Internet and the Political Public Sphere

The article addresses the main theory of the political public sphere generally, and the role of the Internet and Internet‐based media in the theory specifically. It first reviews briefly the initial social research on the Internet in the 1990s concerning political participation. After a presentation of Jürgen Habermas' theory of the contemporary public sphere, it proceeds to discuss the main problems concerning the Internet as a platform or infrastructure for public debate: segmentation and concentration. It argues that a general conclusion is that the public sphere differentiates and become more complex. A key task for future research, it argues, is to investigate the complex connections between Internet publics and mass media publics.     

A semiotic approach to the internal functioning of publics: implications for strategic communication and public relations

Employing public relations as a paradigmatic instance of strategic communication, this article challenges the prevailing view of publics as reactive entities. The article briefly reviews the two primary schools of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, and argues for the utility of the latter for building a language-centered understanding of publics. The Peircean ideas of unlimited semiosis, semiotic rhetoric, and community are employed to argue that publics ought to be understood primarily as self-actuated and interactive social entities with values and internal dynamics at least as complex and important to communication campaigns as are message content or client/practitioner intentions.The article concludes that we can best understand a public as an ongoing process of agreement upon an interpretation, and that during this process a public may well develop an interpretation that is more sophisticated, insightful, and socially linked than the understanding with which the practitioner/client started. As a result, we argue, publics should be accorded the preeminent position when studying or practicing any form of strategic communication, including public relations. Carl Botan is Associate Professor at Purdue University. Francisco Soto (MA, Purdue, 1995) is an Account Director for Aleph Communicacion, a public relations firm in Madrid, Spain and lectures at several higher education institutions.     

Echo chambers and social mediators in public advocacy issue networks

The growing trend of politically motivated consumer boycotts and buycotts on social media not only impacts a company’s financial bottom line, but more fundamentally disrupts relationships between the firm and its publics, the cornerstone of public relations (Ferguson, 1984; Sommerfeldt, & Kent, 2015). On a broader level, such politically motivated advocacy is a critical facet of civil society with important implications on the societal role of public relations (Taylor, 2010). In light of the significance of politically motivated consumer advocacy to public relations, a multi-phase, exploratory study was conducted. Study 1 applies content analysis and social network analysis to examine how different interactive mechanisms on social media—retweet, mention, and reply—may affect communication within and between communities of different ideological views surrounding the boycott and buycott issues. Study 2 further explores the challenges and opportunities of fostering exchange of diverse viewpoints by identifying new social mediators—the “echoers” who propel information flow among in-group members, and the “bridgers” who initiate communication with political out-group members—and assess the key network characteristics of these social mediators. The findings of these two studies advance public relations theories on networks, intergroup communication, and civil society by illustrating how social media structure and social mediators shape the networked public discourse to facilitate or inhibit conversations between publics of different ideological orientations.     

On the definition of public relations: a European view

The article confronts a U.S.-based definition of public relations as relationship management with a European view that besides a relational, argues also for a reflective paradigm that is concerned with publics and the public sphere; not only with relational (which can in principle be private), but also with public consequences of organizational behavior. The article is based on a three year research project on the European Public Relations Body of Knowledge and it reflects on the consequence of that project for definitional activities in the US practitioner and academic communities.     

Publishing postcolonial Africa: Nigeria and Ekeh’s two publics a generation after

This paper interrogates Peter Ekeh’s “two publics” in Africa in the context of African studies. It argues that what Ekeh analysed was a society in transition. Thirty-eight years after Ekeh’s publication, also using a Nigerian case study, the “attacks” on the “civil public” which Ekeh theorised, are suggested to have extended to the “primordial public”: amorality is presently ubiquitous in the “two publics.” The paper identifies a combination of three elements pushing the “attack”: military rule, a civil war and enormous resource from mineral oil (oil boom). Furthermore, the paper suggests that “two publics” evolved largely because before colonialism, there was no hegemony built in any known “state” in what was Nigeria at the time to sustain any common (moral) value system that could have resisted the “civilising” ideology of colonialism. The paper underscores the fact that knowledge production in African studies has not paid sufficient attention to the gap created in nation building in Africa because of the inability of pre-colonial African states to establish hegemony which is critical in state and nation building in other civilisations. In conclusion, the paper argues that the inability to build hegemonic order before colonial rule, not only in Nigeria, but in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa largely explains why 50 years after colonial rule, there may still be debate about and delay in resolving the problem of the “two publics.”     

RE-MAPPING THE PUBLIC

This paper traces the changing political/cultural formations of publicness in Britain, and how these intersect with emerging strategies for governing the social. It draws on three sets of discursive oppositions or elisions – those of public/community; community/bureaucracy; and public/social – to trace successive struggles over the fortunes of a public institution that, I argue, stands as an icon of the public sphere – the public library service. The account illuminates how notions of publics and publicness have been made and remade, expanded and residualized, by state professionals in Britain over the last 50 years as they struggled with the incursions of ‘new’ publics as well as seeking to mediate the impact of the Thatcher years and Blair governments. But rather than reading the decline of the public library service in Britain as just another example of neo-liberal governance, the paper argues for an approach that pays attention to the specificity of institutional histories and to the organizational and occupational forces that produce and mediate cultural change.     

Public crises,public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analysing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support.     

A social capital approach to improving public relations’ efficacy: Diagnosing internal constraints on external communication

This article extends Heath's (2006) concept of fully functioning society theory (FFS) and argues that public relations can be used as a force to enhance collective social capital in communities. To serve this purpose, however, the effectiveness of an organization to serve its external publics is often dependent on the status and relationships the public relations function has developed within the organization. This paper provides a network analysis of a government agency in Jordan that illustrates the relationship between internal organizational social capital and the potential problems for establishing external relationships with publics. Implications for public relations research methods and theory are also discussed.     

New politics and satire: the Euro financial crisis and the one-finger salute

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the conventional conceptualization in political science of politics is problematic, that it is overly narrow and constrained. This is because it excludes a range of actions like satire and humour which have come to play an increasing role in inspiring and provoking powerful political emotions and in informing the political agenda. Drawing on the work of critical scholars, it is argued that emotion, ethics and art can be deeply political. Moreover, new forms of media have encouraged new–old forms of political action often at the hands of young people who hitherto have been marginalized from the public sphere. Digital technology enables the production of user-generated content, opening new spaces for information, the exchange of ideas and mobilization. This article highlights the work of the young German satirist Jan Böhmermann to demonstrate how expressive art is playing a major role in shaping public opinion, in contesting power elites and informing political debate. In short, I use Böhmermann’s 2015 satire depicting Greco-German relations in the midst of a financial crisis and fears of loan defaults to argue for a broader understanding of politics that is inclusive of activities conventionally deemed non-rational.     

German Muslims and their engagement in participatory culture: reflections on civic and artistic contributions to the public sphere

This paper examines publics of young German Muslims. Case studies include the singer Huelya Kandemir, the theatre group Uma Lamo and the social network Zahnräder. By focusing on spiritual music publics, theatrical comedy publics and social publics, it tries a new approach to the way in which we understand minority public engagement. In addition to examining the concept of counterpublics, it utilizes the concept of participatory culture, which offers a relevant complement. The study argues that the publics of young German Muslims display multifaceted artistic and civic engagement, which can best be understood in terms of participation in cultural or civic productions and contribution to the wider German public. Features or effects of counterpublics, such as the countering of mainstream representations of minority identities and the offering of alternative discourses, are occasionally reflected in their activities.     

Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy: Towards a “new” cult of personality

This study examined how Turkey uses social media as a tool for public diplomacy and how the state’s soft-power efforts have recently changed on the global stage. The researchers constructed a dataset of 2769 Twitter posts by the Turkish government’s most influential public diplomacy accounts. The analyses revealed that the focus of Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy has become concentrated on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and is thematically focused on the political values embodied by the Turkish president. The findings suggest that public diplomacy remains to be the diplomacy of the government, not of the public, and social media is used as just another tool for propaganda, not as a means of engagement with foreign publics. Further, the findings indicate the emergence of a “new” cult of personality in public diplomacy and point out the instrumental role of social media in changing the dynamics of leader-follower relationship. The study contributes to public relations theory and practice by advancing the burgeoning public diplomacy scholarship at the intersection of social media and relational approaches.     

Reflections on Public Sociology: Public Relations, Disciplinary Identity, and the Strong Program in Professional Sociology

Public sociology is an attempt to redress the issues of public engagement and disciplinary identity that have beset the discipline over the past several decades. While public sociology seeks to rectify the public invisibility of sociology, this paper investigates the limitations of it program. Several points of critique are offered. First, public sociology's affiliations with Marxism serve to potentially entrench existing divisions within the discipline. Second, public sociology's advancement of an agenda geared toward a "sociology for publics" instead of a "sociology of publics" imposes limitations on the development of a public interface. Third, the lack of a methodological agenda for public sociology raises concerns of how sociology can compete within a contested climate of public opinion. Fourth, issues of disciplinary coherence are not necessarily resolved by public sociology, and are potentially exacerbated by the invocation of public sociology as a new disciplinary identity. Fifth, the incoherence of professional sociology is obviated, and a misleading affiliation is made between scientific knowledge and the hegemonic structure of the profession. Finally, the idealism of public sociology's putative defense of civil society is explored as a utopian gesture akin to that of Habermas' attempt to revive the public sphere. The development of a strong program in professional sociology is briefly offered as a means to repair the disciplinary problems that are illustrated by emergence of the project of public sociology.     

Imperative for an Arab model of public relations as a framework for diplomatic,corporate and nongovernmental organization relationships

This paper advocates a morally/ethically defensible “organic theory” of public relations that is in opposition to the public relations literature that predominantly suggests that only those publics that have direct consequences for the organization are publics with whom public relations practitioners should deal. A biological metaphor can be used in supporting this “organic” theory of public relations in which the organization is an organ and society is a body as a whole.This paper concludes that the process of public relations, as well as the outcomes, is critically important in maintaining a metabolic balance and harmony within society itself—a requisite for the health and well-being of nation-states, corporations and nongovernmental organizations. Much of this process involves communication as a ritual, rather than communication as transmission of information; it involves interpersonal communication, rather than mass communication. It involves relationship-building as opposed to persuasion. Much of this process has been found traditionally in Arab culture, and these rich traditions should be recognized and examined for their utility and value in developing an Arab model of public relations to help resolve the plethora of 21st Century issues that threaten global stability and ultimately the well-being of all cultures and societies.     

A transnational networked public sphere of air pollution: analysis of a Twitter network of PM2.5 from the risk society perspective

ABSTRACT

Drawing on digitaltrace data, publicly accessible government documents, and journalistic reports, this research integrates Beck’s risk society theory with digital media theories to examine the mediated process of risk definition and assessment of PM2.5 (particulate matters with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers) in a networked public sphere. Network and content analysis of a PM2.5 Twitter network shows that political and professional elite remained the most powerful producers of risk definition. Established media played a key role, yet faced challenges from a variety of actors who disseminated and filtered information. Laypersons, while peripheral, actively interacted with elite and established media. The blurring geographic boundary in the PM2.5 Twitter network revealed an emerging transnational public sphere, which, however, was segregated by language. This research advances a layered understanding of the contingent, paradoxical media impact for social changes in a risk society.     

The utility of situational theory of publics for assessing public response to a disaster prediction

The study of public response to disasters is a relatively recent discipline that developed following the passage of the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977. Because earthquake prediction is an inexact science, few formal predictions have been issued, which has limited the opportunity to study public response to predictions. The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of public relations theory, specifically situational theory of publics, for assessing response to the New Madrid earthquake prediction.Situational theory demonstrates that there is not a single, general public for disaster predictions as has been assumed in studies of disaster response. Instead, multiple publics develop in response to a prediction based on how members of those publics view the situation. Contrary to previous findings that believability and personalized risk are correlated constructs, high personalized risk was associated with high constraint recognition regardless of belief in the prediction. Based on the findings, suggestions are proposed for the development of more effective messages for communicating with publics at risk.     

The Missing Link: The Public Relations Manager Role as Mediator of Organizational Environments and Power Consequences for the Function

We argue that the public relations manager role provides the "missing link" between environmental challenges and the consequences for the public relations function. Conceptualizing the manager role in terms of organizational power, the concept provides linkages between the environmental-imperative and the power-control perspectives. The model posits that environmental challenges to the organization, in part, determine the role enacted by the top public relations practitioner. This role enactment, in turn, increases the function's capacity to maintain the integrity of its domain. Using a sample of 262 public relations practitioners in the United States, we tested the relationships just stated. Findings indicate that the range of publics and changeability of publics (environmental variables) are positively related to the manager role. The manager role is negatively related to marketing involvement in public relations activities and to the assignment of individuals from outside public relations to head the public relations unit.     

Post-truth and public relations: Special section introduction

With spindoctoring, publicity seeking stunts and evidence of mal-practice, public relations is easily associated with the development of post-truth society. The elevation of bullshit as political coinage presents a challenge for the rational public debate which the public relations profession at large should have an interest in maintaining. In this introduction, we briefly highlight some of these challenges for public relations. We point to how papers in the special section tie into these challenges, by for instance, helping to understand the construction of truth, how to construct a defense for legitimate public relations and engage with publics, as well as to build a professional practice through developing and measuring communication.     

Public Relations in a Democratic Society: Value and Values

Each of the articles in this special issue merit attention based solely on the authors' contributions to alternative ways of doing and understanding public relations. More important, as a body of work, the authors expand on Schudson's (1997) provocative article about the role of conversation in a democratic society. In this review, I summarize the strengths of each article, discuss the focus on activist publics, highlight concepts new to the study of public relations, and suggest avenues for further thought based on the ideas presented in this issue. I conclude with the proposal that in a democratic society, public relations should facilitate making profoundly uncomfortable conversations more comfortable.     

Thinking aloud/allowed: pursuing the public interest in radio debate

This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators. The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public, public accountability and the public interest were contested. The research describes independent newsroom practices conducted in terms of journalistic ethics and professional ideologies, and shows that journalists assume a powerful role in defining publics and calling them into being, as well as in orchestrating their participation in public deliberation. This is a professional responsibility that is recognised and defended. However, the practices associated with that responsibility and the power to orchestrate the debate in particular ways are not critically engaged within the profession. Just as the debate illuminates the concept of publicness imported into journalistic practice, it also illuminates concepts imported into SABC institutional practice which are rooted in a long lineage of national democratic struggle. In the controversy, the two concepts chafed against each other, propounded in each case by protagonists embedded in their respective lineages. The controversy was thus more than simply a struggle for political control; it was a contest about the meaning of democratic citizenship itself, rooted in differing but intersecting political‐intellectual logics.