Technology Needs To Be Effectively Incorporated
The future of the field is closely tied to communication technologies. As technology develops, communication curricula need to remain flexible and incorporate the new demands of communication technologies. At the practical level, this requires perpetual instruction ( practice sessions and workshops) of communication educators and close association with the market sector. This training is necessary as the process of communicating, informing and educating is mostly medicated by technical skills. It is apparent that many communication scholars shy away from this technical experience and view this encountering as reducing the intellectual role played by the communication educator in building and shaping the minds of new generation of young journalists and communicators. Nonetheless, communication educators seem not to have other choices except to be friends with these technologies. The incorporation of multimedia in communication curricula requires theoretical and methodological considerations. This requires, in our opinion, a particular conception which views multimedia as mass communication. This is certainly the case of the Internet for example. The subject matter of communication educators would be the different contents of the Internet, the virtual communities, the end users of the Internet and their socio-demographic characteristics, implication of the Internet on power control, extension of public sphere, the opportunities for developing societies, etc. The Internet has its technical fundamentals. However, it would be quiet unwise to stretch the field of communication well beyond its subject matter and venture without perspective into areas of other related technical disciplines as Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology (IT), etc. The accumulated experience of teaching Broadcasting and Film shows this inherent exigency. Schools of communication were more in line with forming graduates who can effectively communicate through these media than with producing technicians who fashion
media content in certain ways. The new media, however, pose more challenges than the previous traditional media in terms of content, scope and complexity.