An Ecology Of Communication

Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication enviroments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice., Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment.

An Ecology of Communication addresses an ecological and communicative dilemma: the universe, earth, and socio-cultural life world are resoundingly dialogic, yet we have created modern and postmodern cultures largely governed by monologue. This book is indispensable reading for scholars and students of communication, ecology, and social sciences, as it moves readers beyond the anthropocentric bias of communication study toward a listening-based model of communication, an essential move for discerning fitting responses and the call to responsibility in an age of ecocrisis.

There is undoubtedly considerable intellectual and methodological progress evident in approaches to linguistics, from systemic and formal methods, to post-Newtonian transpersonal, non-local models of meaning co-creation built within contemporary language studies. Indeed, such changes are constant – the 20th century product orientation of linguistic research is currently being complemented by ecolinguistic processes, with the linearity of scientific perception and treatment being replaced by the dynamic and multispectral approach of “ecological” theory. This book provides a richly detailed analysis of this profound shift within contemporary language and communication research. A particularly interesting facet of this volume is the proposal that the architecture of the human organism is, transpersonally, in constant relation with its immediate surroundings, as well as with non-local multilevel surroundings. This connection is based not only on the cognitive connection of minds or neurocognitive contacts with the nervous and sensual systems of communicators, but on the multidimensional relationship between the manifold communicative modalities living systems possess. Human communication is embedded within a given local communicative situation, as well within the global, non-local environment via the basic ontology of entanglement. The human communicative process is always evolving as a result of the constant fluctuations of life processes. Indeed, the conclusions presented in this volume open up a new approach to present-day linguistics, that human language is an essential life process.

Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication environments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice. Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment. As more routines, rituals, and activities incorporate such technologies within their organizational cultures, new sorts of activities are added and previous ones are changed according to an underlying logic explored in these pages. Various chapters illustrate some of these altered and redefined organizational cultures: bureaucracy, the mass media, computer formats, war, surveillance, and testing, among others.

How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media? The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment". This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sámi region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur. Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.

This volume addresses the questions of whether it (still) matters what neighborhood individuals live in and if it is still necessary and possible for city dwellers to build and maintain place-based communities.

The Fifth Edition of the award-winning Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere is the first comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental communication. This groundbreaking book focuses on the role that human communication plays in influencing the ways we perceive the environment. It also examines how we define what constitutes an environmental problem and how we decide what actions to take concerning the natural world. The updated and revised Fifth Edition includes recent developments, such as water protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Flint Water Crisis, and the March for Science, along with the latest research and developments in environmental communication.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for theory, research and practice with regard to environment and communication, and it does this from a perspective which is both international and multi-disciplinary in scope. Offering comprehensive critical reviews of the history and state of the art of research into the key dimensions of environmental communication, the chapters of this handbook together demonstrate the strengths of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding the centrality of communication to how the environment is constructed, and indeed contested, socially, politically and culturally. Organised in five thematic sections, The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication includes contributions from internationally recognised leaders in the field. The first section looks at the history and development of the discipline from a range of theoretical perspectives. Section two considers the sources, communicators and media professionals involved in producing environmental communication. Section three examines research on news, entertainment media and cultural representations of the environment. The fourth section looks at the social and political implications of environmental communication, with the final section discussing likely future trajectories for the field. The first reference Handbook to offer a state of the art comprehensive overview of the emerging field of environmental communication research, this authoritative text is a must for scholars of environmental communication across a range of disciplines, including environmental studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies and related disciplines.