Emerging Technologies in Communication: Best Practices and Theoretical Frameworks for Professional Success

Dear Colleagues,

Being an early adopter of emerging technologies has long been regarded as a strategic approach to achieving success in many areas of professional communication. On the one hand, the ability to seize opportunities as they arise positions oneself favourably in a highly competitive market. On the other hand, it can help create and maintain a powerful brand for those practitioners, one associated with high levels of professional competence, openness, and engagement in a continuous learning process — all of which are essential qualities for one’s success in fields such as public relations, advertising, marketing communications, and journalism. However, the past few years have brought unprecedented levels of innovation, with numerous communication tools, hidden by multiple veils of complexity, emerging at an overwhelming pace. Being in touch with all of the novelties and challenges brought by these instruments can now be a full-time endeavour for professionals, as artificial intelligence systems, along with virtual and reality tools, have become a moving target, advancing and changing the rules of the game in real-time.

Communication practitioners are now faced with difficult questions regarding which of these technologies can substantially improve their workflow and which only add to the technological noise interfering with the essence of their work. Even if productivity considerations have encouraged the adoption of AI systems in many areas of professional communication, it is still not certain which tasks can be safely delegated to the technological systems, if one takes into account their oscillating levels of accuracy. As concerns for end-product quality increase in many areas, it becomes clear that most of these new options need a substantial amount of correction on the part of human professionals, which means that new and more important questions arise:

• Does this change in the nature and the organization of their work impact the levels of motivation and satisfaction that communication professionals feel?
• Which of the communication professionals will see their work augmented by automated system, and which of them will see it displaced by them?
• What should professionals do to make themselves more difficult to displace? Should they focus on mastering the supervision of new technologies, or rather focus on developing the uniquely human traits that machines are yet unable to reproduce?
• Are there areas where professionals can only achieve high levels of skill if they do not rely on technological tools too early in their career development?

To adequately address these questions and go beyond the multitude of speculations around technological innovations, it may be necessary to diversify the existing theoretical frameworks of communication and incorporate perspectives from communication scholars, researchers, and professionals from different cultural backgrounds and whose work spans across different fields of communication. This call thus emphasizes the need to examine theories, concepts, ideas for best practices, and attempts to understand the changing parameters for professional success.

The authors can focus their manuscripts on the following issues and topics:

• Technological innovations in media.
• Diversify the existing theoretical frameworks of communication to incorporate the impact of emerging technologies.
• Various methods for measuring communication success in practice.
• Communication pathologies trigged by using emerging technologies (i.e., fake news, deep fakes, etc.).
• New emerging technologies that enhance communication skills.
• Changes in the communication job market determined by using emerging technologies.
• The use of new emerging technologies in communication practice raises ethical issues.
• Gaps between communication theory and practice.
• New parameters for professional success in communication.

Dr. Daniel-Rareș Obadă
Prof. Dr. Mihaela-Alexandra Tudor
Prof. Dr. Murat Mengu
Guest Editors

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• emerging technologies
• artificial intelligence
• artificial intelligence systems
• strategic communication
• fake news
• communication tools
• communication practices
• new theoretical models
• artificially generated content
• communication pathologies