Communication Studies

Does your child have dyslexia? Backed by research and over a decade of personal experience, I've developed a holistic approach to help your child succeed. In my forties, while helping my dyslexic son, I discovered I wasn't a lousy speller - I also had dyslexia. I'm a picture t...hinker. I imagine dyslexia as a huge octopus exhibiting eight areas of difficulty: reading, listening, spelling, writing, memory, motor control, spatial issues, and the frequently overlooked social challenges. I will show you how to keep your child safe, improve their health and help them develop their unique talents. * Uncover the links between dyslexia and common health conditions * Access tools to teach your child: reading, spelling and mastering their multiplication tables * Understand other learning challenges commonly found alongside dyslexia * Discover ways to prevent bullying and abuse * Learn how to build on your child's strengths and competencies I'll share the secrets on how to thrive, uncovered by a groundbreaking twenty-year study on living with learning difficulties. And I'll include case stories of famous people who overcame their dyslexia.Join my octopus wrestling team as we tackle dyslexia together.
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The world is awash in bullshit, and we're drowning in it. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. These days, calling bullshit is a noble act. Based on their popular, eponymous, course at the Un...iversity of Washington, professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West catalogue bullshit in its many forms, explaining where bullshit arose in our evolutionary past and why it is ubiquitous today. Calling Bullshit offers readers the tools to see through the obfuscations, deliberate and careless, that dominate every realm of our lives. In this lively guide Bergstrom, a computational biologist, and West, a statistician, teach us that calling bullshit is crucial to a properly functioning social group, whether it be a circle of friends, a community of academics, or the citizenry of a nation.
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If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at ...once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it's an indictment of how social media has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong.
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In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. But the site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration.... It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world with over 2.23 billion global users. Love it or hate it, there is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in daily life. And in light of growing scandals surrounding election-influencing 'fake news' accounts, the mining of its users' personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the international conversation.
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This edited collection compares and analyses the most prominent political communicative responses to the outbreak and global spread of the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus within 27 nations across five continents and two supranational organisations: the EU and the WHO. The book enc...ompasses the various governments' communication of the crisis, the role played by opposition and the vibrancy of the information environment within each nation. The chapters analyse the communication drawing on theoretical perspectives drawn from the fields of crisis communication, political communication and political psychology. In doing so the book develops a framework to assess the extent to which state communication followed the key indicators of effective communication encapsulated in the principles of: being first; being right; being credible; expressing empathy; promoting action; and showing respect. The book also examines how communication circulated within the mass and social media environments and what impact differences in spokespersons, messages and the broader context has on the success of implementing measures likely to reduce the spread of the virus. Cumulatively, the authors develop a global analysis of the responses and how these are shaped by their specific contexts and by the flow of information, while offering lessons for future political crisis communication. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of politics, communication and public relations, specifically on courses and modules relating to current affairs, crisis communication and strategic communication, as well as practitioners working in the field of health crisis communication.
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