172 | nº 29, pp. 169-196 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2019
Intelligent automation in communication management
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
This industrial revolution is characterized mainly because digital media transformed the forms of communication. But especially, because of the creation of new media where people are generators and consumers of information, especially for the appearance of social networks (Lamberton & Stephen, 2016).
Right now, there are moments of transition between the third and fourth industrial revolution. This last one that began at the beginning of the 21st century and is characterized mainly by giving life to new forms and tools to communicate through the internet, by the appearance of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, big data, blockchain, internet of things, automation and many more sciences that have been growing and possibly others that will appear in the coming years.
The so-called fourth industrial revolution is also called industry 4.0, I4.0, digitalization of production systems or reindustrialization. The term industry 4.0 was coined at the Hannover Fair of 2011 where it was described how it will revolutionize the organization of global value chains (Schwab, 2016). An Adeco study conducted in 2018 says “in reality, the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, is an evolution of the digital infrastructure that we already have towards new systems” (Adecco, 2018, p. 46). This era is the transition to the knowledge and information society. Where relationships and the way of communicating change in the human being.
By recapitulation, the stages of the revolution and their main characteristics are summarized:
Table 1. Stages of the industrial revolution and its characteristics.
Stage of Revolution
Main Features
First Industrial Revolution
Creation of first inventions.
Various origin criteria. Possibly 1760 – 1840.
Second Industrial Revolution
Industrial stage.
It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
New visionaries and large-scale job generation appear.
Third Industrial Revolution
Post-industrial stage.
Called the computer age or digital revolution era. Computer and computer science pre-dominates.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Also called revolution 4.0 and with other denominations
Early 21st century
New ways and tools to communicate over the Internet.
Emergence of artificial intelligence and other sciences.
Source: own elaboration.
Facing of all developments that could result in progress for humanity, for the critic and analytic of the digital culture Bernard Stiegler (2014, p. 150) externalizes that we are in the hyper-industrial phase that transforms social, economic and cultural structures, where hyper control is carried out through a generalized automation process. Moving from an era of proletarianisation to digital retention or what Stiegler himself points out (2014, pp. 147-148) that hyper-industrial society has given way to the loss of know-how in the 19th century then to the loss of knowing-living in the twentieth
