Publisher: The Transformation Society, © 2017 by the authors www.transformationsociety.net 3 Impasse de la Gare 34260 St Etienne Estréchoux France info@transformationsociety.net +33-6 72 40 37 60 Hybrid Communication for Industry 4.0: Nemetic Models Ray Gallon, The Transformation Society, France/Spain Neus Lorenzo, The Transformation Society, France/Spain Michael Josefowicz, The International Nemetics Institute, USA/India 1. INTRODUCTION The increasing diversification of interconnected media platforms, which provide a complex discourse, has led to the concept now called “transmedia,” a term that in 1991 was used by Marsha Kinder to describe a new media supersystem, using intertextuality and diversity of sources with different levels of interaction (Kinder, 1991). The concept is open enough to incorporate media that had not been invented then, such as wearables, bionic implants, or augmented reality technology. Industry 4.0, a term coined by the German government, extends this idea beyond media, into the realm of hybrid communications in a world of autonomous, interconnected objects mediated by artificial intelligence (Wikipedia, 2017). This article focuses on the relationships between hybrid communication environments and skills that will be needed to work in Industry 4.0. It also provides models based on the nemetic system, which are useful to analyze, track, and represent hybrid interactions in extremely digitalized environments. The transmedia narrative inherent in social media (Dena, 2009), where content is spread across many platforms with varying degrees of interaction among multiple authors and multiple audiences, already adds complexity to the fragmentation of content (Steinberg, 2012) that McLuhan (1994) identified early on as a characteristic of mass media. When machines are added into the mix as intelligent agents in these dynamic interactions, we add a new set of complexity layers, where part of the cross-media content is not directly readable by humans. Eventually, much of these connections and messages will be unknown, untracked, and invisible to human beings. For people to function in Industry 4.0, they will need skills well beyond the traditional listening and reading, and even beyond the new skill of transliteracy, understood as the ability to communicate across a range of platforms, tools and media (Thomas, 2005). They will need to be able to determine appropriate modalities and strategies for coding and decoding new types of multi-discourse: • Human-human • Human-machine / machine-human • Machine-machine Recent research explores cognitive patterns in narrative that can be represented through geometric models (Duarte, 2014). These recursive communication experiences have been described as “fractal narrative,” in terms of individual discourse (micro level), collective interaction (meso level), and community knowledge building (macro level).