Search Results

The author of this book, as a qualitative audience researcher, observes that a typical situation in a nursery school might usually exhibit how popular television shows plays a major part in conflicts, various aspects of interpersonal communications, and in the exchange of assorted symbols of cultural capital. While qualitative research cannot directly approve or reject a teacher’s common notion that television promotes violent behaviour among children, qualitative research may be able to provide an explanation that would consider several different contextual factors in such situations of violence while also identifying television’s other uses as a topic and form of communications in varied social settings. While ethnographic audience research reveals that media has now become an essential part of everyday life, we can say that interpersonal relationships and media consumption may be interrelated.

This chapter discusses how language technology is used to control the volume of interpersonal communication. It examines a range of language technologies that have increasingly empowered individuals to call the shots on social interaction. The more conceptual discussion is illustrated with data from a study undertaken in fall 2004 and spring 2005 of multitasking behavior by college students while using instant messaging. The study reveals how deft the current generation of multitaskers is at meshing online conversations with other activities. In electronically-mediated communication, users turn up the “volume” when they incessantly check their email. Along with the volume-control metaphor, another useful concept is affordances, the physical properties of objects that enable us to use them in particular ways. This chapter also looks at discourse control in traditional face-to-face and written-communication settings, and then at the affordances new language technologies add for adjusting the conversational “volume”. The cognitive and social aspects of multitasking, specifically with respect to instant messaging and mobile phones, are also discussed.

Youth is a major predictor of use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This chapter attempts to give a detailed examination of the functions for which teenagers use the Internet. It notes that interpersonal communication and downloading music dominate teens' time online. Almost all of teens' online communication is with other teens that they know from school and other local contexts, although online gaming and participation in chat rooms puts them in contact with strangers. By analysing the multiple conversational threads intertwined in an online chat room, the chapter provides a description of how teenagers use online conversation to cope with the perennial concerns of adolescent life, such as gender and racial identity, sexual development, and romantic partners.

Honesty is a central concept in interpersonal communication ethics, typically studied through the lens of self-disclosure in close relationships. Expanding the self-disclosure construct to encompass multiple types of messages occurring in public and private relationships offers additional insights. Across relational contexts, at least two aspects of human communication are relevant to honesty: the content dimension, which references factual information carried by a message; and the relationship dimension, which provides the implied stance or attitude toward the other and/or the relationship. This dimension provides interpretive nuance for the content dimension, its implications for honesty shaped by culture and context. This chapter considers five themes relevant to communication research—self-disclosure and restraint, Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, message design logic, communication competence, and civility, authority, and love—and explore the implications of each content area for honesty in human relationships.

This chapter first presents a vision of open communication and then explores the meaning of Commitment to Open Communication. A primary focus of the Commitment to Open Communication is on learning how to respond appropriately and avoid collective disturbance by understanding the nature of collective and unconscious processes, improving interpersonal communication, reducing the barriers that are created due to long-standing discriminatory practices, and enhancing organizational transparency.

Nursing is an interpersonal profession (Ellis and Whittington 1981) which is to say that the majority of the goals of the profession are met through the quality and nature of relationships the nurse is able to form. Effective interpersonal communication which underpins the therapeutic relationship is a complex set of skills which require the nurse to understand the context and purpose of the interactions, in addition to being aware of their own agendas and factors which might form a barrier to effective working relationships. Historically, interpersonal communication was implicit within nursing care and by the 1980s writers such as Morrison and Burnard (1991) and Porritt (1990) had identified and explored the nature of the therapeutic relationship and interpersonal skills within nursing care. Now authors such as Stein-Parbury (2009), Burnard and Gill (2008), Maben and Griffiths (2008), Freshwater (2005) and Greenhalgh and Heath (2005) have studied and written about this area in great depth. Both the Department of Health (DOH) (2010) and the Nursing and Midwifery Council (2008) have identified the centrality of patient-led care and the nurses’ ability to develop effective working relationships that enhance dignity and treat the person with compassion and care. A therapeutic relationship is significantly different from relationships that are formed socially amongst colleagues and friends. In order to establish a relationship which is helpful it is necessary to be aware of the assumptions, expectations and feelings you carry into each new professional relationship. Without this awareness there is a real danger that your own ‘noise’ will make it difficult for you to be present and experience the other person as they are. In order to understand the emotional needs and concerns of the person it is necessary for you to try to understand the world of the person that you are caring for—from that person’s own perspective. The nearer you can come to this the more effective will be the relationship, and the assessed needs of the patient will be more accurate and relevant. Learning about interpersonal communication within the context of nursing and the therapeutic relationship means that you will have the opportunity to develop your skills and adapt them for the purpose of caring for others.

This chapter explores incidental, indirect ways in which memory is shaped by interpersonal interaction and communication, that is, without collaboration of several individuals on an explicit memory task. The first section discusses research showing that encoding stimuli together with another person improves memory for the experience. Some studies examine memory effects from task sharing and joint action, while others explore effects of the mere joint experience of stimuli. The second section turns to effects of social sharing in communication on memory, specifically, the effects of conversational retellings and the audience-tuning effect on memory. Regarding explanations for the audience-tuning effect, the chapter focuses on shared reality theory and review evidence for the motives and goals underlying shared-reality creation.

This book examines the history of the role of communication as a tool for bringing development and social change. Drawing on the author's own experience accumulated over the past almost fifty years of professional interest in communication for development (c4d), the book investigates how both theory and practice evolved along with the technologies. In particular, it considers what is done for and to people by large outside institutions that provide funding and what people find to do for themselves. It also evaluates where we are today in the long-term struggle to bring development and social change through information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as interpersonal communication. Furthermore, it discusses four paradigms that have arisen in the social change and development arena over the past two decades: modernization-diffusion paradigm, critical or dependency paradigm, participation paradigm, and social entrepreneurship. The book concludes by tackling the question about how the c4d field might improve.

The chapter explains public opinion about the state of European democracy by focusing on the role of communication. It is argued that political talk, described as a core component of democratic life, is likely to be consequential for public assessments of EU democracy, but that the direction of relationship depends on context characteristics. Following prior literature the chapter focuses on the democratic quality of national political institutions. The findings indeed show that, in particular, in countries in which national institutions perform rather poorly, talking about the EP election is related to better assessments of EU democracy. The reverse pattern, however, is less evident. Overall people to some degree do rely on their national political institutions as a benchmark against which to talk about EU democracy.

This chapter proposes a principled distinction between two types of inferences: ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ (or reasoning proper). It grounds this distinction in a modular view of the human mind where metarepresentational modules play an important role in explaining the peculiarities of human psychological evolution. The chapter defends the hypothesis that the main function of reflective inference is to produce and evaluate arguments occurring in interpersonal communication rather than to help individual ratiocination. This function, it claims, helps explain important aspects of reasoning. The discussion reviews some of the existing evidence and argues that it gives support to this approach.

This chapter explains complex spoken communication development and intervention strategies that facilitate language growth in adolescents with hearing loss. The first section of this chapter summarizes spoken language development of adolescents. The second section focuses on factors influencing complex language development for adolescents with hearing loss. The chapter closes with a review of functionally relevant communication skills for adolescents with hearing loss such as mentalizing, figurative language, exposition and argumentation.

This concluding chapter reviews the alternative paths for how workers are dealing with conditions of the precarious new economy. They are entering common occupations in everyday workplaces that people do not normally think of as knowledge-based or culturally relevant, and transforming them into high-end, quality jobs that fuse mental and manual labor and that people with other work opportunities see as viable career options. These workers experience manual labor as meaningful and even fun through the enactment of a set of cultural repertoires that allow for physical, bodily labor, challenging mental problem-solving, cultural understanding, and interpersonal communication. The jobs also require the confident performance of each of these work practices in concert, not independently of the others.

This chapter reflects on various ways that the act of communication between persons has been treated in the social sciences and humanities. There is a distinction between a concern for acts as intelligible to those who engage in them and those perspectives that seek to offer views that somehow contrast the frameworks and reflexive practices constitutive of this intelligibility. Whatever the value of these contrastive views, a concern for the frameworks of intelligibility and their reflexive organization is the proper basis for identifying why and with what ends people communicate. The chapter illustrates this argument with explorations and a discussion of why people “Skype.”

Chapter 3 is a discussion about what not to do in conversations about politics, focusing on three common pitfalls. The first is approaching discussions as a competition. The goal of a conversation is not to “win” nor to wage a battle against another person; the goal is to come to a clearer understanding of what the other person thinks and, in the process, to come to a clearer understanding of one’s own thinking. Second, another common hiccup in meaningful dialogue is using the wrong tone, often resulting in shame or defensiveness. One of the surest ways to shut down a conversation before it starts is to make someone feel ashamed or defensive. Finally, the chapter identifies approaches to finding the most appropriate places and times to engage with other people in a meaningful way.