Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies: a minitrack of HICSS

The Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies minitrack focuses on the study of communication taking place on digital and social media. Communication is the making of meaning and culture among people, with growing interconnections with a world of human-machine interactions. In mediated form, communication can involve text, emoticons, audio, images, video, virtual or augmented reality, or any combination thereof. The minitrack welcomes research on all forms of digital communication, including interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication, as well as a wide variety of contexts for communication, such as news, politics, entertainment, education, social movements and activism, etc. Additionally, this minitrack attends to the emerging interplay of human-machine communication—as evident, for example, in recent developments of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and the tools they afford for conversation and communication.

This minitrack is part of the Digital and Social Media track of HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The HICSS-58 conference will be held January 7-10, 2025, at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, USA.

The deadline for paper submissions is June 15, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. HST. For complete details on what and how to submit, see these instructions for authors.

This minitrack brings together researchers and innovators to explore Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies and their implications; to raise new socio-technical, theoretical, methodological, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic, and social questions; and to suggest new methods, perspectives, and design approaches. The minitrack is the successor of the Mediated Conversation minitrack, which itself was a successor of the Persistent Conversation minitrack (established by Tom Erickson and Susan Herring at HICSS in 1999). The original minitrack was focused on the novelty of conversational persistence. With the prevalence of mediated conversation in contemporary life and a much wider landscape of digital communication that has emerged in recent years, we are called upon to consider a broader field of issues.

For this minitrack, examples of appropriate topics include but are not limited to:

Communication dynamics (from mass to interpersonal to other forms) that shape the development of digital media spaces and their role in public and private life
The role of artificial intelligence in communication, including in areas such as mediated conversation, news, and social media
Ethics of communication, digital conversation, and media technologies: e.g., privacy, deception, freedom of speech, security, and information warfare

Human-machine communication and related forms of conversation (e.g., chatbots)
The role of conversation in understanding the interplay between media producers and media audiences
The dynamics and analysis of large-scale conversation systems (e.g., MOOCs and big data applications)
Methods for analyzing communication, mediated conversation, and media technologies: qualitative, quantitative, data analytics, etc.
Innovation in the intersections of communication, mediated conversation, and media technologies
The dark side of mediated conversation: e.g., hate speech, bullying, information overload
Domain-specific applications, opportunities, and challenges of communication, digital conversation, and media technologies (e.g., in education, healthcare, social movements, government, citizen participation, management, and news media)
Studies of virtual communities and the discourses in digital spaces
Novel properties of platforms as they relate to communication/conversation dynamics
Power dynamics and conversational patterns among social media users
The role of communication, conversation, and media technologies in knowledge management and organizations
Conversation visualizations and analytics
The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions

Fast-track journal opportunity: Authors of papers accepted for presentation in the minitrack will be offered the opportunity to submit an extended version of their papers for consideration for fast-track publication in the ACM journal ACM Transaction on Social Computing (https://tsc.acm.org/)

Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies minitrack co-chairs:

Seth C. Lewis (Primary contact)
University of Oregon
sclewis@uoregon.edu

Yoram M. Kalman
The Open University of Israel
yoramka@openu.ac.il

Gina M. Masullo
The University of Texas at Austin
Gina.Masullo@austin.utexas.edu