Global platforms present novel challenges. They serve as powerful conduits of commerce and global community. Yet their power to influence political and consumer behavior is enormous. Their responsibility for the use of this power – for their content – is statutorily limited by national laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. National efforts to demand and guide appropriate content moderation, and to avoid private abuse of this power, is in tension with concern in liberal states to avoid excessive government regulation, especially of speech. Diverse and sometimes contradictory national rules responding to these tensions on a national basis threaten to splinter platforms, and reduce their utility to both wealthy and poor countries. This edited volume sets out to respond to the question whether a global approach can be developed to address these tensions while maintaining or even enhancing the social contribution of platforms.

This chapter investigates how Percy Shelley’s poetry of speech draws on a Darwinian materialist understanding of the body and can be read alongside John Thelwall’s theory of rhythmus in its figuring of speech as unstoppable action. Focussing on Shelley’s later works, including A Defence of Poetry, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Mask of Anarchy, this chapter draws out the ways that materialist and embodied models of speech production underpin Shelley’s figuring of poetry as a force of change, and allow him to blur the boundaries between art and science, aesthetics and politics, the internal and the external. It examines how such understandings of the communicative power of voice as a physical and material force that can be felt as action or movement challenge the notion that Shelley’s later poems are indicative of the failure of both poetry as a means of communication and utterance as a means of effecting change.

The chapter examines principles and values of communication and societal relationships from an Islamic perspective. It highlights the significance of communication in Islam, including language, communication theory, and the principles of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The chapter explores different levels of Islamic communication, cultural influences, and communication within Muslim families across age groups. It addresses the challenges Muslims face in a globalized world and the impact of communication technologies on Islamic culture. The chapter offers health practitioners and educators an insight into effective Islamic-based communication in therapeutic relationships for individuals with regards to addressing mental and physical health issues. This chapter also briefly discusses the contemporary challenges of globalization and communication as it relates to Islamic principles.

Considers communication in dense bacterial suspensions with an emphasis on quorum sensing.

Chapter 6 delves deeply into the subject of communications in groups. We discuss the factors that hamper effective communications. We also explore the effects that gender and more broadly, member diversity can have on the nature of our communications. We include a section on factors and techniques that improve the quality of member communication in a diverse society.

Climate change is the most serious challenge of the Anthropocene, and so climate change communication needs to be taken suitably seriously, enriched with new ways of conceptualising, understanding and imaging the world and its transformations. The lack of understanding and seeing the gravity of the crisis has been increasingly identified as the ‘crisis of the imagination’. Over the centuries, telling stories was used to confront the unknown, encourage thinking about solutions, illuminate opportunities and give hope. Stories and storytelling allow space for interpretation and agency to think critically and, most importantly, act imaginatively. They encourage inter- and transdisciplinarity and thus novel perspectives, stressing the fact that, ultimately, discussions on climate change are discussions about who we are. In this sense, storytelling has a great potential to motivate individuals, communities and policy-makers to act on climate change.

A significant part of our work as conversation analysts is to persuade different disciplinary communities of the insights from CA. Here, conversation analysts working within the broader domains of sociology, linguistics, psychology and communication, education, and health services discuss the ways in which our findings may be shaped for publication in journals particular to our own domains, and thereby engage with our wider disciplinary audiences. In the first instance, we situate CA with respect to its development in each of our disciplines and identify the core issues with which CA is engaging. We then examine some of the challenges in presenting CA to our disciplines. These include addressing the question that CA scholars often face from colleagues in those disciplines: ‘Why should this matter to us?’. We finally offer some practical guidance on writing CA for our particular audiences, including: how to manage the length constraints often imposed by journals, the issue of sampling size, and how to balance the demands of transcriptional detail as required by CA with those of clarity and legibility for those not accustomed to it. Such challenges can be highly creative – and worthwhile in showing how CA can enhance received theory in our own disciplines.

For a book that attempts to explain how to understand visuals in life sciences, it seems prudent to first explain what we mean by “visual,” even if it may seem quite a common word.

In everyday conversation, “visual” is often used as an adjective and means “relating to seeing or sight,” as in “visual impression” or “visual effect.” In the context of this book, “visual” is used similarly as an adjective, but in addition, and more often, it is used as a noun. As a noun, it refers to the variety of images used in life science communication. For example, photographs are a type of visual commonly used in life science communication, and so are drawings.

Illustrations are a visual staple in life science communication. Despite being commonplace, they are in many ways a blackbox. They mask the creative – and scientific – decisions that go into making them. They present an end product that says, as it were, “this is how you look through life to its essence.” The use of precise lines and explicit shapes helps to convey this scientific authority. In contemporary illustrations, pseudo-details such as colors and dimensions further prove that “this is what life looks like.”

Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

Micrographs, like the little (pun intended) cousin of photographs, are considered by some as an objective portrayal of nature. Why, they are photographs of the microscopic world invisible to the naked human eye. As such, what you see is what you get, and what you get is nature unveiled.

Particularly because the microscopic world is invisible to us in everyday life, we find it even more urgent to behold that world. We assume that if and when we see, we will automatically understand. If and when we observe microorganisms in their smallest components, we will be able to “get” them and conquer them.

Contemporary life sciences are big data sciences. The human genome, for example, contains about three billion DNA base pairs and an estimated 20,000 protein-coding genes. Public health data, as another example, are endlessly enormous and encompass electronic medical records, health monitoring data, environmental data, and more. When it comes to analyzing and presenting these big data, interactive online visuals – maps, graphs, three-dimensional models, even computer games – have inherent advantages. They are dynamic and easily updated. They support user interaction and allow users to create displays that make sense to them. Being “hands-on” also makes these visual displays more interesting. As computer visualization technologies continue to advance, we are guaranteed to see faster, more fluid, more ingenious interactive displays.