Emerging Media: Opening a New Era in Future Communication

Abstract

Looking back into the history of human communication, it is not difficult to find that the development of communication and the evolution of media technology have always been intertwined, complementary , and reciprocal. For example, newspapers, magazines, books, and other print media go hand-in-hand with the invention of paper-making and printing technology; radio, television media, and broadcasting technology are inseparable like the two sides of a coin. Today as we are confronted with the reality of information technology "explosion," technological innovation could bring unprecedented changes to the media environment and human communication (Bale et al., 2022). When the Internet technology transitioned from Web1.0 to Web3.0, human communication, in turn, embraced the era of static web pages, social media, and blockchain; the progress in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology opened the prelude to the era of metaverse communication (Lin et al., 2022); with the advent of big data, artificial intelligence, and particularly the amazing inventions such as ChatGPT, human beings have entered a brand-new era of "intelli-gent communications" (Qin et al., 2019)! As the continuous progress of information technology paints a constantly changing media landscape for us, we created this journal Emerging Media, with the aim of building a new platform for academic exchange and gathering outstanding scholars from all over the world to address emerging technologies, discuss emerging issues, employ emerging methods, develop emerging theories, explore emerging practices, and cultivate emerging industries. To put it simply, we will use the keyword "Emerging" as a common thread that goes through the themes of this journal.