Discourse, Technology and Change

Discourse, Technology and Change
Author: Brenton Faber
Publisher: Continuum
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781441105936

Discourse, Technology and Change presents a detailed analysis of discourses that initiate, enable, and stabilise social change in organizational contexts. The book examines the function of written discourse within this setting to examine the dynamic relationships between writing, technology, and socio-cultural change. Focusing on everyday texts used to create technical and social change, the book offers a detailed study of the intersections of discourse, technology and persuasion illustrated through an empirical case study of technological change in an academic institution. The book seriously engages the claim that texts dually construct and reflect social networks and social action. Working at both the micro and macro textual level, the book examines the functions of change discourse, providing a framework for understanding how change is constituted within social networks. This cutting-edge monograph will be of interest to academics researching discourse analysis and applied linguistics.

Discourse and Technology

Discourse and Technology
Author: Philip LeVine
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2004-02-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781589013117

The overarching theme of Discourse and Technology is cutting-edge in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse. This volume opens up a discussion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and related fields about the two-fold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how discourse data is collected, transcribed, and analyzed—and the impact that these technologies are having on social interaction and discourse. As inexpensive tape recorders allowed the field to move beyond text, written or printed language, to capture talk—discourse as spoken language—the information explosion (including cell phones, video recorders, Internet chat rooms, online journals, and the like) has moved those in the field to recognize that all discourse is, in various ways, "multimodal," constructed through speech and gesture, as well as through typography, layout, and the materials employed in the making of texts. The contributors have responded to the expanding scope of discourse analysis by asking five key questions: Why should we study discourse and technology and multimodal discourse analysis? What is the role of the World Wide Web in discourse analysis? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in studies of social actions and interactions? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in educational social interactions? and, How does one use multimodal discourse analyses in the workplace? The vitality of these explorations opens windows onto even newer horizons of discourse and discourse analysis.

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom
Author: Adam Thierer
Publisher: Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1942951248

Will innovators be forced to seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy new devices and services, or will they be generally left free to experiment with new technologies and business models? In this book, Adam Thierer argues that if the former disposition, “the precautionary principle,” trumps the latter, “permissionless innovation,” the result will be fewer services, lower-quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living. When public policy is shaped by “precautionary principle” reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, and long-run prosperity. By contrast, permissionless innovation has fueled the success of the Internet and much of the modern tech economy in recent years, and it is set to power the next great industrial revolution—if we let it.

Discourse, Communication, and Tourism

Discourse, Communication, and Tourism
Author: Adam Jaworski
Publisher: Channel View Publications
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781845410209

For the first time ever, this book brings together an explicit linkage between empirical and theoretical perspectives on tourism and discourse. A broad social semiotic approach is adopted to analyse a range of spoken, written and visual texts providing a unique resource for researching and teaching tourism in the context of communication studies. Some of the key concepts explored in its chapters include space, representation, the tourist experience, identity, performance and authenticity, and the contributors are key sociologists of tourism as well as discourse analysts and sociolinguists.

Critical Discourse Studies and Technology

Critical Discourse Studies and Technology
Author: Ian Roderick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-06-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1472569512

Making a new contribution to the developing field of multimodal critical discourse studies, Ian Roderick's book demonstrates how technologies that tend to be widely represented as innovative, or as simple pragmatic solutions, are always anchored in power relations and are therefore deeply ideological. A series of examples analysing technologies such as robotics, smart phones or bio-medicine, their functioning and uses, as well as their representations in the media, show that these are embedded within discourses that tell us about social and power relations, identities and political values. The book takes a tour of everyday technologies and how they are represented in different settings. A Disney theme park attraction showing how technology has improved family life makes many assumptions about what is natural in terms of interpersonal relations, pleasure and satisfaction. Advertisements that represent robot workers inform us about the kinds of worker-management relations now characterising work places. Roderick looks at the way that technologies, while often represented as divorced from their production and maintenance, as objects of wonder, need to be seen within a fabric of social relations that tends to be supressed from how we see them as part of a wider technological fetishism. Engaging with existing theories of technology, the book argues that we must take a more interdisciplinary approach to avoid the pitfalls of social constructivism and technological determinism. Our experiences of technologies are shaped through the relationship between knowledge, practices and institutional forms.

Technological Change

Technological Change
Author: Clotilde Coron
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1786304376

Technological change is exciting as much as it is daunting. The arrival of new digital tools affects consumption patterns, types of employment and working conditions, and can pose challenges to organizations and individuals alike. Indeed, although technological change is a factor for economic growth, it can also be an amplifier, or even a catalyst, of inequality. It is also a social change and interacts in complex ways: technology is both the source and the consequence of social transformation. To understand technological change and to harness its effects, this book studies transformations at different levels (societal, organizational and individual). In its analysis of the subject, it also draws on a number of disciplines of the human and social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology and psychology.

Historical Corpus Stylistics

Historical Corpus Stylistics
Author: Patrick Studer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441139176

This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.

Technology and the Historian

Technology and the Historian
Author: Adam Crymble
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252052609

Charting the evolution of practicing digital history Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive—all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
Author: E. Fisher
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230106064

This book explores the new terrain of network capitalism through the transformations of the discourse on technology. Rather than viewing such discourse as either a true or false reflection of reality, Fisher evaluates the ideological role that technology discourse plays in the legitimation of a new form of capitalism. Based on an extensive empirical analysis, the book argues that contemporary technology discourse at one and the same time promises more personal empowerment through network technology and legitimates a more privatized, flexible, and precarious economic constellations. Such discourse signals a new tradeoff in the political culture of capitalism, from a legitimation discourse which emphasizes the capacity of technology and technique to bring about social emancipation (through equality, stability, and security) to a legitimation discourse which focuses on the capacity of technology to bring about individual emancipation (through individual empowerment, authenticity, creativity, and cooperation). Contrary to the prevailing assumption that sees network technology as liberating from the rigidity and pitfalls of a stifling, Fordist capitalism, the book offers a theoretical framework which sees contemporary technology discourse as an ideology that legitimates the economic, social, and political arrangements of the new capitalism.

Discourse and Social Change

Discourse and Social Change
Author: Norman Fairclough
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1993-06-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780745612188

Now available in paperback, this book is a critical introduction to discourse analysis as it is practised in a variety of different disciplines today, from linguistics and sociolinguistics to sociology and cultural studies. The author shows how concern with the analysis of discourse can be combined, in a systematic and fruitful way, with an interest in broader problems of social analysis and social change. Fairclough provides a concise and critical review of the methods and results of discourse analysis, discussing the descriptive work of linguists and conversation analysts as well as the more historically and theoretically oriented work of Michel Foucault. He develops an original framework for discourse analysis which firmly situates discourse in a broader context of social relations bringing together text analysis, the analysis of processes of text production and interpretation, and the social analysis of discourse events.