Future roles for communicators in digital media-arenas: Boxturners and global diplomats

Abstract

Digitalization is affecting not only the corporate communication function within organizations, but also giving rise to numerous new and unpredictable digitally-influenced societal issues. The more these changes occur, the greater the responsibility of communicators to monitor and manage these effects. To make sense of these effects, this article introduces the novel Digital Media-Arena (DMA) Framework (Badham et al., 2022, 2024) which outlines 14 digital spaces where organizations, stakeholders, and publics communicate today. The article then examines new emerging roles for corporate communications in the digital realm.