The Communications Revolution At Work

No area of technology has developed faster or affected contemporary society more pervasively than electronic communications. Networked computers linked through the internet have enabled finance, commerce and manufacturing to function in a "virtual" environment, unconstrained by time and space. Boundaries have also been removed in voice, image, and data transmission, once normally provided through discrete media. Although the effects of these developments are large, their significance is far from clear. This collection of eleven original papers by British and Canadian experts examines a wide range of practical consequences of the current revolution in communications technology and reconsiders the actual depth of changes so far produced in the economy and society.

In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution which is at the centre of 21st century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because media criticism and scholarship haven't been up to the task. McChesney's concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as the media became a decisive issue of these times. The revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.

LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR “I often talk about the importance of trust when it comes to work: the trust of your employees and building trust with your customers. This book provides a blueprint for how to build and maintain that trust and connection in a digital environment.” —Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom A Harvard Business School professor and leading expert in virtual and global work provides remote workers and leaders with the best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. The rapid and unprecedented changes brought on by Covid-19 have accelerated the transition to remote working, requiring the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to virtual work in just weeks, leaving managers and employees scrambling to adjust. This massive transition has forced companies to rapidly advance their digital footprint, using cloud, storage, cybersecurity, and device tools to accommodate their new remote workforce. Experiencing the benefits of remote working—including nonexistent commute times, lower operational costs, and a larger pool of global job applicants—many companies, including Twitter and Google, plan to permanently incorporate remote days or give employees the option to work from home full-time. But virtual work has it challenges. Employees feel lost, isolated, out of sync, and out of sight. They want to know how to build trust, maintain connections without in-person interactions, and a proper work/life balance. Managers want to know how to lead virtually, how to keep their teams motivated, what digital tools they’ll need, and how to keep employees productive. Providing compelling, evidence-based answers to these and other pressing issues, Remote Work Revolution is essential for navigating the enduring challenges teams and managers face. Filled with specific actionable steps and interactive tools, this timely book will help team members deliver results previously out of reach. Following Neeley’s advice, employees will be able to break through routine norms to successfully use remote work to benefit themselves, their groups, and ultimately their organizations.

One of the world's most insightful journalists argues that swiftly unfolding advances in telecommunications will effectively eliminate distance as a perceptible concept from our lives. She predicts that this "death of distance" between individuals & entities will become the single most important economic force to reshape society over the next half century. The Death of Distance reveals the ways-only now dimly imaginable-that the communications revolutions will tilt the balance between large & small, rich & poor, as it transforms decisions about home & work, notions of national borders, the institutions of education & government, trade patterns, & more. Among the author's more striking predictions: there will be greater economic rewards for those who promote or "boost" their information ahead of everybody else's; the world will work 24 hours a day on three shifts based on the time zones of the Americas, Europe, & the Far East; the design of the home & the office will be altered to accommodate the increasingly blurred lines between work & leisure; the strength of local cultures will be enforced, while a global culture will develop in parallel-dominated by the English language-based world on the Internet.

The communications explosion; The electronic environment; The communications future; The new society.

Presenting profiles of the mathematicians, engineers, and other scientists who helped create and develop communications technologies, Bray (Imperial College London) begins his volume in the mid-18th century, looking at people like Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, and Hertz, who created the mathematical and scientific foundations of telecommunications. He proceeds to offer chapters on telegraph and cable engineers, telephone engineers, inventors of the thermionic valve, pioneers of radio and television broadcasting, microwave radio-relay engineers, the inventors of the transistor and the microchip, the creators of information theory and digital techniques, satellite communication engineers, pioneers optical fiber communications, and inventors of the Internet and mobile communications. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR