Throughout the world, the mass media are responsible for shaping the form and content of experiences. In this book, David L. Altheide examines how the mass media, including news and popular culture, have cast terrorism, propaganda and social control post 9/11. Altheide shows how fear works with terrorism to alter discourse, social meanings, and our sense of being in the world. Emphasis is placed on the different institutional interventions and how these particular stories become framed and inform the wider media narratives of terror. The author argues that post 9/11 we are witnessing the emergence of new communication formats that not only constitute counter-narratives, but also shape future communicative experience. The text is suitable for scholars and students interested in the ongoing relationship between the media and terror post 9/11.

Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics explores the relationship between rhetoric's materiality and the social world in the late modern political context. Taking as their point of departure a reprint of Michael Calvin McGee's 1982 call to reconceptualize rhetoric as the palpable "experience" of sociality, the authors in this volume grapple anew with the role of communication practices in contemporary collective life. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, these twelve original essays supplement, extend, and challenge McGee's position, collectively advocating on behalf of a shift in theoretical and critical attention from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric's materiality.

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games. It is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses covering mobile phone or gaming culture, media history and educational technology, as well as researchers and the general public.

With contributions from leading international researchers, Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling offers a critique of current thinking on the research literature into reading, reading comprehension and writing. Each paper in this volume provides an account of empirical research that challenges aspects of accepted models and widely accepted theories about reading and spelling.

This book develops the argument for a need to incorporate less widely cited research into popular accounts of written language development and disability, challenging the idea that the development of a universal theory of written language development is attainable. The arguments within the book are explored in three parts:

• overarching debates in reading and spelling
• reading and spelling across languages
• written language difficulties and approaches to teaching.

Opening up the existing debates, and incorporating psychological theory and the politics surrounding the teaching and learning of reading and spelling, this edited collection offers some challenging points for reflection about how the discipline of psychology as a whole approaches the study of written language skills.

Highlighting ground-breaking new perspectives, this book forms essential reading for all researchers and practitioners with a focus on the development of reading and spelling skills.

With contributions from leading international researchers, Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and Spelling offers a critique of current thinking on the research literature into reading, reading comprehension and writing. Each paper in this volume provides an account of empirical research that challenges aspects of accepted models and widely accepted theories about reading and spelling.

This book develops the argument for a need to incorporate less widely cited research into popular accounts of written language development and disability, challenging the idea that the development of a universal theory of written language development is attainable. The arguments within the book are explored in three parts:

• overarching debates in reading and spelling
• reading and spelling across languages
• written language difficulties and approaches to teaching.

Opening up the existing debates, and incorporating psychological theory and the politics surrounding the teaching and learning of reading and spelling, this edited collection offers some challenging points for reflection about how the discipline of psychology as a whole approaches the study of written language skills.

Highlighting ground-breaking new perspectives, this book forms essential reading for all researchers and practitioners with a focus on the development of reading and spelling skills.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary events, who felt compelled to adopt the role of a news reporter. This collection of twenty-one original, thought-provoking chapters investigates citizen journalism in the West, including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, as well as its development in a variety of other national contexts around the globe, including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Antarctica. It engages with several of the most significant topics for this important area of inquiry from fresh, challenging perspectives. Its aim is to assess the contribution of citizen journalism to crisis reporting, and to encourage new forms of dialogue and debate about how it may be improved in future.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary events, who felt compelled to adopt the role of a news reporter. This collection of twenty-one original, thought-provoking chapters investigates citizen journalism in the West, including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, as well as its development in a variety of other national contexts around the globe, including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Antarctica. It engages with several of the most significant topics for this important area of inquiry from fresh, challenging perspectives. Its aim is to assess the contribution of citizen journalism to crisis reporting, and to encourage new forms of dialogue and debate about how it may be improved in future.

This volume explores the relationship between shared disciplinary norms and individual traits in academic speech and writing. Despite the standardising pressure of cultural and language-related factors, academic communication remains in many ways a highly personal affair, with active participation in a disciplinary community requiring a multidimensional discourse that combines the professional, institutional, social and individual identities of its members. The first section of the volume deals with tensions involving individual/collective values and the analysis of collective vs. individual discoursal features in academic discourse. The second section comprises longitudinal investigations of the academic output of single scholars, so as to highlight the individuality in their choices and the reasons for not conforming with the commonality of conventions shared by their professional community. The third part deals with genres that are meant to impose commonality on the members of an academic community, not only in the drafting of specialized texts but also when these are reviewed or evaluated for possible publication.

Making New Media offers a series of case studies from the author's work with students and teachers from the mid-90s to the present day, charting the dramatic rise of new media in schools. Work across a wide range of media is presented: computer animation, digital video and film, computer games and machinima. The author tackles the vital contemporary themes of literacy and creativity, making an innovative argument for the combination of traditions of social semiotics and cultural studies in the study of literacy and new media. This volume should be read by every undergraduate and graduate student, as well as any faculty member, involved with or interested in any aspect of new media.

Has the internet changed the nature of conducting controversies? This question cannot be answered easily as different forms of human interaction in an online environment exist and controversies in an online environment have not been analyzed from a linguistic point of view so far. On the other hand, there are many linguistic analyses of controversies in the Early Modern Period. First, this volume describes the communicative background of two online discussion forums dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Then, the volume analyzes the similarities and differences between Early Modern controversies and controversies in online internet discussion forums. Further, this book offers an accurate analysis of the strategies used in online discussion forums, analyzing two controversial threads taken from two online discussion forums and provides insights into the individual tactics and strategies applied in online controversies and highlights the similarities and differences of applied principles, norms, and rules. The book finally comments on stylistic choices used by participants in the controversies.

Many books have been written about the press and terrorism - particularly since September 11th - but this is the first press-focused exploration of their relationship. Drawing upon the history of terrorism, mass communication research, media theory, and journalism practice, this book examines how the press reports terrorism, and how that reporting varies depending on the medium and location. Examining the differences in reporting - globally and historically within different media and government systems - Terrorism and the Press provides insights for how, in the future, we can better navigate the relationship between the press, government, and audience when terrorists attack.

Scholars in Media Studies increasingly take the view that our understanding of the history of the discipline is deeply inadequate. It is now widely recognised that a large number of important media analysts have simply been omitted from the standard histories. This book aims to fill in some of the gaps by examining the work of eleven neglected writers, each of whom has made a seminal contribution to the analysis of the media but whose work rarely appears in student textbooks, anthologies and readers. In keeping with the interdisciplinary ambitions of contemporary Media Studies, the selected thinkers are drawn from a wide range of historical periods and intellectual backgrounds. There are chapters on sociologists, creative writers, cultural theorists, art critics, journalists and even ancient Greek philosophers. The aims of the book are by no means purely antiquarian. The contributors believe that a revival of interest in the work of their chosen writers can go a long way towards revitalising Media Studies, especially by (1) drawing attention to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches which have yet to be adequately exploited, (2) suggesting new areas of research, and (3) transforming our understanding of the historical development of Media Studies.

How effective are election campaign posters? Providing a unique political history, this book traces the impact that these posters - as well as broadsides, banners, and billboards - have had around the world over the last two centuries. It focuses on the use of this campaign material in the United States, as well as in France, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries. The book examines how posters evolved and discusses their changing role in the twentieth century and thereafter; how technology, education, legislation, artistic movements, advertising, and political systems effected changes in election posters and other campaign media, and how they were employed around the world. This comprehensive and original overview of this campaign material includes the first extensive review of the research literature on the topic. Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion will be useful to scholars and students interested in communications, politics, history, advertising and marketing, art history, and graphic design.

This book explores the cognitive and communicative processes involved in the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) within cross-cultural specialized contexts where non-native speakers of English - i.e. Western experts and non-Western migrants - interact. The book argues that the main communicative difficulties in such contexts are due precisely to the use of ELF, since it develops from the non-native speakers' transfer of their native language structures and socio-cultural schemata into the English they speak. Transfer, in fact, allows non-native speakers to appropriate, or authenticate, those English semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and specialized-discourse structures that are linguistically and conceptually unavailable to them. It follows that there are as many ELF varieties as there are communities of non-native speakers authenticating English. The research questions justifying the ethnographic case studies detailed in this book are: What kind of cognitive frames and communicative strategies do Western experts activate in order to convey their culturally-marked knowledge of specialized discourse - by using their ELF varieties - to non-Westerners with different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds? What kind of power asymmetries can be identified when non-Westerners try to communicate their own knowledge by using their respective ELF varieties? Is it possible to ultimately develop a mode of ELF specialized communication that can be shared by both Western experts and non-Western migrants?

The aim of this volume is to present a state-of-the-art view on corpus studies. This collection of papers, presented at the XII Susanne Hubner Seminar in November 2003 at the University of Zaragoza, comprises both quantitative and qualitative analyses and studies on both written and oral corpora. Structured in seven sections, the book covers a wide range of approaches and methodologies and reflects current linguistic research. The papers have been written by scholars from a large number of universities, mainly from Europe, but also from the USA and Asia. The volume offers contributions on diachronic studies, pragmatic analyses and cognitive linguistics, as well as on translation and English for Specific Purposes. The book includes several papers on corpus design and reports on research on oral corpora. At a more specific level, the papers analyse aspects such as politeness issues, dialectology, comparable corpora, discourse markers, the expression of evidentiality and writer stance, metaphor and metonymy, conditional sentences, evaluative adjectives, delexicalised verbs and nominalization.

How effective are election campaign posters? Providing a unique political history, this book traces the impact that these posters - as well as broadsides, banners, and billboards - have had around the world over the last two centuries. It focuses on the use of this campaign material in the United States, as well as in France, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries. The book examines how posters evolved and discusses their changing role in the twentieth century and thereafter; how technology, education, legislation, artistic movements, advertising, and political systems effected changes in election posters and other campaign media, and how they were employed around the world. This comprehensive and original overview of this campaign material includes the first extensive review of the research literature on the topic. Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion will be useful to scholars and students interested in communications, politics, history, advertising and marketing, art history, and graphic design.

Lankshear (literacy and new technologies, James Cook U. Australia) and Knobel (language and literacy education, Queensland U. of Technology, Australia) have chosen the contributors to this volume based on the idea of emphasizing the plurality of digital literacies, by which they mean to refer to the diversity of specific accounts of digital literacy that exist and consequent implications for digital literacy policy, the strength and usefulness of a sociocultural perspective on literacy as practice (according to which literacy is best understood as literacies), and the benefits that may accrue from adopting an expansive view of digital literacy and its significance for educational learning. They present 12 chapters addressing such subjects as the required cognitive skills for Internet literacy, digital literacy as information savvy, digital literacy policies in the European Union, digital literacy in enterprises, the digital literacies of online shoppers, digital literacy and participation in online social networking spaces, and digital literacy and the law.

The studies presented in this volume concentrate on aspects of Late Modern English correspondence in the usage of individuals belonging to different social classes, writing for different purposes, and finding themselves in different social contexts, both in Britain and in its colonies. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of letters presents both a challenge and an opportunity to obtain access to as full a range of styles as would be possible for a period for which we only have access to the language in its written form. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed 'second-generation' corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning letters as a text type, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of register or variety specific traits are high-lighted, alongside issues concerning the (often less than easy) relationship between strictly codified norms and actual usage on the part of speakers whose level of education could vary considerably.

This volume originates from the editors' interest in one of the most relevant fields of research these days: Intercultural and International Business Communication. The needs of the business world to communicate effectively at an international level in order to overcome language differences have proved to be a fascinating topic for many scholars. International business discourse is culturally-situated and therefore context-dependent, and all three -- discourse, culture and context -- play a key role in the communication process. The present contributions analyse this topic under the perspective of theory, research and teaching. Different scholars have offered their views on the subject, presenting contributions on different areas related to business communication all over the world.

The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.