What's communication got to do with IT?

European Journal of Information Systems (2012) 21, 341–344. doi:10.1057/ejis.2012.34 This is my first opportunity as editor to address the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) community, and I take great pleasure in doing so. We are a diverse community of readers, authors, reviewers and editors. Indeed, cultivating diversity of research methods and topics, presentation genres, cultures and norms is a hallmark of this community (see Editorials by Frantz Rowe (2010, 2011). Many of us wear different hats, switching between roles: one day an author, the other a reader, one day a reviewer, the other an editor. All these roles can, and indeed should, build on intellectual discourse and socialization that respect diversity. Today I look at what we can do to improve discourse and socialization. To me discourse is dialog with others in the community expressing thoughts and emotions, generating perspectives of situations and phenomena, moving across levels of context of a perspective, moving from simplifications to complications and from concrete to abstract descriptions, and using representations with various formats and lexicons to do so. Socialization is learning about each other and learning how to interact with each other in the community. New communication technologies, not the least social media, are changing the way we process information, learn, make decisions, create and distribute knowledge, manage, and socialize, all of which have been traditional areas of our research in Information Systems. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) affect not only what we study, but also how we study, communicate and share knowledge. The changes brought about by new ICT sometimes appear to affect behaviors quickly and abruptly, as in the use of social media in the recent Arab political uprisings. But at other times, the changes seem unwieldy and painfully slow in affecting, for instance, the design of systems to support knowledge dissemination in our journal publishing and conferencing. Improving discourse and socialization in EJIS is strongly linked to advances in ICT and how the new technologies serve to create, disseminate and utilize knowledge.