|
|
Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies
The words of business leaders matter. They can spark action,
enhance branding, share knowledge, transmit values, and influence
social and cultural behavior. Decoding CEO-Speak critiques the
public language of a powerful class of people - the Chief Executive
Officers of major companies. Interest in the behavior and thinking
of CEOs is not confined to their corporation's direct stakeholders
only: the public is increasingly interested in how CEOs stand on
current issues and community debate. Through case study analysis of
companies such as News Corporation, BP, Wells Fargo, Satyam, Uber,
Canadian National Railway, Tesla, and Boeing, authors Russell Craig
and Joel Amernic illustrate ways of mining meaning or decoding a
CEO's written words and speeches. They critically examine a variety
of public media, including social media, testimony, and speeches,
performed by leaders of major companies. Decoding CEO-Speak
demonstrates how monitoring the language of CEOs can yield valuable
insights into a company's policy, strategy, and ethicality; and how
it can point to the priorities, values, and personality of the CEO.
The book will appeal to CEOs, senior managers, and public relations
and media consultants, as well as business professors, students,
and corporate stakeholders who want to find otherwise disguised
meaning in the words of leaders.
The role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is
full of mistakes-errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and
understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and
deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and
intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and
poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative
conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and
misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and
non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the
presumed value of "sounding good"? Distressing Language grows out
of the author's experience of hearing loss in which
misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson
maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in
understanding than a component of new knowledge. Davidson discusses
a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on
YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim's audiovisual
installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical
Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness
becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us
a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are
working with the axiom of "error" to produce novel subjecthoods and
possibilities.
Introducing the key questions and challenges faced by the
researcher of digital discourse, this book provides an overview of
the different methodological dimensions associated with this type
of research. Bringing together a team of experts, chapters guide
students and novice researchers through how to conduct rigorous,
accurate, and ethical research with data from a wide range of
online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube,
and online dating apps. Research Methods for Digital Discourse
Analysis focuses on the key issues that any digital discourse
analyst must consider, before tackling more specific topics and
approaches, including how to work with multilingual or multimodal
data. Emphasizing concrete, practical advice and illustrated with
plentiful examples from research studies, each chapter introduces a
new research dimension for consideration, briefly exploring how
other discourse analysts have approached the topic before using an
in-depth case study to highlight the main challenges and provide
guidance on methodological decision-making. Supported by a range of
pedagogical tools, including discussion questions and annotated
further-reading lists, this book is an essential resource for
students and any researcher new to analyzing digital discourse.
Inspired by Raymond Williams' cultural materialism, H.F. Pimlott
explores the connections between political practice and cultural
form through Marxism Today's transformation from a Communist Party
theoretical journal into a 'glossy' left magazine. Marxism Today's
successes and failures during the 1980s are analysed through its
political and cultural critiques of Thatcherism and the left,
especially by Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm, innovative publicity
and marketplace distribution, relationships with the national UK
press, cultural coverage, design and format, and writing style.
Wars of Position offers insights for contemporary media activists
and challenges the neglect of the left press by media scholars.
A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance
in the digital era In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy
access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is
unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert
Williams's 1916 silent film short "A Natural Born Gambler" or the
performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick
YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research
Black performance. While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access,
it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical
archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global
export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera
argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured
in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a
cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and
culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black
music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to
the background sounds of the continued exploitation and
commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of
Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how
knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is
obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly
digital. Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap
forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this
work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture
in the digital world.
Networked Feminism tells the story of how activists have used media
to reconfigure what feminist politics and organizing look like in
the United States. Drawing on years spent participating in
grassroots communities and observing viral campaigns, Rosemary
Clark-Parsons argues that feminists engage in a do-it-ourselves
feminism characterized by the use of everyday media technologies.
Faced with an electoral system and a history of collective
organizing that have failed to address complex systems of
oppression, do-it-ourselves feminists do not rely on political
organizations, institutions, or authorities. Instead, they use
digital networks to build movements that reflect their values and
meet the challenges of the current moment, all the while juggling
the advantages and limitations of their media tools. Through its
practitioner-centered approach, this book sheds light on feminist
media activists' shared struggles and best practices at a time when
collective organizing for social justice has become more important
than ever.
Examines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of
surveillance When Donald Trump promised to "build a wall" on the
U.S.-Mexico border, both supporters and opponents visualized a
snaking barrier of concrete cleaving through nearly two thousand
miles of arid desert. Though only 4 percent of the US population
lives in proximity to the border, imagining what the wall would
look like came easily to most Americans, in part because of how
images of the border are reproduced and circulated for national
audiences. Border Optics considers the US-Mexico border as one of
the most visualized and imagined spaces in the US. As a place of
continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense,
the border is rendered as a layered visual space of policing-one
that is seen from watchtowers, camera-mounted vehicles,
helicopters, surveillance balloons, radar systems, unmanned aerial
vehicles, and live streaming websites. It is also a space that is
visualized across various forms and genres of media, from maps to
geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations,
photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television, which combine
fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance
and survey. Border Optics elaborates on the expanded vision of the
border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology,
and media. Camilla Fojas describes how the perception of the
viewing public is controlled through a booming security-industrial
complex made up of entertainment media, local and federal police,
prisons and detention centers, the aerospace industry, and all
manner of security technology industries. The first study to
examine visual codes of surveillance within an analysis of the
history and culture of the border region, Border Optics is an
innovative and groundbreaking examination of security cultures,
race, gender, and colonialism.
Tourism consumers are increasingly demanding and seek to base their
travel decision-making process on relevant and credible tourism
information. In recent years, user-generated content on social
media, the opinion of travel bloggers, and entertainment programs
in the media have influenced the public's travel purchasing
behavior and acted as a driving force for the development of
tourism products, such as film tourism. It also has played a role
in the evolution and development of marketing, giving rise to new
applications, as in the case of digital and influence marketing. On
the other hand, tourism organizations and destination management
organizations face major challenges in communicating the attributes
of a tourism product, since this cannot be experienced before
consumption. Thus, they need to know how and in which means or
platforms of communication they can inform potential consumers.
Impact of New Media in Tourism provides theoretical and practical
contributions in tourism and communication including current
research on the influence of new media and the active role of
consumers in tourism. With a focus on decision making and
increasing the visibility of products and destinations, the book
provides support for tourism agencies and organizations around the
world. Covering themes that include digital marketing, social
media, and online branding, this book is essential for
professionals, academicians, researchers, and students working or
studying in the field of tourism and hospitality management,
marketing, advertising, and media and communications.
In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of
the new-the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and
our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on
many of today's communications tech workers mirror those of a much
earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the
London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive
telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth
century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely
on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for
seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing
thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly
unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth
operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and
app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of
information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of
liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the
twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the
administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications
systems created networks according to conventional gender
perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the
networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite
attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible,
these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern
life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized
status-from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant
sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly
neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one,
challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.
Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events-especially the
lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey
Schwerner-stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights
movement. The infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just
the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer
Project. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans
challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that
during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and
other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black
bodies in Mississippi's swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has
evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers,
and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of
supposed Black bodies-never identified-has grown from five to more
than two dozen. In Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom
Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions:
Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking
claim only grown in the past several decades-despite evidence to
the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black
bodies claim do, and with what audiences? Houck's story begins in
the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of
the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964,
by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated
Organization's voter registration efforts in Mississippi leading up
to Freedom Summer. He considers the extent to which violence
generally and expectations about interracial violence, in
particular, serves as a critical context for the strategy and
rhetoric of the Summer Project. Houck then interrogates the
unnamed-Black-bodies claim from a historical and rhetorical
perspective, illustrating that the historicity of the bodies in
question is perhaps less the point than the critique of who we
remember from that summer and how we remember them. Houck examines
how different memory texts-filmic, landscape, presidential speech,
and museums-function both to bolster and question the centrality of
murdered white men in the legacy of Freedom Summer.
Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and
contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of
dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been
an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation.
Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized
in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the
nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the
development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican
popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth
century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution
(1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety
of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales,
themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national
nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the
following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling
functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship
of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study?
Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds)
have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories
defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand
some of the possible answers to these questions through five case
studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different
media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two
hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important
insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to
larger notions of how national identities are created through
narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political
implications.
It may be stipulated that, in the emergent media age of illusion,
the scope of media issues is vast and pervasive in every field of
scientific research as-well-as mystical philosophy. Issues of a
"conscious universe", "universal fractal "sentience", and subjects
of nanotechnology and the "Psychic paranormal" have begun to be
understood as issues of the global media that have been subdivided
into issues of "fake news", social media, propaganda, transpersonal
psychology, human "embodiment", climate change & human
intention, governmental structure, and more. This book establishes
a possible template for addressing the global media mandate as a
scientific study of paranormal influence on global culture. Such an
approach to the "New Normal" has been mandated by recent events
(especially the attempted insurrection in the U.S.) that highlight
global issues of mediated influences on the dynamic of government.
Futurist academics and professionals who are researching this ""new
normal"" of the mediasphere and this book will be a valuable
contribution to the field.
Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In
the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published
every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred
annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more
frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This
explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms
of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What
makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer
representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right
lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if
these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer
Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason
considers these questions through a range of popular media,
including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro,
the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and
popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes
that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture - queer
visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the
promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not -
challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's
media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a
subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes
that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry
boundaries, one that coheres around affect - specifically, anxiety
- instead of content.
The United States has a hate problem. In recent years, hate speech
has led not only to deep division in our politics but also to
violence, murder, and even insurrection. And yet established
constitutional jurisprudence holds that all speech is protected as
"content neutral" and that the proper democratic response to
hateful expression is not regulation but "more speech." So how can
ordinary citizens stand up to hate groups when the state will not?
In Combating Hate, Billie Murray proposes an answer to this
question. As a participant in anti-racist and anti-fascist
protests, including demonstrations against the Ku Klux Klan,
neo-Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church, Murray witnessed
firsthand the limitations of the "more speech" approach as well as
the combative tactics of anti-fascist activists. She argues that
this latter group, commonly known as antifa, embodies a radically
different strategy for combating hate, one that explodes the myth
of content neutrality and reveals hate speech to be a tactic of
fascist organizing with very real, highly anti-democratic
consequences. Drawing on communication theory and this
on-the-ground experience, Murray presents a new strategy, which she
calls "allied tactics," rooted in the commitment to affirm,
support, and even protect those who are the victims of hate speech.
Engaging and sophisticated, Combating Hate contends that there are
concrete ways to fight hate speech from the front lines. Murray's
urgent argument that we reconsider how to confront and fight this
blight on American life is essential reading for the current era.
|
|