America Identified Nelson, Lisa S
2010, 20101112, 2010-11-12, 20110101
eBook
The use of biometric technology for identification has gone from Orwellian fantasy to everyday reality. This technology, which verifies or recognizes a person's identity based on physiological, ...anatomical, or behavioral patterns (including fingerprints, retina, handwriting, and keystrokes) has been deployed for such purposes as combating welfare fraud, screening airplane passengers, and identifying terrorists. The accompanying controversy has pitted those who praise the technology's accuracy and efficiency against advocates for privacy and civil liberties. In America Identified, Lisa Nelson investigates the complex public responses to biometric technology. She uses societal perceptions of this particular identification technology to explore the values, beliefs, and ideologies that influence public acceptance of technology. Drawing on her own extensive research with focus groups and a national survey, Nelson finds that considerations of privacy, anonymity, trust and confidence in institutions, and the legitimacy of paternalistic government interventions are extremely important to users and potential users of the technology. She examines the long history of government systems of identification and the controversies they have inspired; the effect of the information technology revolution and the events of September 11, 2001; the normative value of privacy (as opposed to its merely legal definition); the place of surveillance technologies in a civil society; trust in government and distrust in the expanded role of government; and the balance between the need for government to act to prevent harm and the possible threat to liberty in government's actions.
How do we become connected to people we have never met in person? From celebrities to faraway relatives, from favorite writers to thinkers to people we meet on-line, we form a host of subtle, ...invisible, but very real social connections with distant others. In Connecting, Mary Chayko investigates how physically separated people manage to create a sense of connectedness—a “meeting of the minds”—and feel undeniably, if unexpectedly, bonded. Through dozens of personal accounts, the book considers the social “fallout” of connecting with absent others—the benefits and hazards—on our societies, communities, relationships, and individual selves. The result is a comprehensive yet intimate look at social bonding as it is rarely recorded: an examination of the bonds and communities we form across great distances, and even across time, in the age of the Internet.
This Handbook stands as the premier scholarly resource for Language and Social Interaction (LSI) subject matter and research, giving visibility and definition to this area of study and establishing a ...benchmark for the current state of scholarship. The Handbook identifies the five main subdisciplinary areas that make up LSI--language pragmatics, conversation analysis, language and social psychology, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. One section of the volume is devoted to each area, providing a forum for a variety of authoritative voices to provide their respective views on the central concerns, research programs, and main findings of each area, and to articulate the present or emergent issues and directions. A sixth section addresses LSI in the context of broadcast media and the Internet. This volume's distinguished authors and original content contribute significantly to the advancement of LSI scholarship, circumscribing and clarifying the interrelationships among the questions, findings, and methods across LSI's subdisciplinary areas. Readers will come away richer in their understanding of the variety and depth of ways the intricacies of language and social interaction are revealed. As an essential scholarly resource, this Handbook is required reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in language and social interaction, and it is destined to have a broad influence on future LSI study and research.
This fully revised and updated second edition:* outlines the main components and distinctive characteristics of interpersonal communication* offers detailed analysis of communication structures, ...considering their everyday applications and implications* includes new material on race, gender and sexuality* looks to the future of interpersonal communication.
Informality Misztal, Barbara A.
2000, 20020911, 2002, 1999, 2002-09-11, 20000101
eBook
For most of the twentieth century, modernity has been characterised by the formalisation of social relations as face to face interactions are replaced by impersonal bureaucracy and finance. As we ...enter the new millennium, however, it becomes increasingly clear that it is only by stepping outside these formal structures that trust and co-operation can be created and social change achieved. In a brilliant theoretical tour de force, illustrated with sustained case studies of changing societies in the former eastern Europe and of changing forms of interaction within so-called virtual communities, Barbara Misztal, argues that only the society that achieves an appropriate balance between the informality and formality of interaction will find itself in a position to move forward to further democratisation and an improved quality of life.
However much people want esteem, it is an untradable commodity-- there is no way that you can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others your good opinion of them. And yet esteem is allocated ...in society according to systematic determinants: people's performance, publicity, and presentation relative to others will help to fix how much esteem they enjoy and how much disesteem they avoid. In turn, rational individuals are bound to compete with one another, however tacitly, in the attempt to increase their chances of winning esteem and avoiding disesteem. And this competition shapes the environments in which they each pursue esteem, setting relevant comparators and benchmarks, and determining the cost that a person must bear for obtaining a given level of esteem. Hidden in the multifarious interactions and exchanges of social life, then, there is a quiet force at work a force as silent and powerful as gravity which molds the basic form of people's relationships and associations. This force was more or less routinely invoked in the writings of classical theorists like Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Montesquieu, Mandeville and Hume and Madison. Although Adam Smith himself gave it great credence, however, the rise of economics proper coincided with a sudden decline in the attention devoted to the economy of esteem. What had been a topic of compelling interest for earlier authors fell into relative neglect throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is designed to reverse the trend. It begins by outlining the psychology of esteem and the way the working of that psychology can give rise to an economy. It then shows how a variety of social patterns that are otherwise anomalous come to make a lot of sense within an economics of esteem. And it looks, finally, at the ways in which the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes. While making connections with older patterns of social theorising, it offers a novel orientation for contemporary thought about how society works and how it may be made to work. It puts the economy of esteem firmly on the agenda of economics and social science and of moral and political theory. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance//toc.html
Questioning the tradition of individual responsibility, this pioneering book also transforms the concept of responsibility by giving centre stage to the relational process rather than to the ...individual - replacing alienation and isolation with meaningful dialogue. The first three chapters are the editors′ own contribution on relational responsibility - followed by their analysis of a challenging case study involving the issue of child sexual abuse. The next 14 chapters contain responses from leading academics and professionals in the fields of communication, psychology and organizational development, which extend the editors′ original dialogue. In conclusion, Sheila McNamee and Kenneth Gergen illustrate relational responsi.
Featuring a wealth of familiar and easy-to-learn games, this practical handbook is designed to foster successful social strategies for children aged 5-12, and will help adults to understand and ...reflect constructively on children's social skills. The book covers the theory behind the games in accessible language, and includes a broad range of enjoyable activities: active and passive, verbal and non-verbal, and for different sized groups. Deborah Plummer addresses issues that might arise when supporting children with a range of communication differences, including children with learning differences, and offers a variety of cognitive and behavioural strategies to help children to reinforce the skills explored in the games. This is an ideal resource for teachers, parents, carers and all those working to improve the social skills of children.
