Message And Medium

The Medium is the Message

Message and Medium

Studies of digital communication technologies often focus on the apparently unique set of multimodal resources afforded to users and the development of innovative linguistic strategies for performing mediatised identities and maintaining online social networks. This edited volume interrogates the novelty of such practices by establishing a transhistorical approach to the study of digital communication. The transhistorical approach explores language practices as lived experiences grounded in historical contexts, and aims to identify those elements of human behaviour that transcend historical boundaries, looking beyond specific developments in communication technologies to understand the enduring motivations and social concerns that drive human communication. The volume reveals long-term patterns in the indexical functions of seemingly innovative written and multimodal resources and the ideologies that underpin them, and shows that methods are not necessarily contingent on their datasets: historical analytic frameworks can be applied to digital data and newer approaches used to understand historical data. These insights present exciting opportunities for English language researchers, both historical and modern.

Communication Theory

Communication is the most complex and elevating achievement of human beings. Most people spend up to 70 percent of our waking hours engaged in some form of communication. Listening and responding to the messages of others occupies much of this time; the rest is taken up by talking, reading, and writing. An additional consideration is the rich assortment of nonverbal cues humans share, which also constitute a form of communication. All together, the stream of verbal and nonverbal information that bombards our senses is composed of as many as 2,000 distinguishable units of interaction in a single day. The kinds of interaction change constantly: morning greetings, cereal labels, bus signs, charts, traffic lights, hate stares, graffiti, coffee shop chat, gestures, laughter, and head nods: The themes are endless. All of this constitutes subject matter for the study of communication. The book seeks to acquaint students with a basic understanding of the process of human communication. The breadth and scope of subject matter is adaptable to a number of approaches to the first course in communication, whether theoretical, practical, contemporary, or traditional in orientation. The framework of this book introduces five topics of central interest to the field of communication theory. Part I describes the process of communication as it unfolds in face-to-face environments. Part II considers the symbolic significance of interpersonal behavior. Part III examines the organization of communicative acts and shows why human interactions tend to become more synchronous over time. Part IV explores the complex problem of understanding other people, demonstrating the tendency of understanding to become intersubjective. Part V accounts for the communicative significance of several basic human environments--communities, organizations, media, institutions, and culture.