Call Of The Mall

Profiling malls as intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture, an examination of malls as reflections of commercial and social culture considers what malls mean to ordinary people.

A bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall--America's gift to personal consumption--is an example of commercial and social culture. This book examines how the mall is used, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn't.

Nothing exemplifies shopping more than the mall or shopping centre. It is the US's gift to personal consumption and the crossroad where consumer marketing, media and street culture meet. It is where the developed world (and increasingly everyone else too) goes to acquire, eat and hang out and where many people find their first jobs.

The author of the international bestseller Why We Buy—praised by The New York Times as “a book that gives this underrated skill the respect it deserves”—now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping and author of the huge international bestseller Why We Buy, now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall—America’s gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time. It’s about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom and where the rest of us compare notes. Call of the Mall examines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn’t.

This book presents a snapshot of innovative blended learning practices that either stem from the affordances of web 2.0 technologies or illustrate the re-purposing of ‘older’ ones, like the creation of tailor-made virtual learning environments, to set up telecollaborative projects. It is based on the papers presented at the B-MELTT: Flipping the Blend through MALL, MOOCs, and (Blended) OIL – New Directions in CALL symposium held at Coventry University in June 2017. It is hoped that the work presented here can provide some ideas on pedagogically sound ways of blending technology into higher education curriculums to enhance both the digital literacy and the intercultural awareness of all stakeholders involved.

Every once in a while a truth-telling book appears out of nowhere, a book that crystallizes our darkest suspicions and makes us mad as hell—while we’re laughing like fiends. A book like this one. Your Call Is Important to Us is a manifesto for anyone who’s sick and tired of the twenty-first century’s tidal wave of bullshit. Taking no prisoners, author Laura Penny dissects—no, disembowels—the culture of globalized, super-sized, consumerized b.s. Dating the renaissance of bullshit to wartime propaganda, Penny skewers the “corporate bafflegab,” scripted, question-proof political events, toxic faux foodstuffs, and miracle pills that clutter our lives. She spares no one and nothing: not Wal-Mart, where “every rinky-dink chunk of mass-produced bric-a-brac is manufactured expressly for you”; not Bush’s White House, with its “wallpaper of phony populist sloganeering”; and not the vast pharmaceutical industry, with its “gateway prescription drugs.” Penny reveals that prisons are the hot new thing in call centers (the federal prison industry bills itself as “the best-kept secret in outsourcing”) and that the Public Relations Society of America has a Code of Ethics Pledge (who knew?). Finally, with devastating precision, she demonstrates how our “all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness” not only alienates us from each other but degrades public discourse, breeds apathy, and makes us just plain stupid. Your Call Is Important to Us introduces a fearless and utterly disarming new voice in social criticism. It’s an island of clarity in an ocean of ordure. Laura Penny on Bullshit: There is so much bullshit that one hardly knows where to begin. The platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is bullshit. . . . The committee-crafted persona and the focus-grouped fad and the rule of the polls are straight-up bullshit. The disease hysteria du jour is bullshit, and so is the latest miracle pill. The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit. “Your call is important to us” has been chosen from a very deep reservoir of bullshit phrases for the title of this book because it best exemplifies the properties native to bullshit. It tries to slather some nice on the result of a simple ratio: your time versus some company’s dough. Like most bullshit, the more times you hear it, the bullshittier it gets. This is why bullshit is best served quickly, with many visuals, in mass quantities, with no questions from the floor.

In a diverse society, the ability to cross communication barriers is critical to the success of any individual personally, professionally, and academically. With the constant acceleration of course programs and technology, educators are continually being challenged to develop and implement creative methods for engaging English-speaking and non-English-speaking learners. Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines the relationship between language education and technology and the potential for curriculum enhancements through the use of mobile technologies, flipped instruction, and language-learning software. This multi-volume book is geared toward educators, researchers, academics, linguists, and upper-level students seeking relevant research on the improvement of language education through the use of technology.

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was organised by the Cyprus University of Technology Language Centre. The theme of the conference was “CALL communities and Culture”. Between the 24th and 27th August 2016, over 135 presentations were delivered and 27 posters were presented; 84 of these presentations appear in this volume of selected peer-reviewed short papers.