Call for papers: HICSS Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies minitrack

Location: Maui, Hawaii, USA (at the Hyatt Regency Maui)

Conference dates: January 6-9, 2026

Deadline to submit a full paper: June 15, 2025

 

Dear colleagues,

 

We invite you to submit your research to the HICSS Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies minitrack. This 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.

 

For further details about the minitrack and its aims, see https://CommunicationHicss.wordpress.com/

This minitrack is part of the Digital and Social Media track of HICSS. The HICSS-58 conference will be held January 6-9, 2026, at Hyatt Regency Maui, on the island of Maui, Hawaii, USA.

Submissions will be accepted until June 15, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. HST. To submit: https://hicss-submissions.org/

 

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.

 

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. Topics of interest 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, safety, 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

 

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

 

Seth C. Lewis (Primary contact)

University of Oregon

sclewis@uoregon.edu

Gina M. Masullo

The University of Texas at Austin

Gina.Masullo@austin.utexas.edu

Yoram M. Kalman

The Open University of Israel

yoramka@openu.ac.il