A Whole-Hearted Effort to Get It Half Right: Predicting the Future of Communication Technology Scholarship

As I consider communication technology research —where it has been and where it is going —I regularly think back to a response I wrote for my comprehensive exams as a doctoral student 15 years ago. In an essay to defend the relevance of communication technology as an area of study, I somewhat boldly predicted that communication technology would never be a major subfield itself because experts across a wide range of more traditional subfields would end up studying the topic in each of their specialty areas. As with most things, I was only about half right. Indeed, one does not have to look very far to see the importance of communication technologies when it comes to research throughout the communication discipline. However, I missed the mark in anticipating the amazing growth of communication technology scholarship as its own unique realm of study in Communication and related fields. Thanks to growing published scholarship, new research and teaching jobs, and rising professional memberships related to communication and technology, this area has begun to successfully carve out its own identity as distinct and complementary to other subfields in our discipline. Despite my admittedly poor record at attempting to predict the future—and the even more difficult endeavor to actually shape it —I think such efforts are necessary to stimulate thinking and set priorities. I would like to suggest three directions for communication and technology research —but given that limited ability to predict the future accurately only about half the time, I will actually provide six future directions in hopes that three might hit the mark. Indeed, these are what I see as desirable directions for where we need to go as much as prophetic predictions about where we’re headed. Let me briefly introduce each idea here.