by K Rojas

Created on: April 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 04, 2007

COMMUNICATING IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

There has doubtless ever been a journalist whose career ambition did not include the publication of that one great story earning recognition for generations to come. This is the writer's legacy. It has always been the Professional Communicator's most noble and sought after goal. Once again, we have entered a millennium where it is apparent that the field of communications is in the midst of a great socio-technological revolution, and that changes everything.

No longer can an investigator rely on that grand journalistic break any more than a political correspondent can be satisfied with uncovering a Washington scandal. It's not enough for the information climate of the 21st century. While journalistic moguls of the past left us legacies we can learn and grow from, today's journalism student must rely on a synergy of communications, the social sciences, environmentalism, and technology.

Communicators during the last millennium celebration were also in the throws of technological advancement. The advent of the telephone created a prolific change in the way people lived, played, and worked. The telephone changed the way people communicated by substituting much of the written communication that was necessary at the time with speech communication. In our great twentieth century advancement, we have come full circle to written communication again.

The middle of this century saw a fear of this technology, and portrayed the computer revolution as a freedom-robbing miscreant. Reality is the direct opposite, the antithesis of Orwell's famous prophecy of "1984". The world is freer than it has ever been because of the advances in communication, not in spite of them. History has shown that technology encourages democracy. World wide, open communication, such as the Internet, creates both the public over-sight necessary to prevent tyranny, and the capability of a global sharing of ideas. Our generation has the unique opportunity to shape this technology into what we want it to be, and what we want our posterity to behold.

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