Communicating With The World Of Beings

The rock art found in the World Heritage sites in the Alta area, Arctic Norway, comprise thousands of images including reindeer and elk as well as fish, birds, boats, humans and geometric patterns. They contain information about peoples who lived in this northern area from about 5000 BC up until the birth of Christ; such as possible social organizations, hunting and trapping, beliefs, rituals,stories, legends, myths, cultural changes and continuities. Communicating with the world of beings addresses an understanding of the rock art in terms of communication with other people and other than-human beings. The figures could have been seen and experienced as symbols in rituals or as expressions of identity, position, power and rights, as depictions of real events and perhaps for use in storytelling. Through rock art, people might also have been able to communicate with other-than-human beings who ruled parts of the environment – in order to petition favors for themselves or others. These other-than-human beings may have been perceived as good and evil powers and spirits of the different worlds of the universe; the dead or souls; which also included the animals depicted or were even embodied in the stone. This communication may have been based on a belief that both living beings and inert objects and natural phenomena had souls, a belief that may have existed ever since the earliest settlements. Such an animistic belief means that everything was seen as having a consciousness and identity of its own, independent and imbued with a will. Therefore, it was essential that the different participants communicated with one another as equal partners. In this beautifully illustrated book Knut Helskog provides a lyrical and personal interpretation of the chronology, patterning and possible meanings behind this extraordinary landscape of prehistoric rock art.

Permanently Online, Permanently Connected establishes the conceptual grounds needed for a solid understanding of the permanently online/permanently connected phenomenon, its causes and consequences, and its applied implications. Due to the diffusion of mobile devices, the ways people communicate and interact with each other and use electronic media have changed substantially within a short period of time. This megatrend comes with fundamental challenges to communication, both theoretical and empirical. The book offers a compendium of perspectives and theoretical approaches from leading thinkers in the field to empower communication scholars to develop this research systematically, exhaustively, and quickly. It is essential reading for media and communication scholars and students studying new media, media effects, and communication theory.

Committee Serial No. 9. Reviews technological advances in the field of communications satellites. Classified material has been deleted.

This book is unique in the sense that it offers a comprehensive review and analysis of human communication and mediated communication around the world. This is one of the first attempts to do so in a systematic, comprehensive way. It challenges the assumption that Western theories of human communication and mass communication have universal applicability. It surveys the applicability of mass communication theories to other than Western cultures. The book explains the influence of culture on all forms of communication behavior, be it personal, mediated or mass communication. It presents communication theories from around the world, incorporating a vast body of literature from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. This updated information on important international perspectives that includes both interpersonal and mediated communication is presently not readily available in other sources. The book offers an integrated approach to understanding the working of electronic means of communication that are hybrid media combining human and mediated communication. These new media that are often presented as universal are even more culture-bound than the traditional media.