneers like R. W. Paul and Fred and Joe Evans in England, Auguste and Luis Lumière and Georges Méliès in France, and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton in America, who, by managing all the compositional, executional, and editorial facets of film production—scripting, directing, acting, photographing, set, costume, and lighting design, editing, and marketing—imposed their personal vision or authorship on the film. The dichotomy of the auteur and the production ensemble established a production hierarchy in most filmmaking. In formative German silent film, however, this hierarchy was less rank or class driven, because collaborative partnerships took precedence over single authorship. Whereas in silent film production in most countries the terms filmmaker and director were synonymous, in German silent film the plural term filmemacherin connoted both directors and cinematographers, along with the rest of the filmmaking crew. Thus, German silent filmmakers’ principle contribution to the new medium and art of film was less the representational iconographies of Expressionist, New Objective, and Naturalist styles than the executional practice of co-authorship and co-production, in distinctive cinematographer-director partnerships such as those of cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and director Ernst Lubitsch; Fritz Arno Wagner with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst; Rudolf Maté with Carl Theodor Dreyer; Guido Seeber with Lang and Pabst; and Carl Hoffmann with Lang and Murnau.

In film history, director-cinematographer collaborations were on a labor spectrum, with the model of the contracted camera operator in the silent era and that of the cinematographer in the sound era. But in Weimar era German filmmaking, 1919-33, a short period of intense artistic activity and political and economic instability, these models existed side by side due to the emergence of camera operators as independent visual artists and collaborators with directors.Berlin in the 1920s was the chief site of the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the Modernist movement in the visual, literary, architectural, design, typographical, sartorial, and performance arts in Europe. The Weimar Revolution that arose in the aftermath of the November 1918 Armistice and that established the Weimar Republic informed and agitated all of the art movements, such as Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Minimalism, Objectivism, Verism, and Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Among the avant-garde forms of these new stylistically and culturally negotiated arts, the cinema was foremost and since its inception had been a radical experimental practice in new visual technologies that proved instrumental in changing how human beings perceived movement, structure, perspective, light exposure, temporal duration, continuity, spatial orientation, human postural, facial, vocal, and gestural displays, and their own spectatorship, as well as conventions of storytelling like narrative, setting, theme, character, and structure. Whereas most of the arts mobilized into schools, movements, institutions, and other structures, cinema, a collaborative art, tended to organize around its ensembles of practitioners. Historically, the silent film era, 1895-1927, is associated with auteurs, the precursors of François Truffaut and other filmmakers in the 1960s: actuality filmmakers and pioneers like R. W. Paul and Fred and Joe Evans in England, Auguste and Luis Lumière and Georges Méliès in France, and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton in America, who, by managing all the compositional, executional, and editorial facets of film production—scripting, directing, acting, photographing, set, costume, and lighting design, editing, and marketing—imposed their personal vision or authorship on the film. The dichotomy of the auteur and the production ensemble established a production hierarchy in most filmmaking. In formative German silent film, however, this hierarchy was less rank or class driven, because collaborative partnerships took precedence over single authorship. Whereas in silent film production in most countries the terms filmmaker and director were synonymous, in German silent film the plural term filmemacherin connoted both directors and cinematographers, along with the rest of the filmmaking crew. Thus, German silent filmmakers’ principle contribution to the new medium and art of film was less the representational iconographies of Expressionist, New Objective, and Naturalist styles than the executional practice of co-authorship and co-production, in distinctive cinematographer-director partnerships such as those of cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and director Ernst Lubitsch; Fritz Arno Wagner with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst; Rudolf Maté with Carl Theodor Dreyer; Guido Seeber with Lang and Pabst; and Carl Hoffmann with Lang and Murnau.