A term that is still loose, and three marks

After computers became ordinary, related tools moved quickly, and many people now carry a smartphone with similar functions, and can go online without being tied to one place or one hour. The internet of things, augmented reality, and a metaverse are named as virtual worlds that sometimes mix with the physical one. Artificial intelligence has also pushed past the older use of robots for repetitive or dangerous work, and can now, in this telling, carry out logical thought and inference from large amounts of data. That shift, on the surface, raises both a fear that jobs will be taken and a hope of new industries; more deeply, it asks again what is distinctively human.

The fourth industrial revolution is widely named in Korea and elsewhere, often as a further turn in the long line of scientific and technical revolutions, and as one that goes past the computers and the internet of the third. The term is still not firmly fixed in academic use, and is often misapplied by businesspeople and politicians. Among the backgrounds for Klaus Schwab’s coinage, Germany’s Industrie 4.0 is placed first. On the World Economic Forum’s site he sets the distinctiveness of the turn in speed, in scope, and in systemic impact, and treats those three marks as grounds for calling artificial intelligence and robots a new revolution, not only a continuation of the third. A 2018 essay in Science and Technology Policy, volume 1, number 1, asking by what criteria an industrial revolution should be judged, is cited beside that account.

A hologram of a soprano, and a match watched at home

Media, treated here as culture and art, is not a matter of survival, but it has long shaped how people feel and how they live. It deepens a sense of human life, and of the social and cultural setting a community shares. It has also been used, in music therapy, drama therapy, and dance therapy, toward psychological and physical illness. Core tools of the fourth industrial revolution — the internet of things, three-dimensional printing, virtual reality — are expected to widen what culture and art can do, and to open new work where media meets care.

Physical limits around a sports match or a sports event can be crossed with very high-definition screens and with holograms, so that scenes and movements that could not be shown before become possible. The same turn is illustrated by a concert that visualised, as a hologram, the soprano Maria Callas, who died in 1977. Culture and digital tools, once joined, also loosen the hold of a particular hour and a particular place. The need for remote activity during COVID-19 is named as one reason that mattered. A person who once had to travel to a match can now watch online, on a screen or through virtual reality, at home.

As sport becomes more popular, and as interaction among many people online grows, the line between the person who provides a cultural work and the person who enjoys it is expected to blur. Feedback can be sent with a button or a similar tool, and can shape the next work, so that makers and audiences may share the role of creator.

A saying about the sports desk, and goods from a printer

In the media-content trade, there is a saying that the sports journalist is the job most likely to disappear first, because work that runs on numbers, calculation, or patterns, including in sports, can be pushed aside by artificial intelligence. The saying is left as a saying, not as a ranked official finding.

Toward the close, artificial intelligence and big data are said to make some prediction possible; a match may be watched as a hologram; virtual reality is named again; and a three-dimensional printer can be used to make sports-media goods, so that the ways of making media become more various.

Why the hologram, and why the desk, sit together

The turn is not only a new machine. It is also a question of what still belongs to a person who watches, who reports, and who makes, once a soprano can appear after death and a desk of numbers can be run by a model. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Essay on the effect of the fourth industrial revolution on sports media, in a course on contemporary society and sport (Korean source page).
2. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, on the arrival and the idea of the fourth industrial revolution, as cited from the Forum’s official site, with distinctiveness in speed, scope, and systemic impact, and with Germany’s Industrie 4.0 as a principal background.
3. “By what criteria should an industrial revolution be judged?,” Science and Technology Policy 1, no. 1 (2018): 113–141. NICE (News & Information for Chemical Engineers) 35, no. 1, as cited on the Korean page.
4. A concert visualising Maria Callas, who died in 1977, as a hologram, as named on the Korean page, without a separate date for the performance.

Last updated: 14 November 2026