Publication Date

4-15-2026

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Communication Education

DOI

10.1080/03634523.2026.2647873

Abstract

I arrived as a new faculty member at San José State University, the self-described “public university of Silicon Valley,” in 2002. The iPod was born the year before; Google was four years old. The next five years saw the introduction of Android, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone (Gewirtz, 2025). It was the beginning of the Digital Age: 2002 was the first year that worldwide digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity (Hilbert & López, 2011). And it was the birth of Web 2.0, the beginning of the Internet as we know it: participatory media featuring user-generated content and newly democratized and commercial online spaces across multiple platforms (O’Reilly, 2007). Still, the classroom was largely analog—maybe one student in each class had a laptop. My Palm Pilot didn’t quite sync to my desktop calendar, and we still reported our grades in triplicate carbon copy. Google Drive wouldn’t be introduced for another decade, online classes were taught via email, and free websites such as GeoCities presented a bold new frontier for education. Now, a quarter century into the new millennium, we live in a world of autonomous cars and have personal assistants named Alexa and Siri. Students have a computer in their pocket, every class has a Discord, and artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly shaped writing, research, and academic integrity.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Communication Education on 15 Apr 2026, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2026.2647873

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Department

Communication Studies

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