Communication and the Human Condition

Communication and the Human Condition
Author: W. Barnett Pearce
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1989
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780809314126

Starting with the premise that we live in communication (rather than standing outside communication and using it for secondary purposes), Pearce claims that people who live in various cultures and historical epochs not only communicate differently but experience different ways of being human because they communicate differently. This century, he notes, ushered in the "communication revolution," the discovery that communication is far more important and central to the human condition than ever before realized. Essential to the communication revolution is the recognition that multiple forms of discourse exist in contemporary human society. Further, these forms of discourse are not benign; they comprise alternative ways of being human. Thus communication theory must encompass all that it "means to live a life, the shape of social institutions and cultural traditions, the pragmatics of social action, and the poetics of social order."

Media Ecology

Media Ecology
Author: Lance Strate
Publisher: Understanding Media Ecology
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Mass media
ISBN: 9781433131226

Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition provides a long-awaited and much anticipated introduction to media ecology, a field of inquiry defined as the study of media as environments. Lance Strate presents a clear and concise explanation of an intellectual tradition concerned with much more than understanding media, but rather with understanding the conditions that shape us as human beings, drive human history, and determine the prospects for our survival as a species. Much more than a summary, this book represents a new synthesis that moves the field forward in a manner that is both unique and unprecedented, and simultaneously grounded in an unparalleled grasp of media ecology's intellectual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. Taking as its subject matter "life, the universe, and everything," Strate describes the field as interdisciplinary and communication-centered, provides a detailed explication of McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message," and explains that the human condition can only be understood in the context of our biophysical, technological, and symbolic environments. Strate provides an in-depth examination of media ecology's four key terms: medium, which is defined in much broader terms than in other fields; bias, which refers to tendencies inherent in materials and methods; effects, which are best understood via the Aristotelian notion of formal causality and contemporary systems theory; and environment, which includes the distinctions between the oral, chirographic, typographic, and electronic media environments. A chapter on tools serves as a guide to further media ecological research and scholarship. This book is well suited for graduate and undergraduate courses on communication theory and philosophy.

Transformative Communication Studies

Transformative Communication Studies
Author: Omar Swartz
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1906221901

This interdisciplinary collection of essays charts intersections between communication/cultural studies and a variety of emergent emancipatory and liberatory discourses. Every essay attempts, in one way or another, to speak to the following questions: What would a theory of liberation look like that is premised on a communication view of the world? How would such a view expand and even redefine our understanding of liberation? Finally, how would such a view enlarge our understanding of what is collectively, communally, and organizationally possible? In other words, the chapters articulate what can be loosely considered a humanist theory of communication and praxis. The goal is to move beyond discourses of liberation that are grounded in essentionalist assumptions and to move the conversation toward an engaged criticism on cultural and social levels that facilitates and encourages progressive action.This edited collection, thus, has as its goal a theory of human liberation grounded in communication as a resource for social and spiritual transformation. The chapters comprise a mix of conceptual and applied studies that interrogate the communicative practices that naturalize our hierarchical world, reifying and stultifying our moral and political imaginations. As an antidote to this problem, the contributors consider the importance of uncertainly and contingency in the development of human potential.Rather than fearing uncertainty and contingency and allowing that fear to control us, contributors argue that we should find within these conditions the source of our humanity and the strength to question and resist unjust social reifications. When we do this, we will rediscover the power of communication and regain an agency and control over our lives. We then can start the difficult but humanizing process of constructing the world anew. Case study exemplars of this construction, thus, are showcased.

The Illness Narratives

The Illness Narratives
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 154167460X

From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness. Modern medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition

Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition
Author: Christian Baron
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 331956577X

This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions.

Beyond the Human Condition

Beyond the Human Condition
Author: Jeremy Griffith
Publisher: WTM Publishing and Communications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991
Genre: Christian ethics
ISBN: 9780646039947

Griffith's second book that gives a detailed account of the biology underpinning his explanation of the human condition. Charles Darwin connected humans with nature but there biology has been stalled, unable to explain the dilemma of the human condition. Griffith's answer defends and dignifies humans, it lifts the burden of guilt, making possible our species' psychological rehabilitation; the real repair or ourselves and our planet.

Origins of Human Communication

Origins of Human Communication
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2010-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262261200

A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

Communicating in the Anthropocene

Communicating in the Anthropocene
Author: C. Vail Fletcher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1793629293

The purpose of Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations is to tell a different story about the world. Humans, especially those raised in Western traditions, have long told stories about themselves as individual protagonists who act with varying degrees of free will against a background of mute supporting characters and inert landscapes. Humans can be either saviors or destroyers, but our actions are explained and judged again and again as emanating from the individual. And yet, as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear, humans are unavoidably interconnected not only with other humans, but with nonhuman and more-than-human others with whom we share space and time. Why do so many of us humans avoid, deny, or resist a view of the world where our lives are made possible, maybe even made richer, through connection? In this volume, we suggest a view of communication as intimacy. We use this concept as a provocation for thinking about how we humans are in an always-already state of being-in-relation with other humans, nonhumans, and the land.

Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State
Author: James C. Scott
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300252986

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University