Conference Panel 1_Public Relations
Technological advancement brings several challenges to the manner in which PR practitioners conceptualise, organise and evaluate their own professional work. As organisations of all kinds, as well as their in-house or agency PR teams adopt new technologies in most areas of their activity, the practice of establishing and developing fruitful stakeholder relations also goes through profound changes, putting PR practitioners in the position to reinvent themselves several times in one single career.
In this context, we encourage contributions on how technological advancement has changed or is currently changing the following aspects of PR work:
- research tools that PR specialists use to analyze the environment of their clients' organisation or to assess the progress of their own work of establishing, maintaining and developing stakeholder relations;
- roles played by PR professionals and competencies that they are required to master in order to create relevant and appealing messages for different categories of stakeholders;
- strategies, tactics and specific tools used by PR practitioners to prevent or navigate organisational crises, online and offline;
- the theoretical lenses used to make sense of stakeholder relations management; the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of the notion of an 'audience' – e.g., what changes are brought by the proliferation of digital communities online.
Conference Panel 2_Advertising
The technological transformations of today are bringing both opportunities and risks on advertising professionals in all areas of the industry – account, research, strategy, creative work, production, media planning, as well as media buying. Where is this change heading to? As stronger artificial intelligence systems get more and more refined, will professionals still have a place in the industry? Do we have any similar situations in the past, when the advertising industry was called to reinvent itself, that we can count on for pieces of retrospective wisdom?
To answer such questions, we invite researchers and practitioners to present their insights on the following topics:
- challenges brought by technological progress to the work of advertising professionals;
- ethical issues raised by ad personalization tools powered by artificial intelligence;
- advertising copy, images, and media plans created by generative artificial intelligence;
- ethical aspects of using big data in the creation and evaluation of advertising content.
Conference Panel 3_Journalism and media studies
The technological products of today can be understood as providers of channels of interaction,
as topics for media content, but are also framed as partners or assistants in
journalism and media. Artificial Intelligence-mediated communication has the potential to alter the
norms and dynamics of human communication (Mieczkowski et al. 2021), as people can now communicate
with AI as well as through AI devices. With such fundamental changes in the reception
and production patterns of communication, what will journalism practice look like in the future? Are we
facing a new era of the field? Are there any available theories or professional experiences, past and
present, that can inform our expectations for the future?
In this vein, some of the possible topics of our panel include:
- editorial content produced by systems of generative artificial intelligence;
- digital audiences and the psychology of media reception online;
- the effects of echo chambers on the distribution patterns of media content;
- fake news, deep fake, and the power of digital tools to amplify their effect.
Conference Panel 4_Semiotics, Rhetoric, and Discourse Theories
People manage their world (offline and online) using an increasing variety of semiotic and rhetorical tools. Everyday communication includes a plethora of signs: videos, pictograms, hyperlinks, maps, drawings and so on. Many of these new signs (and their mix) lead to new forms of discourse. Multimodal and multisemiotic resources are employed to enact identities, activities, and ideologies in the digital world, as part of a larger social world (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2019), apparently leading to an augmented social reality, combining threads of experience in unpredictable ways.
In this context, some of the issues that are worth exploring are the following:
- methods that can be employed to interpret digital content;
- tropes used in (the analysis of) digital discursive practices;
- multimodal tools used to shape personal identity and image online;
- the role of artificial intelligence in online propaganda.