Reviews for Communication & Management Skills for the Pharmacy Technician

The average rating for Communication & Management Skills for the Pharmacy Technician based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-14 00:00:00 David Batten Grusin proposes some interesting ideas for how we approach mediated events in the wake of 9/11, but his book ultimately is not effective as it could or should be. Firstly, he fails to clearly define what is meant by premediation. It is only by reading the book that the reader comes to intuit the meaning of the term. Secondly, though his first three chapters are very interesting and seem to illustrate the role of premediation quite well, the last two chapters really go off the rails. In chapters four and five, Grusin addresses affective relationships with media technology and anticipating security, respectively. Though these chapters seem full of promise, Grusin fails to adequately connect these chapters to his idea of premediation. In fact, in these chapters the notion of premediation seems to become confused and unclear. Additionally, Grusin overlooks some frankly painfully obvious alternate conclusions in his quest to use his examples to prove the effects of premediation. Take, for example, Grusin's video game example. Grusin shows that video game players have an affective reaction not to the events in the game, but to unexpected software glitches that interrupt game play. Grusin takes this as a sign that video games "may create a space that is free from, or that protects people from, the violent or negative affective states produced by an ever-threatening world," and that "maintaining the relationship with media artifacts...is more affectively significant" than the actual content of the game itself (112). All this is to say that video games create a lulling affective feedback loop which, when interrupted, somehow shows the importance of that affective state in creating a safe haven. All this is well and good, except it is located in the land of the theoretical, and ignores a STUPIDLY obvious conclusion: a software glitch requires human reaction to resolve. OF COURSE the affective state of a game player is going to be more severely affected by a malfunction than anything that happens in an actual game. A video game IS NOT REAL. A software glitch is, however, and it breaks into real human lives and requires a real human reaction. This may be a bold claim, but I hereby argue that humans do, in fact, comprehend that digital realms are not actual reality, and therefore humans will not have as strong an affective response to something THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN REAL LIFE. With that statement alone, I am sure I have revolutionalized centuries of philosophy and modern psychology. You're welcome, everybody. This book was an interesting read, and my picked bones were really with the problems inherent in the final two chapters (see above example), and the fact that this book was written in nearly incomprehensible academese (really?? Unnecessary). Anyway, I am fully aware that 0% of my goodreads friends would have read this book anyway, and consequently I will premediatedly predict that this review will impact 0% of their lives. Huzzah.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-16 00:00:00 Christopher Todd A thought-provoking book, full of fertile ideas. Chapters 3 & 4 are brilliant, and Chapter 5 anticipates the Snowden affair by several years. The first two chapters seem underdeveloped. It's not clear whether "premediation" is meaningful without "preemption" or vice versa. Is premediation distinct from "risk society" or "society of control?" Are Grusin's ideas about mediality distinct from Beaudrillard's or Zizek's? That is, is premediation a novel phenomenon resulting from 9/11 or is it a manifestation of a logic already decades old? I will leave these questions to someone with better knowledge of media theory and history. Grusin's ideas appear to explain both the reactions to Abu Ghraib and the initial swift successes of the Arab Spring, e.g., the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. Affect --> emotion --> action/revolution mediated by our everyday use of global-social-networks. But the power of this explanation appears to be independent of the idea of premediation itself. Premediation adds a layer of complexity involving potentialities/virtualities/futures, which in turn are integral elements of affect and cognition. By controlling, modulating potentialities/futures government can hope to (indirectly) modulate/mediate emotion. Others have shown how this is more difficult than it, perhaps, appears in Premediation--thin of the laughable "terror color alerts" of the Bush Era. Perhaps further research could verify whether "premediation" has indeed played a more important role in mass media than it did pre-9/11. It would, then, also clarify what it means for the consumer and the citizen today.