Future of Crisis Communication

This chapter explores the future of international crisis communication. The interest in international crisis communication continues to increase. International business, typified by long supply chains, continues to create potential international crises. Moreover, the social media adds to the need to improve our understanding of international crisis communication. This chapter is about forecasting the future of crisis communication. The forecaster draws upon data from the past and the present to make claims about outcomes that have yet to be observed—the future. Forecasting itself is a precarious undertaking because it is speculative. A forecast maybe grounded in data but the extrapolations from that data involve speculation. Speculation runs the risk of being inaccurate because it is far from an exact science. Hence, any forecast runs the risk of being inaccurate. You appreciate this point if you have ever heard a weather forecast predicting a sunny day only to be drenched by rain. My challenge is to craft a glimpse into the probable future of crisis communication. The future of crisis communication plotted in this chapter is predicated upon existing trends that should increasingly influence the development of crisis communication as both a practice and a research area. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines the international demands of crisis communication. This section expands upon arguments I made in 2008 and utilizes extant research to support this continued projection. The second section examines the influence of digital communication channels. The focus will be on the rise of social media and the implications for crisis communication. The concluding section synthesizes the first two sections to provide a highlight of the forecast for the future of crisis communication.