Communicating with Our Families: Technology as Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation

(Hardback)

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Communicating with Our Families: Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation explores the impact of personal communication technologies on family communication. In this historical moment, novel communication technologies and social media applications infiltrate our family units. This edited collection examines how communication technologies are shaping childhood, parenthood, and families by exploring topics such as parental loneliness, family storytelling, family technology rules, mindful technology usage, multigenerational communication, and community. The scholars in this volume work from a human communication perspective and use various research modes of inquiry including quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive methods. Through the integration and presentation of diverse research questions tested and responded to from a variety of scholarly approaches, a nuanced exploration of communication technology utilized within a family setting is provided. Since the family is indeed "the first communication classroom," this volume interrogates how that classroom may be changing and the implications of that change on different roles, responsibilities, and relationships within the family. Perhaps the most significant question implied by our contributors in this volume: Will the introduction of new communication technologies fundamentally alter familial forms and will those new grouping that emerge resemble what has been generally assumed for several millennia

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Communicating with Our Families invites us into the rich, variegated communication within family lifethe everyday wonders and worries we experience in our age of intense technological mediation amid the enduring realities of eating, working, sleeping, and talking together close at hand.

Communicating with Our Families: Technology as Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation, is a collection of essays that explore the impact, influence, and consequences of new and emergent communication technologies on familial communication, familial relationships, and communicative action in the world. The editors are guided by the assumption that how human beings live in familial relationships can model how we relate to others and engage in the world around usextending communicative practices beyond familial ties. Considering all of the polarization, incivility, and disruption in our communities, our governments, and our generalized public sphere today, this text reminds us to look toward our families to learn how we might transform our public spaces with healthier communicative engagement.

Author Bio

Maryl R. McGinley is associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jill K. Burk is associate teaching professor and program chair of he communication arts and sciences program at Pennsylvania State University, Berks.

Joel S. Ward is associate professor of communication at Geneva College.