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A “group” forms when two or more people interact in a way that allows each person to influence and be influenced by each other member of that group. Interaction differentiates a group from students sitting in a hall listening to a lecture, movie-goers viewing a film, and passengers being carried by an elevator. These other assemblages lack the dynamics required to be considered a collection of people...
For any form of communication to impart a message that triggers learning to occur within the recipient, the communicator must take into account the diverse ways people learn and make use of media. These different personality, learning and coping styles often may conflict when people work together. Personality styles affect people’s interactions because of different ways that information is processed...
“Culture” is one of those expansive terms that we use most always without an explicit definition. Like “freedom,” “love,” and “common sense,” culture seems to be intuitively understandable. But, grasping its meaning gets mentally slippery when we attempt to saddle it with a cut-and-dry definition. Imparting culture can be thought of as the same as education, though then we are using another concept...
Most jobs today require both the ability to write cogently and to speak well. While writing skills are practiced from our earliest grade school, public speaking usually gets only scant attention in our academic development. This chapter is designed to help you become a polished speaker. Specifically, three aspects of public speaking will be covered: structuring the presentation, delivering the presentation,...
When discussing communication, we intuitively think of the language of words. Words are powerful conveyers of meaning and they do matter in getting your message across. But, there is a whole other realm of communication, one that transfers meaning between sender and receiver without using words. This is the realm of non-verbal communication (also referred to as “subtext”). It has been estimated...
This chapter deals with visual aids used to enhance oral presentations. It is intended to guide planning and presentation of visual aids; actual construction of visual aids is covered in other texts, some of which are recommended at the end of the chapter. What sets off a visual aid from a visual message is how is it applied and used. Visual aids, as they are explained here, are meant to enhance a...
This chapter is meant to help the communicator understand how the news media work, and to give advice on interacting with reporters and producers so that fair and acurate information is reported to the public. There are many misconceptions about the news media and the role they serve in society. It is often assumed that the news media give a complete picture of current events or situations. While...
The history of natural resources management and environmental issues is filled with notable conflicts. Indeed, in an article about ecosystem management, the Ecological Society of America pointed out that these are not conflicts between humans and nature, but conflicts between competing human needs for natural resources. This chapter is not meant to be an in-depth analysis of conflict management, but...
Ask a scientist what “risk” means and, more likely than not, they will emphasize the likelihood of something nasty happening. But, as communicators and social scientists have examined the interface of technology and society more closely during the last 25 years, they have reached a general consensus that non-scientists view risk in an almost antithetically different way from those in the scientific...
Marketing and public relations are inventions of the business world for communicating messages to influence opinions of specific audiences. Popular opinions about these fields are often less than flattering, especially by those with environmental leanings. Indeed, a natural resources management student responded to a lecture on marketing communication with the comment that conservation was ‘much too...
The greatest change agent in the world could arguably be the business community. While in the past this group has been perhaps the biggest contributor to environmental problems, a transformation has been occurring. Understanding how business has been responding to this transformation is crucial in understanding how to empower communities and businesses to work together to create regenerative communities...
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