In team-based tasks, successful communication and mutual understanding are essential to facilitate team coordination and performance. It is well-established that an important component of human conversation is the maintenance of common ground. Maintaining common ground has a number of associated processes in which conversational participants engage. Many of these processes are lacking in current synthetic teammates, and it is unknown to what extent this lack of capabilities affects their ability to contribute during team-based tasks. We focused our research on (...) how teams package information within a conversation, by which we mean specifically whether information is explicitly mentioned or implied, and how multiple pieces of information are ordered both within single communications and across multiple communications. We re-analyzed data collected from a simulated remotely-piloted aerial system task in which team members had to specify speed, altitude, and radius restrictions. The data came from three experiments: the “speech” experiment, the “text” experiment, and the “evaluation” experiment. We asked first whether teams settled on a specific routine for communicating the speed, altitude, and radius restrictions, and whether this process was different if the teams communicated in speech compared to text. We then asked how receiving special communication instructions in the evaluation experiment impacted the way the human teammates package information. We found that teams communicating in either speech or text tended to use a particular order for mentioning the speed, altitude, and radius. Different teams also chose different orders from one another. The teams in the evaluation experiment, however, showed unnaturally little variability in their information ordering and were also more likely to explicitly mention all restrictions even when they did not apply. Teams in the speech and text experiments were more likely to leave unnecessary restrictions unmentioned, and were also more likely to convey the restrictions across multiple communications. The option to converge on different packaging routines may have contributed to improved performance in the text experiment compared some of the conditions in the evaluation experiment. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 224 Seiten: 269-293.

Subjects communicated prior to playing trust games; the richness of the communication media and the topics of conversation were manipulated. Communication richness failed to produce significant differences in first-mover investments. However, the topics of conversation made a significant difference: the amounts sent were considerably higher in the unrestricted communication conditions than in the restricted communication and no-communication conditions. Most importantly, we find that first-movers' expectations of second-movers' reciprocation are influenced by communication and strongly predict (...) their levels of investment. (shrink)

Medium-sized language communities face competition between local and global languages such as Spanish, Russian, French and, above all, English. The various regions of Spain where Catalan is spoken, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania show how their medium-sized languages (a term used to distinguish them as much from minority codes as from more widely-spoken codes) coexist alongside or struggle with their big brothers in multilingual families. This comparative analysis offers unique insight into language contact in present-day Europe.

This research examines how an organization, Thanksgiving Coffee, establishes and maintains its legitimacy with its constituent publics. In line with Boyd’s (2000, Journal of Public Relations Research12(4), 341–353.) concept of actional legitimacy, Thanksgiving Coffee demonstrates a legitimation strategy addressing social issues and by responding to ethical and political questions. Applying Fisher’s (1984, Communication Monographs51, 1–18) concepts of narrative fidelity and probability, Thanksgiving Coffee’s policies and communication activities were found to alleviate the social issues to which they were addressed (...) and therefore reinforce perceptions of legitimacy among publics. Viewing the influence of organizations from a different perspective, this study provides an example of how the policies of an organization can have a positive impact on the broader society in which it operates. (shrink)

This paper examines the varied learning experiences that integrated socio-cultural theory, community engagement and e-learning offered by the “Diversity, Social Justice and Schooling” subject at the University of Western Sydney. This subject engaged university students in the learning process in a reflective and critical way, by responding to a need identified by community. Together with education technology, subject content knowledge and community engagement, the social justice subject aimed to enhance the educational achievement of marginalised groups, while simultaneously supporting pre-service teachers (...) in the context of their development as educators committed to a social justice ethos. (shrink)

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the (...) furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.1. (shrink)

This research examines how an organization, Thanksgiving Coffee, establishes and maintains its legitimacy with its constituent publics. In line with Boyd’s (2000, Journal of Public Relations Research 12(4), 341–353.) concept of actional legitimacy, Thanksgiving Coffee demonstrates a legitimation strategy addressing social issues and by responding to ethical and political questions. Applying Fisher’s (1984, Communication Monographs 51, 1–18) concepts of narrative fidelity and probability, Thanksgiving Coffee’s policies and communication activities were found to alleviate the social issues to which they (...) were addressed and therefore reinforce perceptions of legitimacy among publics. Viewing the influence of organizations from a different perspective, this study provides an example of how the policies of an organization can have a positive impact on the broader society in which it operates. (shrink)

This paper will set out the key planning considerations regarding the establishment of a dedicated online portal for Gaeltacht and Irish-medium schools at post-primary level as detailed in the Policy on Gaeltacht Education 2017-2022 (PGE). The research topic is intrinsically linked with action points highlighted within strategy and policy papers concerning the improvement of online supports for teachers in recent years by the Department of Education (DE) in Ireland. The Digital Strategy for Schools 2015-2020 refers to the objective of (...) establishing digital communities of practice and the PGE highlights the need for a ‘dedicated online portal’ for Irish-medium schools. Embracing a problem-solving spirit, forging coalitions, building inter-agency collaboration, and ensuring teacher buy-in from the outset are all critical factors in the necessary planning process. Through the adoption of a mixed-methods approach, questionnaire and focus group respondents verified the most important thematic issues for L1 (Irish-medium) post-primary teachers respecting the establishment of what has the capacity to become a flourishing online community of practice (OCoP). The research process cast a spotlight upon how best to serve the teachers’ professional needs, confirmed the need for a collaborative approach that prioritised the significance of the collective, ascertained the existence of greater teacher openness to systemic change, and the centrality of transformative digital solutions in the L1 educational sphere. (shrink)

Using an apparatus in which two scalers register decays from a radioactive source, an observer located near one of the scalers attempted to convey a message to an observer located near the other one by choosing to look or to refrain from looking at his scaler. The results indicate that no message was conveyed. Doubt is thereby thrown upon the hypothesis that the reduction of the wave packet is due to the interaction of the physical apparatus with the psyche of (...) an observer.A. Einstein(1). (shrink)

Few previous studies have investigated the relationship between global perspective and willingness to communicate in English. Hence, more studies are needed to validate their correlation. Furthermore, hardly any pertaining studies have been conducted at English Medium Instruction universities. As such, the current study aimed to fill these gaps in the context of an EMI university in China, by investigating whether GP correlates with second language WTC and what factors impact the two variables. Data were collected from students via an (...) online questionnaire and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire findings confirmed a moderate positive correlation between GP and L2 WTC. The interview data unraveled that several factors influenced students’ L2 WTC, including needs and motivations driving L2 WTC, concerns constraining L2 WTC, and intercultural cognition facilitating L2 WTC. These findings suggest that: students could be more determined to practice their English if they realize the significance of the role of English in their life; teachers could foster students’ WTC by creating a non-threatening English-speaking environment and encouraging students to communicate in English in and outside the classroom; and teachers could educate students about GP and L2 WTC, which might help to expand students’ horizon and stimulate their interests in foreign cultures and global affairs, so as to facilitate the sustainable growth of their English learning. (shrink)

The Visible Medium. Opaque Interface and Non-Mimetic Immersivity -/- The relation of reciprocal co-implication that Merleau-Ponty formulates—and on which he insists throughout his work—between sense and the sensible, perception and expression, and then visible and invisible, transforms the way in which one conceives of the medium. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics reveals an idea of the medium as a support that erases itself in the act of conveying the signifi cation and also shakes the direct correlation between transparency and mimetic (...) simulation. Understood as the sensible thickness of the body opening onto the world, then as depth and écart that catalyzes vision, the medium, then, furnishes one of the defi nitions of fl esh, as the element of auto-mediation: connective tissue or fabric of communication that is at once écart and internal difference. Merleau-Ponty conceives of the medium as both that which renders and that which is rendered visible. It is therefore no longer an intermediary; it ceases to be an invisible mediator and becomes the opaque element that reveals in fi ligree the movement of gestaltic difference. It is from such a Merleau-Pontian conception of medium that one can begin to elaborate the complex issues posed by mediality in the post-medial age. The idea of a “visible medium” permits us to break with the confl ation of the simulation’s immersive effect and performance, which often informs the rhetoric concerning medias and new technologies, in order rather to think of an “opaque interface” or an “non-mimetic immersivity.” From such a conception of mediality we can equally understand the phenomenon of numerical convergence, not as the accomplishment of the suppression or dematerialization of the medium, as is the case with traditional theories, but as the point of departure for a return to the body as the condition of possibility for every aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Peltokorpi and Hood provide a systematic review of theory and research examining the ways communication and conversations help dyads, groups, and teams form and maintain transactive memory systems (TMS; Wegner, Erber, & Raymond, 1991) through overlapping encoding, storage, and retrieval processes. Peltokorpi and Hood organized their systematic review of 34 articles published in psychology, communication and organization research and management into four main themes: i) communication frequency and quality; ii) communication medium and group development, iii) (...) communication styles, and iv) communication networks. (shrink)

Annual reports are an important element in the genre of corporate public discourse. The reporting practices mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all publicly traded corporations are intended to render the annual reports a legitimate and trustworthy medium through which management communicates information related to the financial performance of the firm. The following discussion represents an inaugural attempt to investigate the ethical characteristics of the discourse found in corporate annual reports using Habermas' principles of communicative action. In (...) preparing the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the report, managers are charged with providing narrative information for investors and other interested third parties relevant to assessing the firm's financial condition. Previous rhetorical studies of the narrative portions of annual reports argue that they serve as means for both legitimate and distorted communication. We investigate this communication medium through the lens of Habermas' norms for communicative action, which require communicators to be comprehensible, truthful, sincere, and legitimate. The study represents an initial attempt to operationalization Habermas' principles of communicative action and to employ a methodology that facilitates their application to research within a business context. From one perspective, consistent with agency theory as specified by neoclassical economics, it would seem that firms anticipating worse-than-expected financial performance would be less likely to exhibit the Habermasian principles necessary for undistorted communication because they would attempt to strategically influence the message being communicated about the firm's financial position. Instead, employing rhetorical analysis software, Diction 5.0, we found that firms expecting both good and bad earnings surprises exhibited a higher level of communicative action than a composite average firm. Although preliminary in nature, our findings suggest that firms anticipating large earnings surprises, either high or low, use the narrative portion of the annual report as a vehicle through which to communicate information about managements' veracity and trustworthiness as well as the firm's financial position. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Aufsatz wird eine kommunikations- und medientheoretische Untersuchung ausgewählter Divinationspraktiken unternommen. Im Zentrum stehen hierbei das Giftorakel der zentralafrikanischen Zande sowie die arabisch-islamische Geomantie. Dieses Unternehmen hat den Zweck, drei Thesen bezüglich Medien religiöser Kommunikation zu erproben, die sich dem Autor aus der Auseinandersetzung mit Ritualen und speziell Divinationsformen aus unterschiedlichen soziokulturellen Kontexten ergeben haben:1) Divinationsmedien unterscheiden sich in frappierender Weise von Medien der Alltagskommunikation; 2) diese besonderen Medien ermöglichen eine Kommunikation zwischen Wirklichkeitsbereichen und verkörpern damit ein fundamentales „Dazwischen“; (...) 3) von einer Innenperspektive betrachtet, werden Divinationsmedien oft als aktive Kommunikationspartner konzipiert und wahrgenommen – selbst wenn diese aus einer Beobachterperspektive unbelebte Paraphernalia sind.Um eine Grundlage für die Plausibilisierung dieser Thesen zu schaffen, ist anfänglich von Kommunikation und Medien sowie den Besonderheiten religiöser Kommunikation und Medien religiöser Kommunikation die Rede. Auf die detaillierte Beschreibung der Divinationspraktiken folgen ihre kommunikationstheoretische Analyse sowie eine zeichen- und medientheoretische Deutung dieser Ergebnisse.Das Ziel dieses Aufsatzes liegt neben der Plausibilisierung seiner Thesen auch darin, Impulse für die religionswissenschaftliche Debatte um Medien, Materialität und Performanz zu liefern. Gerade in den Ergebnissen der Divinationsforschung sieht David Morgan, wie er jüngst in Material religion schrieb, ein ertragreiches Feld. (shrink)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mediatization was understood as a condition through which a person lost his or her agency. A person mediatized was a person deprived of his sovereign power to act. This understanding is perhaps more pertinent today than ever in describing the way humans are, in a manner, mediatized by their own technological constructs. In a McLuhanesque sense, if we place too much influence on the understanding of the message, we do not understand the medium. (...) In doing that, we become blind to the environments in and through which we must act, for better or worse. The article is a discussion on the conditions of techno-scientific development and their effects on the human condition. (shrink)

Amartya Sen’s capability approach has become increasingly popular in development studies. This paper identifies controllability and operationalisability as two key stumbling blocks which prevent the capability approach from being used even more widely in development practice. It discusses the origins and application of the Choice Framework, a conceptual tool designed to help operationalise the approach. The framework can be used to deconstruct embedded ideologies and analyse the appropriateness of development goals, to map development as a systemic process, and to plan (...) interventions which can result in increased freedom of choice for people. Three examples of the application of the Choice Framework in the field of information and communication for development (ICT4D) are given. The three technologies which are examined, telecentres (Infocentros), Chilecompra and Fair Tracing, can be placed at different places of a determinism continuum, some reducing the spectrum of choices a user has. The paper argues that while frameworks such as the Choice Framework can be developed further to increase the operationalisability of the capability approach, it is up to development funders to accept the fact that people’s choices are never fully predictable and thus Sen’s ‘development as freedom’ will inevitably be a dynamic and open-ended process. (shrink)

Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With (...) its diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere. (shrink)

A significant part of responsible innovation is engagement with diverse groups of stakeholders; this remains true for projects investigating responsible innovation practices. This chapter discusses strategies for engaging small and medium-sized enterprises in co-creating visions of and plans for implementing responsible innovation, drawing on the example of engagement with United Kingdom cyber security companies. The key aspect of the engagement was building trust between the responsible innovation researchers and the companies. Trust was built by a movement away from traditional (...) recruitment procedures for research projects, towards proactive engagement with the culture and traditions of the sector – participating in company sponsored talks and conferences, finding ways to communicate effectively, and ensuring a tailored message that fit the expectations and requirements of the sector. This chapter reviews the context in which the recruitment took place, the assumptions made prior to recruitment, the approaches taken, the revisions made to these approaches, and ultimately offers some general recommendations for industry engagement in responsible innovation activities. (shrink)

University of Pennsylvania, USA, el322{at}nyu.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> One of the most consistent findings in experimental studies of social dilemmas is the positive influence of face-to-face communication on cooperation. The face-to-face `communication effect' has been recently explained in terms of a `focus theory of norms': successful communication focuses agents on pro-social norms, and induces preferences and expectations conducive to cooperation. 1 Many of the studies that point to a communication (...) effect, however, do not further explore whether and to what extent the communication medium affects cooperative behavior. In this article, we ask if pro-social behavior can emerge and survive in computer-mediated environments. We show that, like face-to-face communication, computer-mediated communication also positively affects cooperation in social dilemmas, but cooperation is more difficult to establish and maintain. We argue that the discrepancy between the computer-mediated and the face-to-face communication effects is a consequence of the distinct capabilities of different media to focus agents on pro-social norms and to allow them to develop mutual expectations about future behavior. Key Words: social dilemmas • laboratory experiments • communication • social norms • cooperation • computer-mediated communication. (shrink)

The recruitment and socialization (enculturation) of spirit mediums in the United States is investigated through ethnographic interviews, participant observation and library biographies in Lily Dale, New York. Spirit mediumship, alleged transfer of information from departed souls to the living through another living human (the medium) is a deviant way of knowing in this society. Most children with signs of mediumistic ability are discouraged by family and community. Moving into the role requires positive definitions and social support, such as in (...) Spiritualist Church classes. Given general scepticism about intuition in Western society, even mediums themselves look for "confirmations" to validate their nonrational communications. Thus, the dominance of scientific rationality is accepted to an important degree even by this group that practices an alternate way of knowing. (shrink)

Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology (...) for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field. Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations--creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners--that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts. (shrink)

This article has already been published in Techné : Research in Philosophy and Technology, 19:3, pp. 358–380.: This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel's phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies. It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

Recent research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests the need for further exploration into the relationship between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and CSR. SMEs rarely use the language of CSR to describe their activities, but informal CSR strategies play a large part in them. The goal of this article is to investigate whether differences exist between the formal and informal CSR strategies through which firms manage relations with and the claims of their stakeholders. In this context, formal CSR (...) strategies seem to characterize large firms while informal CSR strategies prevail among micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. We use a sample of 3,626 Italian firms to investigate our research questions. Based on a multistakeholder framework, the analysis provides evidence that small businesses* use of CSR, involving strategies with an important impact on the bottom line, reflects an attempt to secure their license to operate in the communities; while large firms rarely make attempts to integrate their CSR strategies into explicit management systems. (shrink)

This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel’s phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies (ICTs). It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can help us to think about contemporary financial media and technologies. The analysis focuses on the social-spatial implications of financial ICTs. It also makes links to media theory, in (...) particular remediation theory and Marshall McLuhan, and refers to work in anthropology and geography of money to nuance the story of the progressive dematerialization and delocalization of modern life. The conclusion highlights Simmel’s continuing relevance for thinking about the relation between technologies and social change, and explores alternative social-financial media and institutions. (shrink)

This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel’s phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies (ICTs). It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can help us to think about contemporary financial media and technologies. The analysis focuses on the social-spatial implications of financial ICTs. It also makes links to media theory, in (...) particular remediation theory and Marshall McLuhan, and refers to work in anthropology and geography of money to nuance the story of the progressive dematerialization and delocalization of modern life. The conclusion highlights Simmel’s continuing relevance for thinking about the relation between technologies and social change, and explores alternative social-financial media and institutions. (shrink)

Summary Within the health-related promotion of physical activity forms of sport activities are not seen as a necessary option. In this paper, this position is compared with the perspective of the sport system on sport as medium of health promotion. Within a systems theoretical framework, the German Olympic Sports Confederation and German Health Ministry programmes are analysed and contrasted. The documents reveal different perspectives on sport as a medium of health promotion. Moreover, different systemic logics lead to communications (...) which often aim to protect organisational meanings and competences from the external interference of other systems. In this context, the health system's logic appears to be more dominant. This may lead to an evolution of sport system programmes that is shaped by reacting to the operations of the health system. (shrink)

There is a major transformation taking place in the Arab and Muslim worlds. People in these nations are poised on the edge of a significant new social landscape. Called the Internet, this new frontier not only includes the creation of new forms of private communication, like electronic mail and chat, but also webbased forums, which for the first time enables public discussion between males and females in conservative societies. This paper has been written as a result of an ethnographic (...) study conducted in Saudi Arabia during the period 2001‐2002. The purpose of the study was to understand how online communities in Saudi Arabia are affecting people. The results of the study indicate that while participants to a large extent used online communities in accordance with their cultural values, norms and traditions, the communication medium and the features associated with it, such as the anonymity and lack of social cues, have affected them considerably. For example, many participants became more flexible in their thinking, more aware of the diverse nature of people within their society, less inhibited about the opposite gender, and more self‐confident. On the other hand, participants neglected their family commitments, became less shy and some became confused about some aspects of their culture and religion. These findings and their implications for the Arab and Muslim worlds will be highlighted in this paper. (shrink)

William James’s interest in psychical research is often treated as something of an anomaly. The fact that James took "that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as ’mesmeric,’ ’psychical,’ and ’spiritualistic,’" seriously as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry seems slightly bemusing to our contemporary jaded ears. As a result, his writings collected in Essays in Psychical Research tend to be marginalized, even ignored by most serious James scholars. But American pragmatist communication theorist John Durham Peters, (...) in his innovative philosophical and cultural history of communication, Speaking into the Air, provides the key to a new appreciation of this oft-neglected work by asserting that, for James, "the question of communication was one of our time’s questions of faith." By this Peters means that James’s investigations were not simply about whether communication with the dead via mediums was scientifically possible but also and more fundamentally about the desire for authentic person-to-person or soul-to-soul connection across distances. As Peters reads James, the question of communication is fundamentally a religious one, involving issues of hope, trust, faith, and interpretation; James’s "concern was never to rule out the possibility of contact with the inhuman– beast or God." Why? Because of the difference that it made, the effects that it had. (shrink)

How does John Cage’s conceptual work 4′33" communicate its meaning and how can we appreciate it? In this paper, I develop two competing interpretations to tackle these questions. First, drawing on Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens’s account of conceptual art and on Cage’s commentary on 4′33", I elaborate an overlooked idea that the work creates a new art form of conceptual music, which can be appreciated exclusively through the ideas it conveys. However, I argue that the conceptualist interpretation of 4′33" (...) does not help us understand the work’s point, because it reveals a set of inconsistent claims about music and listening. The second interpretation draws on Julian Dodd’s view that the physical medium is irreducible in appreciating conceptual artworks. I develop this view by introducing a notion of a gesture to expand on how the performance of 4′33" contributes to its aesthetic appreciation and propose an alternative interpretation of the work’s meaning. (shrink)

With the advent of strategic science, multidisciplinary and cross-institutional research is more and more becoming the rule. The problems encountered by such multidisciplinary research and development cooperations are highly varied. They derive from multiple differences in the backgrounds of the participants and are often perceived as cultural gaps that need to be bridged for cooperation. The main argument of the article is that multidisciplinary collaborations have mechanisms at their disposal to cooperate despite multiple problems counteracting such a cooperation. Since symbolic (...) communication is the primary medium of articulation across sites, this article focuses on how symbolic communication enables cooperation across sites without a deep comprehension of each other's work. Multidisciplinary cooperations start out with few shared symbolic resources, but as the cooperation continues, they may develop communicative boundarytranscending objects such as active and passive dictionaries and hybrid repertoires. (shrink)

The interlacements between McLuhan and Flusser present the city in its fluidity as a complex topology enabled by communicative structures. For the network city and the device city and their transformations the location of the being is insignificant. An updated reading of Flusser’s text Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut encourages us to take into account the vocation for connectivity of this new form of urbanity.

The article looks at Novi ecclesiastico-scholastici Annales (…), a periodical which is a significant resource in book culture research. The authors focus mainly on book distribution and propagation in Protestant communities during the last decade of the 18th century.

Faculty learning communities are collaborative collegial groups of faculty and other teaching staff who are interested in and committed to the improvement of their teaching to accommodate a diverse student population through group discourse, reflection and goal setting. In this article, we describe our FLC experiences that were supported by a federal grant to ensure accessible learning environments on our campus. The project, Ensuring Access through Collaboration and Technology , sought to introduce faculty at a medium‐sized state university to (...) a pedagogical framework to provide universal access to the curriculum for all students and to encourage faculty to adopt accessible technologies. We describe the recruitment process, the FLC meeting structure, our intended outcomes and the challenges we faced in meeting them. (shrink)

The Lockean theory of communication is here defined as the theory that communication takes place when a hearer grasps some sort of mental object, distinct from the speaker's words, that the speaker's words express. This theory contrasts with the view that spoken languages are the very medium of a kind of thought of which overt speech is the most basic form. This article is a critique of some of the most common motives for adopting a Lockean theory (...) of communication. It is not enough that words in some sense express thoughts. It is not enough that animals and prelinguistic infants in some sense think. It is not enough that speakers mean something by what they say or that hearers must understand a speaker's presuppositions. On the contrary, any explanation of how children can learn to communicate in the way the Lockean imagines will presuppose that words can instill beliefs in some way more fundamental than the Lockean theory itself can explain. (shrink)

"Social capital" can be considered to be the product of co-operationbetween various institutions, networks and business partners. It haspotential as a useful tool for business ethics. In this article weidentify categories pertinent to the measurement of social capital insmall and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). By drawing on three differentsectors, one business-to-business service, one business-to-customerservice, and one manufacturing, we have enabled the consideration ofsectoral differences. We find sector to play an important part inrelation to business practices and social capital. Our (...) inclusion of SMEsfrom Germany and the United Kingdom has called attention to cultural,institutional and economic aspects of two regions of Europe and how theycan influence SME social capital. Social capital is found to beinfluenced by context and, in particular, institutional arrangements. Inanalysing the data we note particular areas of interest from the pointof view of SMEs and social capital as being: formal engagement,networking within sectors, networking across sectors, volunteerism andgiving to charity, and finally a focus on why people engage. We concludethat there is a considerable amount of further research needed on socialcapital, SME''s and business ethics. (shrink)

This review of Medium, Messenger, Transmission outlines and introduces the media philosophy of Sybille Krämer. Her argument that communication initiates a relationship with the other as an ethical act is read alongside the work of Emmanuel Levinas, before exploring the impact of our contemporary obligation to be available for communication in working environments that seem not to encourage or instantiate this moral encounter.

We are mastering engineering behaviour on a molecular level. A growing number of researches investigating the relationship between microbiota, human brain and behaviour examine the impacts of manipulating specific microbial colonies in human hosts. To enable discussing and understanding communicational phenomena that occur in scales not visible to the naked eye, we propose the term Molmedia – a metaphorical reference to the concept of mole, denoting here not exclusively the quantitative amount of substance but the information exchange processes (taking the (...) substances as messages) that are going on at elementary entities level such as atomic, subatomic and molecular, within a given system that can be a living organism. We take media (plural of medium) as an intervening agency, means or instrument. Interacting emitters and receivers in this system are the microbiota and the organism actual cells. Within this self-organizing structure, the ongoing informational processes produce, as an emergence, the self and behavioral patterns that can be appreciated, manipulated and cannibalized. The art and science installation Transplanting the Self: Microbiome Anthropophagy is presented as an explorative exercise of the concept and related possibilities in science concerning gut–brain communication and the use of neuroregenerative nutrition in treatments for neurologic conditions. (shrink)

Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work _Utopia _to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as (...) a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha. (shrink)

Reception and transmission process of the mind is reflected in communicationwhichdependsonanobject,mediumorsymbolsomethingmanisfamiliar withsothathecaninterpret,understandandcomprehendit.Languageisthe mostcommonformofhumansymbolmanmakesuseofincommunication. Freirepresentedtwowaysofcommunication.Thestudyaimedtointertwine communication,educationandsocietyasa systemandcriticizeit.Thestudy madeuseofhistoricalpedagogy.Epistemologicalmethodwasalsointertwined withcommunication.Hebelievedthatsystemofsocietyinfluencedsystemof educationasreflectedbythekindofcommunicationused.Hebelievedthat onlythroughpromotionofdialogueinthecommunicativeprocessthatgenuine knowledgecanbeattained.Today,however,modernsocietieshaverevolutionizedtheroleofeducationsectorespeci allyuniversitiestowardsthesocietyin terms of economics. Global and multinational companies tap researchers and inventors from universities for research and development which could boosttechnology, production, marketing and profit – in short economy. Thus, thestudy implied care for the use of symbols and language in education; freedomand liberation in education should be savored and maximized; education mustbe a catalyst for societal change and development. (...) keywords: Philosophy, mind, communication, process, language, human symbol, medium,liberation,education,society,pedagogy,epistemology,Philippines. (shrink)

An increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises in the German organic agri-food sector involves citizens through different community financing models. While such models provide alternative funding sources as well as marketing opportunities to SMEs, they allow private investors to combine their financial and ethical concerns by directly supporting the development of a more sustainable food system. Due to the low level of financial intermediation, community financing is characterized by close relations between investors and investees. Against this background, we (...) apply the proximity concept from economic geography to explore spatial and relational aspects of community financing in the German organic agri-food sector. Based on a qualitative multiple case study approach, we find that the relevance of proximity is twofold. While different forms of proximity between SMEs and their potential investors are key success factors, proximity is also considered as one desired outcome of community financing. Furthermore, our results reveal that the extent to which SMEs rely on particular proximity dimensions distinguishes two different approaches to community financing. (shrink)

In communities of inquiry, dialogue is central as both the means and the outcome of collective inquiry. Indeed, features of dialogue—including formulating and asking questions, developing hypotheses and explanations, and offering and requesting reasons—are often highlighted as playing a significant role in the quality of the dialogue that unfolds. We inquire further into the quality of dialogue by arguing that dialogue should enable the expansion of epistemic openness, rather than its contraction, and that this is especially important in multicultural communities (...) of inquiry to acknowledge the cultural, perspectival, and experiential differences that exist alongside of similarities as resources for dialogue. The purpose of this article is to highlight two discourse practices that exemplify the nature of discourse as social practice and can be used in communities of inquiry. Attending to these discourse practices may enable teachers and students to reflect upon dialogue as it unfolds. First, we situate ourselves in multicultural classrooms in British Columbia, Canada. Then we articulate three principles of communities of inquiry. Next we describe and exemplify two discourse practices: heteroglossic attunement and lexical awareness. When attended to by teachers and students, 1) heteroglossic attunement enables teachers and students to begin to identify, reflect upon, and discuss the voices and perspectives that are drawn upon as participants inquire together and 2) lexical awareness enables teachers and students to begin to identify their attributions of thinking and feeling to social actors and to recognize how naming social actors positions them in an evolving set of social relations. Rather than a neutral medium of communication, social speech and dialogue is inherently value laden. Attending closely to the discourse that constitutes dialogue in a community of inquiry is a significant pedagogical tool for both teachers and students to expand epistemic openness and make visible learning as it unfolds. (shrink)

This paper discusses the contents and roles of the bulletin Giat, a community-based periodical published in Jakarta by a Koto Gadang foundation to support development in Koto Gadang, West Sumatra. Giat played a role as a communication medium linking people from Koto Gadang who lived outside their home area to their original villages. In describing and analysing the bulletin, I explore its content and focus on its collecting of funds for the clean water pipeline project in Koto Gadang (...) and on its distribution of information, especially information about Minangkabau customary law, culture, literature, and the women’s movement. The bulletin also facilitated the sharing of family news among people from Koto Gadang in the village and the rantau. Giat became a medium for maintaining interpersonal connections and accommodated initiatives to develop the village. It is shown that, as a community-based publication, Giat played a role in developing village infrastructure as well as its social and cultural fields. (shrink)

Carruthers presents evidence concerning the cross-modular integration of information in human subjects which appears to support the “cognitive conception of language.” According to this conception, language is not just a means of communication, but also a representational medium of thought. However, Carruthers overlooks the possibility that language, in both its communicative and cognitive roles, is a nonrepresentational system of conventional signals – that words are not a medium we think in, but a tool we think with. The (...) evidence he cites is equivocal when it comes to choosing between the cognitive conception and this radical communicative conception of language. (shrink)