New opening Chapter 1 (Launching Your Study of Communication Theory) offers a step-by-step discussion of "What is a theory?" and What is communication?" to provide students with a more user-friendly introduction.
Howard Giles' "Communication Accommodation Theory" (an intercultural theory) is introduced in an understandable manner using an intergenerational communication example in Chapter 30.
After only being online, Marshall McLuhan's "Media Ecology" has been added to Chapter 24 in the section on Media and Culture, drawing an extended parallel between the climate ecology of global warming and the media ecology of the electronic age.
The final Chapter 36 (Common Threads in Communication Theories) traces ten principles which run through multiple theories to provide an integration distinct from Chapters 1- 4. The principles refer to the impact of motivation, self-image, credibility, expectation, audience-adaptation, social construction, shared meaning, narrative, conflict, and dialogue.
New expanded trim size allows more space for the definition of key terms in the margin without sacrificing the depth of coverage.
Four significantly revised chapters:Chapter 2 (Talk about Theory) features objective and interpretive analysis by Glenn Sparks and Marty Medhurst; Chapter 3 (Weighing the Words) illustrates the criteria for good objective and interpretive theories with an analysis of an ethnography of customers in a cigar store; Chapter 12 (Relational Dialectics) uses the film, Bend It Like Beckham for an example of relational dialectics; Chapter 16 (Cognitive Dissonance) contains an extended discussion on how smokers handed the dissonance created by a barrage of anti-smoking ads and uses the film, Thank You For Smoking as an example.
Each Ethical Reflection now appears as part of a theory chapter where it is the most appropriate, including Buber’s Dialogical Ethics in Chapter 6 (Coordinated Management of Meaning); Gilligan’s Different Voice in Tannen’s Genderlect Styles (Chapter 33), and Aristotle’s Golden Mean in Chapter 21 (The Rhetoric of Aristotle).
Every chapter has been updated with 1-3 recent citations in the Second Look feature at the end of each chapter.
Nine new cartoons are among the fifty world-class cartoons which help to illustrate the theories in a memorable way.
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