Book review: language in mind: an introduction to psycholinguistics by Julie Sedivy

Language in Mind highlights the topics that capture the imagination of researchers and students alike, for example, deaf communities, poetry, jokes, misutterances, and Alzheimer’s disease. It would be a joy to teach using this book, writes Gwyneth Sutherlin

The Myth of the Universal User. Pursuing a Cultural Variable in ICT Design for Conflict Management through Quantitative Analysis: Implications from a Ugandan Case Study.

This study took a novel experimental approach from the field of cognitive linguistics to quantitatively describe the impact of culture on the use of mobile information and communication technology (ICT) in the context of peace and conflict. Beginning with the hypothesis that ICT reflects a mono-cultural perspective for collecting and organizing information, this study tested how a failure to adapt at a cognitive level resulted in distorted narratives. This distortion has problematic implications for democratic participation in postconflict contexts and in data aggregation initiatives that inform policy decisions related to governance, election monitoring, human rights abuse reporting, and conflict management more broadly. Fieldwork from the Acholi region of Uganda supported the conclusion that current ICT tools used in conflict management contexts fundamentally distort the narratives they were designed to collect at a cognitive level. Findings from this research also presented avenues for software development around a new variable for cultural communication preference

Book review: ethical media policy versus freedom of the press: regulation after Leveson and Prince Harry

When The Sun newspaper published naked photos of Prince Harry last week, other publications shied away, not wanting to embroil themselves in issues of Royal privacy under Lord Leveson’s watchful eye. Rupert Murdoch claimed that there was a “clear public interest” in publishing the photographs “in order for the debate around them to be fully informed”. In his new book, Petros Iosifidis calls for global media policies which are both ethical and driven by public interest. Can we have both? Gwyneth Sutherlin looks closer. Global Media and Communication Policy. Petros Iosifidis. Palgrave. August 2012