Hosted by a top-ranked Marmara University, Faculty of Communication, the Global Communication Association (GCA) invites you to submit your abstracts and panel proposals for the 16th annual convention to be held in İstanbul, Türkiye.

A significant aspect of modernity enabled by media and communication technologies has been the collapse of time and distance. Global connectedness through social media platforms, flow of information through the internet, real-time communication through smartphones, and virtual meetings via Zoom have historically been credited for making the world a more connected place. However, unforeseen predicaments of new technologies have raised concerns about the lack of control over their use, the potential biases of machine visions and thinking, and their potential to facilitate crime as well as security and privacy breaches.

However, the contemporary technological assemblage does not allow time for such critical reflections. Paul Virilio suggests that ‘the faster the technology advances, the more accidents we will see’. He described the internet as ‘“the best and the worst of things…the advance of a limitless — or almost limitless — communication; and at some point, it is also the disaster — the meeting with the iceberg — for this Titanic of virtual navigation.’’

The Titanic metaphor refers to the disastrous nature of the contemporary technological assemblage and the gradual disappearance of the gap between the implementation of new technologies and the emergence of their adversary effects. The conference takes the increasing speed of technological development in the field of media and communication as its starting point and explores how and whether, if at all, the predicaments parallel and/or supersede the promises of the implementation of new technologies.