Abstract
Challenges became more complex to organizational communication since the dissemination and the confluence of big data, artificial intelligence, and internet of things. Ubiquitous and powerful, these technologies require a specific knowledge, partnerships with different areas (data sciences), and learning how to work with a new communicational agent, the non-human. Bots should produce content e become popular as brand virtual influencer among other things. There are many and good opportunities to create and implement more assertive strategies by using data-driven and IA tools. The purpose of this chapter is to contextualize digital transformations and to highlight challenges and opportunities on what the author has defined as second disruptive wave to organizational communication. The first one happened when social media emerged as the main social arena on the contemporary society. The research was supported by a qualitative methodology with a theoretical framework and documentary research from various fields of knowledge.
TopContextualizing Theory Into Facts
The presentation of disruptive waves in communication requires a contextualized observation of the facts to translate the challenges, reveal the opportunities and the paths to follow. In the dictionary, the world “context” expresses the meaning of the interrelationship of circumstances of an act or event (Houaiss, 2009, Webster’s 2003), and, in an era in which inter- and multidisciplinary has become imperative, the ability to be transversal emerges increasingly as a determining factor for the achievement of goals.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Big Data (BD): Big data is a complex system for collecting, storing and parametrizing data, possible by advances on digital technology (as cloud, e.g.). BD is popularly known by its “Vs”: volume, variety, velocity, and value. Impacts brought by big data are immense because of data and information generated from it allow a better knowledge of everything and everybody.
Information Disorder: Information disorder is a term studied and presented by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan in 2017: Information Disorder: toward a multidisciplinary framework for research and policy making. The term understands all phenomena that happen to information universe divided into three categories: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.
Internet of Things: In a very simplistic way, internet of things synthesizes the connectivity, provided by internet, of all kinds of objects.
First Disruptive Wave: It is a movement started with social media consolidation as the main social arena of contemporary society. The emergence of prosumer (producer and releaser of own content) and convergence of media were two big challenges brought by this wave, forcing a reconfiguration of informational and communicational flow.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): It’s a complex field of study launched as a term and as a discipline at Dortmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956 (United States). AI involves various disciplines, such as philosophy, biology, psychology, and computer science among others. John McCarthy, considered one of the ‘fathers’ of AI, defined it as “science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.
Second Disruptive Wave: It is a movement caused by confluence of ubiquitous technologies (big data, artificial intelligence, internet of things) and phenomena that impact organizational communication. The second disruptive wave brings as complex challenges for communication professionals: the need to work with different areas, the need to seek knowledge about new technologies and ways of working with a new communicational agent, the non-human.
Bots: It’s a short for robot, it is linked to artificial intelligence field and operates as a computer program. Bots do not have a physical body but can be represented by avatars.