Interdisciplinary Communication Studies – serie

This collection of papers published in the last forty years documents the author’s journey from philosophy of language to text theory and then to an empirical science of literature, ending with a concept of literary studies as a legitimate part of media culture studies. The main emphasis is placed on communication as a social system. The approach used in the book is strictly interdisciplinary in order to cope with the complexity of the different types of human communication, ranging from everyday talk to literary communication or advertising. Radical Constructivism provides the epistemological basis for this approach – a basis that has undergone important modifications in the course of the author’s development.

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.

Communication within the context of health and social care faces many challenges. Our understanding of how language and communication information is processed by the brain is increasing our awareness of the complexities involved and the influence of normal ageing on communication processing. Care systems are becoming more complex and service users demand more information and choice. At the same time, the range of service users encountered by practitioners includes more people with varied language backgrounds, and greater language and cultural diversity is occurring among health and social care staff.This volume explores current challenges to achieving effective communication in health and social care. It outlines how practitioners communicate, innovative methods for teaching communication skills, and methodologies to include children and people with communication difficulties in research and in consultation processes about healthcare. Particular communication issues, within the context of healthcare, for population groups such as older people, asylum seekers, young offenders and people with mental health problems are also addressed.

Electronic emotion is the emotion lived, re-lived or discovered through machines. It is the emotion that users of information and communication technologies (ICTs) feel when using or not using different devices. Through ICTs emotion is amplified, shaped, stereotyped and re-invented but at the same time sacrificed. This book addresses a number of questions such as: What does electronic emotion actually mean? How does emotion change when mediated by information and communication technologies? How are the production and the consumption of electronic and mediated emotion articulated? What emotional investment do people express in ICTs? The editors have brought together a distinctive group of scholars from multiple disciplines including social sciences, linguistics and information sciences to discuss and provide some answers to these questions.