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In the past few decades, self-help books on communication have ranked among the top titles on bestseller lists. Offering advice about improving communication skills in a variety of contexts, they both reflect and promote a widespread discourse about the importance of good communication in everyday life, in what is in fact a paradoxical endeavor – solving flawed communication with more communication. Based on an analysis of 18 bestselling self-help books, the paper examines the meaning of three recurring themes – "listening," "awareness" and "practice" – and analyzes the paradoxical relationship between what the books say about communication and how they say it. The findings serve to illuminate the relationship between communication and metacommunication more broadly, which, in turn, helps to explain the conditions by which authors express their ideas – their selection of textuality, despite, and precisely because of, its difference from oral talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, the notion of "communication skills" has become increasingly dominant in cultural discourse, as such skills are deemed crucial for success in seemingly various professional occupations and in diverse aspects of an individual's life. This study traces the development of the notion of communication as skills that emerged from the theoretical and experimental work of the Palo Alto group in the 1950s and 1960s. It analyzes the shift from the cybernetic, system-oriented, and technology-inspired conceptualization of communication by the group to the current widespread perception of communication as a self-centered, emotions-directed, reflexive and conscious set of skills. The study argues that, more than a misrepresentation of the group's ideas, this shift reflects a tension already embedded in the work of the Palo Alto group between theorizing and practicing communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years saw the rise of communication experts, operating in various contexts and enjoying high levels of popularity. The paper examines this expertise asking: What kind of expertise do communication experts hold? What is the communication they are expert in? And what can scholars of communication learn from experts who practice it professionally? Based on in-depth interviews with communication experts, we analyze what they believe are the components of their expertise and the reliance of this expertise on communication to communicate itself. We examine this recursive nature of expertise in communication by highlighting the relationship between these experts and laypeople, offering an explanation for the popularity of the former specifically in the era of "the death of expertise". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]