The Multimodal approach offers technical communicators and science writers an analytical tool to synthesize the meaning made in the connections across communicative modes. This multimodal synthesis can help technical communicators better exploit the meaning-making potential of multimodal combinations and understand the needs of future generations shaped by their increasingly developed multimodal literacy.

Advances in AI technology affect knowledge work in diverse fields, including healthcare, engineering, and management. Although automation and machine support can increase efficiency and lower costs, it can also, as an unintended consequence, deskill workers, who lose valuable skills that would otherwise be maintained as part of their daily work. Such deskilling has a wide range of negative effects on multiple stakeholders -- employees, organizations, and society at large. This essay discusses deskilling in the age of AI on three levels - individual, organizational and societal. Deskilling is furthermore analyzed through the lens of four different levels of human-AI configurations and we argue that one of them, Hybrid Intelligence, could be particularly suitable to help manage the risk of deskilling human experts. Hybrid Intelligence system design and implementation can explicitly take such risks into account and instead foster upskilling of workers. Hybrid Intelligence may thus, in the long run, lower costs and improve performance and job satisfaction, as well as prevent management from creating unintended organization-wide deskilling.

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Social media communication is changing the opportunities for technical communicators to really understand audiences when these audiences are active about issues on social media platforms. Through applying ad-hoc corpus building processes to create word lists relevant to specific organizational projects, technical communicators can listen to their external users and identify areas of importance with greater accuracy. While other methods of sentiment analysis look for a solution that leads to artificial intelligence in the program, this paper identifies the present needs of a human interaction approach for contextually understanding social media posts. The human interaction step in ad-hoc corpus analysis is central to this methodology as it provides a means to ask critical questions of the content curated through the ad-hoc corpus directly. Results of ad-hoc corpus analysis from this critical lens can build upon organizational knowledge about ways in which their technologies are received and users perceive the organization.

To highlight aspects of activism obscured by a focus on legitimacy and ideology, this article argues that shifting focus from legitimacy and ideology to identity, problem-solving and dialogue is needed to understand emerging forms of social media native activism that connects consumer social responsibility (CnSR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Taking this view as a basis for social activism offers a valuable perspective for understanding some emergent forms of social media activism toward business. Two cases of social media native activist organizations working to create movements are examined from this problem-solving and dialogue-based perspective-Carrotmob and the GoodGuide. These cases represent examples of a post-dialectic frame for understanding how social media can affect approaches to activism.