Presents the first comprehensive evolutionary approach to the study of human communication. Drawing from the latest scientific research but easily accessible to the non-specialist, Evolutionary Communication: An Introduction represents a truly groundbreaking contribution to communication studies as a field of study.

The first book to combine the proven traditions of public speaking instruction with an extensive integrated technology package. Now in its fifth edition, the book has drawn strong positive reviews and many course adoptions throughout the United States. Features a technology-rich, evolutionary approach to contemporary public speaking. Student mentors guide learners through the entire process of effectively developing and presenting a speech.

 Introducing a new subdiscipline—evolutionary communication—the authors analyze the core domains of life—sheer survival, sex, culture, morality, religion, and technological change—as communications phenomena. Challenging the boundaries of conventional approaches to cultural analysis, The Language of Life presents an original and engaging view of evolution and a prognosis for our collective future.

How do the challenges we face in life turn us into the individuals we become? From a brush with death at birth and the thrill of childhood adventures to the deeply-troubling search for meaning and love as an adult, noted author and cultural commentator James Lull dramatically recounts key moments that have shaped his life. Lull brings the sharp eye and sensitivity of an experienced ethnographer to the slice-of-life stories he tells in this engaging collection of autobiographical essays.

 This classic volume offers a bold and comprehensive analysis of the developments in media, communication, and culture amidst the effects of postmodernism and globalization. Draws from a wide range of social and cultural theory to formulate a well balanced and highly original account of contemporary developments worldwide.

 What does it mean to live in the Communication Age? What is the nature of culture today? How have cultural identities changed in globalization? Culture in the Communication Age brings together leading thinkers from a range of academic disciplines to discuss what “culture” means in the modern era. They describe key features of life in the “Communication Age,” and consider the cultural implications of the rise of global connectivity, mass media, Information Technology, and popular culture.

This is the first volume ever published to evaluate scandal as a mass-mediated, globalized phenomenon. Top scholars examine how institutions and personalities ranging from politics, religion, and big business to TV talk shows, sports, and popular music become converted into scandalous commodities that drive tabloids, trash TV, and “respectable” media too.

 Television came to China as part of the government’s effort to modernize and open up to the West. Today, virtually every urban Chinese home has a television set. However, instead of simply fulfilling the authorities’ propagandist plans, television has become a force for cultural change, offering alternatives to official ideologies, expectations, and lifestyles. This ethnographic study is based on in-depth interviews with China’s leading television executives, and with nearly one hundred families in China’s cities who openly describe how foreign and domestic television programs have helped stimulate visions of liberation from the suffocating circumstances of everyday life.

 An edited collection of provocative essays written by leading scholars who have one common interest–the role of popular music in the social and cultural lives of young people. International in scope and highly conceptual in its framework, the book reveals how music-as-communication is a distinct, pervasive, influential process that is finally getting the attention its popularity demands.

 Those studying the media are becoming increasingly aware of the need to understand the domestic contexts of television consumption, interpretation, and use. This collection of James Lull’s work during the 1980s and early 1990s represents an important stage in the study of the mass media in contemporary culture.

 Outstanding scholars from the far corners of the world–Europe, the Far East, South Asia, North and South America, and the British Isles–contribute original ethnographic essays to this groundbreaking collection of studies of family life with television. The chapters emphasize the qualitative nature of this relationship– how television influences the family, and how families use television within their particular cultural contexts.