This is an excerpt from the dean's speech which I have prepared during the MedCom 2018 conference in Bangkok, Thailand. --- Navigating the Opportunities and Challenges of Communication Technologies in the Century of the 4th Industrial Revolution John Culkin, a contemporary of the great communication scholar Marshall McLuhan, was once famously quoted saying, “we shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us” (1967). Nothing is truer than that. We are living in an interesting period of time in the course of our human civilisation: a period of accelerating technological change, where a lot of revolutionary changes are rapidly taking place driven largely by information and communication technologies. And they in turn have produced tremendous amount of effects within our society today; from the way we consume our news and information, the way we connect and communicate with our families and friends, to the way we work, shop and play; communication technologies have fundam...