May 16-18, 2024

İstanbul Bilgi University İstanbul (Türkiye)

Deadline: February 15, 2024

https://futuresofcom.bilgi.edu.tr/#

Contact E-mail Address: futuresofcomm@bilgi.edu.tr 

Hosted by İstanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Communication, the Global Communication Association invites you to submit your abstracts and panel proposals for the 16th annual convention to be held in İstanbul, Türkiye, between May 16-18, 2024.

A significant aspect of modernity enabled by media and communication technologies has been the collapse of time and distance. Global connectedness through social media platforms, flow of information through the internet, real-time communication through smartphones, and virtual meetings via Zoom have historically been credited for making the world a more connected place. However, unforeseen predicaments of new technologies have raised concerns about the lack of control over their use, the potential biases of machine visions and thinking, and their potential to facilitate crime as well as security and privacy breaches.

However, the contemporary technological assemblage does not allow time for such critical reflections. Paul Virilio suggests that ‘the faster the technology advances, the more accidents we will see’. He described the internet as ‘“the best and the worst of things…the advance of a limitless — or almost limitless — communication; and at some point, it is also the disaster — the meeting with the iceberg — for this Titanic of virtual navigation.’.’’

The Titanic metaphor refers to the disastrous nature of the contemporary technological assemblage and the gradual disappearance of the gap between the implementation of new technologies and the emergence of their adversary effects. The conference takes the increasing speed of technological development in the field of media and communication as its starting point and explores how and whether, if at all, the predicaments parallel and/or supersede the promises of the implementation of new technologies.

The GCA invites research papers exploring any aspect of issues related to the theme of the conference, including but not limited with the following topics:

• The risk society, uncertainties, and risk
  
• Re-thinking communication and communication theory
  
• Life after social media
  
• The future(s) of media industry and alternative media economies
  
• Reconsidering the methodologies of communication
  
• Revisiting the discussion on communication as a discipline or area?
  
• Crises of democracy and the media
  
• Pedagogy of communication and communication technologies as pedagogical tools
  
• Media archeology and revisiting the past
  
• Populism and the media
  
• Artificial intelligence tools & applications
  
• AI and the transformation of society
  
• Humanitarian crises and the media
  
• Climate change and the media
  
• Media persistence
  
• Migration, forced displacement, and the media
  
• Media worlds of terror
  
• Margins of communication – re-thinking the boundaries of interactions
  
• Multimodality and the media
  
• Search for alternative modalities of the media

Important Dates

Submissions due: February 15, 2024

Acceptance notification: March 1, 2024

Conference: May 16-18, 2024