The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication: A Guide to Internal Communication, Public Relations, Marketing, and Leadership

The Perfect Storm

Technology has always driven the way organizations communicate. The introduction of the printing press introduced the notion of mass media, which forever changed communication from the face-to-face, oral tradition that had characterized it for centuries before.

The introduction of video as a technology available to communicators altered the way we communicate externally (look at video news releases) and internally (with video used to explain employee benefits, expand the audience of town hall meetings, and summarize company news). Because of computer technology, the past two decades have seen video transform from a process that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment manipulated by a professional editor ...