Reviews for Communication and Assertion Skills for Older Persons

The average rating for Communication and Assertion Skills for Older Persons based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-30 00:00:00 Tran Eldridge This book is an easy read one. It does not survey the major philosophical movements that influenced communication studies nor does it speak of philosophical issues in the discipline as the book title may suggest. The main idea discussed is that communication studies, because of the influence of information theory, especially Shannon and Wiener's, went off track. Communication should be more concerned with developing a genuine theory that describes the phenomenon of human communication. Information theories are for machines and that they are fundamentally incompatible and unanthropomorphic. Gary did that by going about demonstrating the difference between the human cognition and machine or artificial intelligence, and deduce the inherent difference in their modes of communication.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-25 00:00:00 John Croston the first half was a promising summary of historical theoretical developments, the second half was a confused mess of misguided fumblings using a mismatched toolset to speak about subjects for which we already have robust theoretical and technical groundwork (for example turn taking and pragmatics in linguistics, evolutionary socio-linguistic theories on the development of language, cognitive and neuroscience explanations for language processing and brain structure). it often fell into the fallacy of shifting from one scope or level of analysis to another without reframing the discourse, and kept falling into the rabbit hole of going further and further into tangential uncharted territories/outlining "unsolved mysteries" rather than providing frameworks for discussing the phenomena it initially set out to discuss within reasonable bounds of the subject. very underwhelming given the dramatic orwellian setup of the hermeneutic theory of communication pitched in the middle of the book.