"Theoretically wise and practically powerful, this book is about how to take full advantage of advances in technology and the learner autonomy they afford, rather than simply adapt to or deny them. It issues a clarion call to language educators and administrators interested in building on recent advances in language learning via the informal avenues of digital communications." --Mark Dressman, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, Professor and Chair of English at Khalifa University, UAE "This important and original book challenges us to rethink the design and delivery of the language learning opportunities universities provide for their students. Drawing on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory, Self-Determination Theory and her own empirical explorations of informal online language learning, Denyze Toffoli paints a portrait of today's university language learner that is novel, unexpected and urgent." --David Little, Fellow and Associate Professor Emeritus at Trinity College, Ireland This book takes a fresh look at both context and the language learner in an attempt to shed light on the holistic and ever-changing system of the contemporary L2 speaker's language development. Drawing on complex dynamic systems theory as a means to more fully understand the holistic nature of contemporary language learning, the author attempts to bridge the longstanding gap between formal language provision in Higher Education institutions, and more informal language acquisition achieved through activities such as listening to music, watching films and television, and playing games. Based on a theoretical understanding of the interplay between these contexts, contents and practices, the author offers suggestions concerning the shape of language centres in higher education and the role of teachers in readying the contemporary language learner for autonomous lifelong and lifewide language development. This book will be of particular interest to language teachers, teacher trainers, and higher education administrators.

In a postfactual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they confirm pre-existing or partisan beliefs, this book asks crucial questions: how can we identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can we know when their use is ethically wrong? How can we judge untruthfulness in the messiness of situated discourse? Drawing on pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing untruthful discourse in situated context. TRUST, or Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text, sees untruthfulness as encompassing not only deliberate manipulations of what is believed to be true (the insincerity of withholding, misleading, and lying) but also the distortions that arise from an irresponsible attitude towards the truth (dogma, distortion, and bullshit). Chris Heffer discusses times when truth is not "in play," as in jokes or fiction, as well as instances when concealing the truth can achieve a greater good. The TRUST framework demonstrates that untruthfulness becomes unethical in discourse, though, when it unjustifiably breaches the trust an interlocutor invests in the speaker. In addition to the theoretical framework, this book provides a clear, practical heuristic for analyzing discursive untruthfulness and applies it to such cases of public discourse as the Brexit "battle bus," Trump's tweet about voter fraud, Blair and Bush's claims about weapons of mass destruction, and the multiple forms of untruthfulness associated with the Skripal poisoning case. In All Bullshit and Lies? Chris Heffer turns a critical eye to fundamental questions of truthfulness and trust in our society. This timely and interdisciplinary investigation of discourse provides readers a deeper theoretical understanding of untruthfulness in a postfactual world.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.

Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, Wessendorf explores life in a super-diverse urban neighbourhood. The book presents a vivid account of the daily doings and social relations among the residents and how they pragmatically negotiate difference in their everyday lives.

This book features research papers that examine a host of contemporary issues in Thailand. Coverage includes culture, gender violence, tourism, human trafficking, environmental and ecological issues, sustainability and the sufficiency economy, the (mis)handling of elephants, and more. It features a sociological and anthropological perspective with a dash of communication for sustainable social change. The papers investigate the various phases of communication technology and its impact on cultural change in the country. They explore the use of social networks and privacy issues as well as ethical journalism in the contexts of Thai Buddhism, Thai culture, and other enabling environmental factors. The contributors focus on documentary research of both quantitative and qualitative data on Thai social change as a consequence of globalization and digital technology. They first provide a general overview of social media and communication in the country. Next, the authors go on to explore the specifics of digital communication. This includes a look at its impact on the various ways of Thai communication given politico-economic and religious influences.

This edited collection presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The chapters consider how interactants do identity work and how identity is indexed (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse.

This study, written in the context of its first publication in 1970, discusses and documents the invasion of privacy by the corporation and the social institution in the search for efficiency in information processing. Discussing areas such as the impact of the computer on administration, privacy and the storage on information, the authors assess the technical and social feasibility of constructing integrated data banks to cover the details of populations. The book was hugely influential both in terms of scholarship and legislation, and the years following saw the Data Protection Act of 1984, which was then consolidated by the Act of 1998. The topics under discussion remain of great concern to the public in our increasingly web-based world, ensuring the continued relevance of this title to academics and students with an interest in data protection and public privacy.

Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective shows how language influences mechanisms of cognition, perception and belief, and by extension its power to manipulate thoughts and beliefs. This exciting and original work is the first to apply cognitive linguistics to the analysis of political lies and conspiracy theories, both of which have flourished in the internet age and which many argue are threatening democracy. It unravels the verbal mechanisms that make these "different truths" so effective and proliferative, dissecting the verbal structures (metaphor, irony, connotative implications etc) of the words of a variety of real-life cases in the form of politicians, conspiracy theorists and influencers. Marcel Danesi goes on to demonstrate how these linguistic structures "switch on" or "switch off" alternative mind worlds. This book is essential reading for students of cognitive linguistics and will enrich the studies of any student or researcher in language and linguistics more broadly, as well as discourse analysis, rhetoric or political science.

Exploring Risk Communication presents a systematic planning approach to risk communication. Risk communication is seen by many as an important tool for managing technological, environmental, and natural risks. The book's goal is to improve risk communication processes in these areas between private and public risk communication sources and the public. The systematic planning approach focuses on research activities which are considered to be diagnostic tools providing insight into the public's reactions to risks and into the public's cognitive abilities to process risk information. These studies give us the necessary ingredients for an adequate risk communication from the audience side of the risk communication process. Evaluation studies are considered necessary to monitor the effectiveness of the communication. Exploring Risk Communication provides a review of current research in risk communication, focusing on perceived trust and credibility of risk communication sources, and arguments in risk messages, risk comparison, and framing of risk. Special attention is paid to the mass media context of risks and its impact on public perception. Finally, the potential of the new interactive media for risk communication is reviewed. The authors have performed several communication studies in the risk area, working from their social psychological background. This results in a monograph interesting to those working on risk communication issues on an academic level, but the systematic planning approach is also a useful frame of reference for risk communication practitioners, or for those who are just interested in the often complex risk communication issues.

Communication Games is a new and radical interpretation of the relationship between culture and communication. It explores the idea that culture and communication studies should be seen predominantly in relation to struggles and conflicts within the social arena. It criticizes the conventional heritage of the social sciences and humanities. Culture and communication are conceived not merely as means of integrating social actors, but as semiotic ways of providing fitness indicators that allow for the resolution of competition between individuals. From the perspective of Peircean semiotics and the Darwinian understanding of life processes, Communication Games redefines culture in terms of Darwin's notion of sexual selection. Moving on from the realization that sexual selection creates individual organisms with conflicting interests, Communication Games emphasizes the contribution of game theory to semiotics and communication studies. The book demonstrates how cooperation and shared conventions eventually emerge, and how conflicts are resolved through the display of costly and inflated signs. It is from these inflated signs and the escalation of excessive messages that cultures gain a certain degree of stability. Communication Games proposes a new way of understanding culture, communication, and semiotic exchange in terms of game theory.

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, "relevance" has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of "irrelevance", which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.

Drawing on the new physics as the scientific foundation of transformational politics, Becker and Slaton write compellingly about teledemocracy, social energy, and democratic quanta. They outline their quantum political theory in rich detail, demonstrating how we have entered a phase of highly charged, erratic, and sometimes self-contradictory packets of social political energy that appears to occur with a rough regularity but with differing levels of velocity and force.

Becker and Slaton explore the current state and future of televoting, electronic town meetings, and other initiatives designed to put the public back into public affairs. This book will prove to be a fascinating read for scholars, students, researchers, and policymakers interested in new political paradigms, politics, and public administration.

Contemporary bureaucracy is a set of norms, rules, procedures, and formalities which includes administration, business, and NGOs. Where Max Weber meets Michel Foucault, Beatrice Hibou analyzes the political dynamics underlying this process. Neoliberal bureaucracy is a vector of discipline and control, producing social and political indifference.

Gossip is one of the most common, and most condemned, forms of discourse in which we engage - even as it is often absorbing and socially significant, it is also widely denigrated. This volume examines fascinating moments in the history of gossip in America, from witchcraft trials to People magazine, helping us to see the subject with new eyes.

The Digitization of Cinematic Visual Effects: Hollywood s Coming of Age, by Rama Venkatasawmy, analyzes how the Hollywood cinema industry s visual effects applications have not only motivated the expansion of filmmaking praxis, they have also influenced the evolution of viewing pleasures and spectatorship experiences. Following the digitization of their associated technologies, VFX have been responsible for multiplying the strategies of representation and storytelling, as well as extending the range of stories that can potentially be told onscreen. By the same token, the visual standards of the Hollywood film s production and exhibition have been growing in sophistication. On the basis of displaying groundbreaking VFX immaculately realized through the application of cutting-edge technologies and craftsmanship and of projecting such a significant degree of visual innovation and originality, certain Hollywood movies have established techno-visual trends and industrial standards for subsequent filmmaking practice. Hollywood cinema s entry into the digital realm is intertwined with the intensification of conglomeratic practices within the movie business, the domain of techno-scientific R&D in filmmaking, and the unification of corporate media, information technology, and entertainment. Hence, the standardization of, and convergence toward, the digital medium is emblematic of Hollywood cinema s techno-industrial evolution in the late twentieth century. Accordingly, this volume identifies various synergies and partnerships between VFX providers, movie studios, graphic designers, and more that have emerged from a progressive growth of awareness in Hollywood of the digital medium s potential."

Stresses the importance of argumentation in everyday life Critical Thinking and Communication, 7/e, encourages students to develop skills in constructing and refuting arguments in contexts ranging from informal conversations to structured debates. The authors stress the importance of argumentation in everyday life while building student competence and critical awareness. Through exercises and examples, students learn to create arguments and develop, understand, and interpret extended cases.

Organization Structures: Theory and Design, Analysis and Prescription describes how to organize people to achieve a desired outcome. This is accomplished by establishing sets of rules from "real world" organization contexts. Moreover, the development of these rules within "real world" contexts means that the rules must be true, general, operational, technically sound, and easy to use. With an understanding of rules and the processes of their use, organization structures can be identified, which in turn form the basis of a theoretical framework. This book discusses, examines, and demonstrates the interrelationship of the design rules, their theoretical use within these organization structures, along with their practical implications. Throughout the book, an extended example of the Masters Brewing Corporation (MBC) is used to illustrate the conceptual material and to make the implications of the organizational analysis explicitly concrete.

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This book presents a detailed account of a self-study in which the author considers why a developmental perspective matters in language learning within an intercultural orientation, and how teachers of languages might understand and attend to this notion in their work. The discussion is based on the author's experience as a teacher-researcher and traces aspects of teachers' work from planning, teaching and mediating, to assessing and judging evidence of student learning and development over time. This book is grounded in a praxis view of language teaching and learning and will be of interest to other language teachers, pre-service teachers, teacher trainers and applied linguists.

Eight years after the Arab Spring there is still much debate over the link between Internet technology and protest against authoritarian regimes. While the debate has advanced beyond the simple question of whether the Internet is a tool of liberation or one of surveillance and propaganda, theory and empirical data attesting to the circumstances under which technology benefits autocratic governments versus opposition activists is scarce. In this book, Nils B. Weidmann and Espen Geelmuyden Rod offer a broad theory about why and when digital technology is used for one end or another, drawing on detailed empirical analyses of the relationship between the use of Internet technology and protest in autocracies. By leveraging new sub-national data on political protest and Internet penetration, they present analyses at the level of cities in more than 60 autocratic countries. The book also introduces a new methodology for estimating Internet use, developed in collaboration with computer scientists and drawing on large-scale observations of Internet traffic at the local level. Through this data, the authors analyze political protest as a process that unfolds over time and space, where the effect of Internet technology varies at different stages of protest. They show that violent repression and government institutions affect whether Internet technology empowers autocrats or activists, and that the effect of Internet technology on protest varies across different national environments.

This volume examines the concept of performance in ethnographic studies, with a special focus on the issues surrounding the performances of race, and cultural and environmental identities. A special partial section honours the contributions of David R. Maines to the field of communication studies. The concluding section considers new theoretical developments in interaction theory, including a re-examination of the spectatorial gaze in film and literary approaches to the imagined past.