Communication & Media in the Digital Era

Social media ethics have become a popular debate topic. Specifically, in this era of digital transformation and social division, a question has emerged: What responsibility to social platforms have to protect users against misinformation, hate speech, harassment, and other damaging content. Of course, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects web hosts from legal liability for content published by third party users, but was enacted in the 1996, long before our society was so entrenched in the digital space. We have now witnessed how social media content can impact public health, political landscapes, and social conflict. The idea of fake news is not a new concept, but its rise to popularity in 2016 can, in part, be attributed to our ability to spread information quickly through the Internet and social media. Thus the question of a host platform's role in mitigating the spread of false information becomes more pertinent in this digital age.  In a recent Forbes article ,...

  Digital transformation has brought new marketing technologies that have evolved the industry. Web and mobile platforms now give marketers access to consumers in more invasive ways than ever before.  And through the rapid growth of digital marketing practices, we have discovered the importance of the customer experience (or CX).    In the Digital Revolution, we have seen a how the focus on optimized user experiences gives web and mobile platforms drives digital traffic and engagement, and this focus has translated into the consumer marketing landscape:  " companies are prioritizing digital  investments—for example, in 5G,  artificial intelligence, automation,  machine learning, and the Internet-of- Things—to help deliver enhanced  customer experiences and outcomes … For marketing, this means that a function that was once guided by art and science is now a  discipline driven by technology and analytics. In fact, marketing operations has...

The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted the gaps in the general population's understanding of data practices and the risk of our privacy. The incident revealed that businesses "take more data from people than they need, and give away more than they should, often only asking permission in fine print—if they even ask at all" (Lapowski, 2019, para 8). Thus we have all become more acutely aware of our privacy and the need to monitor businesses' data practices. However, this has created a dichotomy for marketing data practices : "The balance between personalization and privacy is a critical issue facing marketers. On the one hand, consumers want personalized communication, but on the other hand, they are concerned with the implications it has on their privacy. Privacy as a concept is also closely related to ethics, especially data ethics. The amount of personal data gathered in the modern digitalized world is massive, and therefore the threat to personal privacy ...

In the wake of the Digital Revolution, our society faces a variety challenges in this technological era. We have never been so connected, so public, and so reliant on technology. While we have access to more information than ever before, there is a huge potential for issues of anxiety, privacy, and dependence around this access.  Communication and connection today is vastly different from how humans have interacted in the past. During the Second Industrial Revolution , communication transformed with technological advances like the telephone and telegraph, but the Digital Revolution has produced a means of ensuring that society is always on, always connected—whether or not we want to be. Wireless and mobile technologies provide access to information that we are compulsively signed into. On the one hand, our global network has made us a much more open society; we accept and share our cultural differences through digital platforms. But this interconnectivity has a dark side as well: i...

The role of the journalist is to report information to the public with as little bias or influence as possible. Prior to Digital Transformation, this feat relied largely on distancing yourself from your audience to maintain independence and objectivity. But platforms like social media have completely changed this practice, " despite the association often made between the wide adoption of social media in newsrooms and a discourse around ‘engagement’, it is unclear to what extent journalists themselves think of their social media activities in such terms. The notion of engagement could be potentially problematic for political journalists, whose long-held norms of independence and objectivity were often taken as maintaining a distance from other groups, including the audience" (Xia et al., 2020, p. 557).  Today, journalists are expected to interact with their audience in these digital spaces in order to build engagement and attract more readership. So how do communications profe...

Throughout the history of media, there has been a need for the public to be able to understand, assess, and mindfully disseminate messaging, “media literacy is a story of people’s organized efforts to develop and practice the knowledge and skills of media communication necessary to participate and claim power in societies where media play increasingly important roles” (RobbGrieco, 2014, p. 3). Media literacy is essential for the general public to effectively evaluate and engage with information spread through these outlets.  Since the Digital Revolution, the concept of media information has transformed beyond traditional media outlets, "the shift from mass media for information and entertainment towards digital communication media has increased the numbers of media producers … All people are potentially in a position to use digital tools to produce media artifacts and publish them or—to phrase this differently—to use media to express themselves publicly” (Knaus, 2020, p.8).  ...