The annaliste historian Fernand Braudel asserts that dealing with the concept of liberty, “in all its connotations including ‘taking liberties,’ ” is the distinguishing mark of western civilization, the socio-political problem that most persistently occurs from the fifth century to the present. The liberty to communicate, to impart and receive information of all kinds, is
The two-step flow of communication hypothesis was first formulated by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues in their classical study on the 1940 American presidential election (1944). It states that there is usually no direct influence of the mass media on the general public. Rather, “ideas often flow from radio and print to the opinion
Paralanguage refers to verbal communications that have meaning but are not part of the system of words and grammatical rules we call language. Paralanguage includes such elements as pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality. Laughter, imitatitive speech, and prosody are also forms of paralanguage. Paralanguage emphasizes the fact that people convey meaning not only in
For the process of health care to be successful, patients and their providers must be able to communicate with one another clearly and efficiently. Interpersonal communication involves an exchange of messages or meanings between people, in this case between patient and provider. Communication can have many differing kinds of content and can take several forms.
What are the means of communication used by people when they conduct their everyday lives; and what meanings does this communication have for them? These are central questions guiding the ethnography of communication. The ethnography of communication is an approach, a perspective, and a method to and in the study of culturally distinctive means and
In interpersonal situations, language can be used to convey information about one’s personality, temperament, social status, group belonging, and so forth. Although many of us like to think that we interact essentially the same way to virtually every person we encounter, thanks to fairness and our integrity, this simply is not true. In most instances
Communication is commonly defined as a transmission of thoughts, feelings, information, knowledge, and ideas by means of written or verbal messages. However, when people communicate face-to-face, they position their bodies in a certain way, vary their stance, control their eye gaze, and move their hands in particular manners. Therefore, there is an additional set of
Marital communication refers to the communication and social interaction that transpire between spouses. However, the study of marital communication is often informed by and extended to a range of couples in a “marriage-like” setting such as cohabiting and same-sex couples. In most industrialized societies as many as 90 percent of the population marry, and in
Every act and artifact of communication is open to evaluations of its quality, i.e., how well it was accomplished. Because such evaluations involve individual and social judgments of communicative performance, especially in interpersonal contexts, and because virtually all relevant achievements of interpersonal communication depend on performance and subsequent evaluations, a theory of interpersonal communication competence
A communication rule is a description of a communicative regularity relevant to social interaction. The communicative regularities contained within rules are normative, in the sense that they are what is expected to occur by participants in social engagements and their absence usually results in social disapproval or sanction on the part of those participants toward