Public Relations and Individuality

Fate, Influence and Autonomy

Simon Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351865678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Our individuality is partly shaped by encounters with the external world so it is inconceivable that we are unaffected by the planned management of public communications which manages much of our external experience. Exploring one of the most important mediators between organizations and individual encounters – public relations (PR) – is long overdue. By developing new ways to create and connect with us as members of particular target audiences, has it changed our interior existence by altering perceptions of the world outside ourselves?

PR's massive impact on groups, society or organizations is rightly explored, but its immense influence on our individuality is neglected. In an age where new media makes deepening connections to individuals, the relationship of PR to individuality is one of the field's most profoundly important issues. This provocative book will assist scholars and advanced students in PR and communication research to develop a clear, structured, disciplined understanding of this phenomenon and its implications.

1 PR and individuality

The book is about the connections of public relations (PR) to individuality, and how those connections are changing. Individuality in this book is the measure of the individual’s autonomy and consciousness, which changes because of PR. Philosophical, scientific and technical considerations appear only as they seem useful to understanding what PR does to and with the individual.

If we want to understand individuality, let alone the workings of the world, PR matters for several reasons. It is a practical activity used by every kind of organization; widespread enough to warrant the same academic attention as, say, accounting, finance, marketing or management. On another level PR goes further because, borrowing from the title of one of the first books on the subject, it is what societies use to engineer consent on a big scale and not always successfully. PR can be a creative force in its own right, applying imagination to deliver experiences to chosen publics, sometimes by operating in near-equal partnership with them, sometimes by pretending to. PR frequently determines the subjects we discuss, the aspects of them we talk about, the tone we use to discuss them, and offers perspectives that affect views on other subjects as well.

PR is a business but was never just a business activity, if defined by what it actually does instead of what it might be called at any particular time in history. Its methods long predate the needs of business, and it is used by many types of organizations and people. PR is present in almost every area of human activity: in warfare and parenthood, selling and voting, image and reputation, corporations and communities, policy-making and the generation of emotion. PR’s enormous range and the media it can use make it of interest to the arts and sciences. It is an arbiter of our senses in an era of closely managed information and as such it is an arbiter of power and a power in its own right.

Since PR’s business is with humanity it must know what makes humanity tick. It is an unrecorded presence in several academic disciplines. We need not look hard to locate PR in, among other subjects, communication studies and semiotics, and in history, politics, psychology, philosophy and technology. It may attract little attention from students of these fields but there it is anyway. The ubiquity is essential. PR must make use of those subjects and many others to manage relationships between organizations and people, which ultimately means between organizations and individuals. To be of any use PR’s varied activities must converge on that one point – that is, on each one of us.

And when that happens what happens to us? The question is as yet unanswered. After all, PR usually scales its resources to reach people in volume. As one among many, an individual must feel reaffirmed as part of a group: a small audience or a big public that seems to matter for personal, social, civic or commercial reasons, if only for a short time. Yet whenever something is presented through the prism of a group, it is done to move individuals in a particular direction. The aggregate effect on individuality must be at least as significant is it is for larger groups. How has PR changed individuality and how will individuality change PR?

Our individuality is the first and last vessel of instincts, reason and experience, both the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ with whom we all must have relations. PR’s connection to it is immense and insufficiently understood. To this observer at least, it seems to be profound and historic. Profound because of the huge period of time in which activities now grouped under the title of PR have been at work, gradually intensifying and diversifying to take in larger numbers of individuals with larger numbers of messages that, for good or not, encourage or provoke particular behaviours. Historic because in that time PR reconfigured individuality itself by affecting personal and collective decisions. It is evidence for what has been called ‘the reality-making power of public relations within the context of historical time, culture and place’ (St John III, Opdycke Lamme & L’Etang, 2014, p. 2).

Individuality evolves if PR is active. That claim can be made because our choices are not separate from our individuality. Choices are not programmed responses to managed messages aimed at our many public identities. They are the result of changes to the way we individually and inwardly choose to see ourselves. Changing individuality itself might be a scarcely noticed by-product of a PR campaign, but it may be PR’s most enduring impact.

The book is partly explained by saying what it is not. Its first, not-chosen title was ‘Public Relations and the fate of the individual’ which I still like for its philosophic, impressionistic and even mythological undertones. For practical reasons the publisher suggested ‘Public relations and individuality’, I think rightly. The interconnections between PR, philosophy and certainly mythology are many and varied, but in the end ‘fate’ should be less prominent. It is a little too mystic to bear the burden of the task assigned to it. Its underlying reference is to that which has been predetermined, which cannot be avoided, and it is too often used if the predetermined end is unhappy. There is no historical and still less mystical inevitability about the detail (or unhappiness) of PR’s effect on our individuality, although possibly its general impact on individuality was irresistible for reasons developed in these pages.

This is not a book about mass or any other kind of media, except when they serve PR. The independent influence of newspapers, television, the internet and other media on society has been much studied. Setting state propaganda aside for now (it appears later), less attention has been paid to the impact on our individuality of planned, carefully targeted communication applying customary and unexpected media and messages, and all the other paraphernalia needed for strategic perception-shaping. Nor is this a book about any noise purely associated with selling. PR and its antecedents work for products, organizations or people in the realm of ideas, of perceptions, and of the feelings suggested through them. Its usually unspoken purpose is to build connections in a more lasting and far deeper way than, say, pushing an immediate purchasing decision. Therein lies one source of its authority.

This is not a polemic. I do not say that PR’s impact on individuality is only bad. PR works at too many levels, and in too many ways, for such a judgement. It may in fact signal that individuality is respected by society. When a definitive moral judgement seems necessary, though, it is offered.

As an aside and in connection with making a judgement, PR’s need to promote public actions with public media is one more reason to read (and write) books. Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, ‘The book form is not a communal mosaic or corporate image but a private voice’ (McLuhan & George, 2013, Chapter 21). Writers have the fortune and opportunity of expressing ideas through an unalloyed medium for individuality. PR is sometimes too inclined to reward groupthink.

It is hoped this book is not the last word on its chosen subject. If we are to protect, project and know our ‘self’, we must know more about PR and individuality. The chapters in this book are linked essays, hopefully introductions to bigger inquiries. An initial attempt must be made because the subject is very urgent.

This is a book about the related and parallel expansion of planned PR activities and individuality’s changing nature. PR is the newest name for a very old practice. It is often pointed out that many activities gathered under the name ‘public relations’ originated many thousands of years ago: started in fact when our emerging consciousness as individuals led people to organize and cooperatively preserve a collective identity as members of a group. The next chapter makes a case that parts of the process began even earlier than that. These first steps towards organized group communication could have been prompted by competition from rival groups, and the compromises individuality was ready to make for sustenance and reproduction advantages conferred by group membership. Communication for the organization grew more complex, more competitive, more essential, and needed more resources, planning and more power hierarchies. Soon a point was reached whereby organizations reversed the hierarchy of communication itself. Their leaders took over the controls and required cohesion from individuals, who at most became a lesser collaborator in the communication process. This transfer of organized public communication power from loosely individuals to largely organization came quite late to humans. It was a momentous development for managed public communication and human individuality.

We must field walk several subjects to find the connections between individuality and group communication, and the effects of PR’s unceasing attempts to alter, weaken or strengthen individuality to achieve momentary purposes. Humans have journeyed across time in company with carefully managed public communication by organizations. That ancient and usually un-named task (which for convenience I shall mainly call by its present day name of PR, or ‘managed public communication’ wherever ‘PR’ seems distractingly contemporary) and its impact on individuality can be understood by means of philosophy, science, history, psychology, social studies, the work of businesses, governments and other organizations and of course PR research. This book is written in the hope that isolating specialisms do not multiply and cut off access to studying PR’s place in them. Thankfully, PR scholars avoid this since, to repeat an earlier remark, their business is with humanity itself.

A comment by the scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski could also be adjusted to PR’s manifold invocations:

The idea that one can conjure the world with names, with nouns, and even with verbs is a familiar belief among primitive peoples.

(Bronowski, 1978, p. 44)

It is not valueless to think about PR’s conjurings from the standpoint of individual belief in them. PR is not just a function. Its immateriality and individual desire for what it promises make it akin to an alternative belief system. In fact, PR’s future with individuality is a pressing matter for society. Biological media for contacting audiences and most of all individuals are coming. Some early examples are described starting in Chapter 4 but newer machines will take their place before this book goes to print. Let us collectively call them ‘biomedia’.

Biomedia alone means PR must know much, much more about individual human biology, but proceed with care if possible. It has been said about Marketing:

Neuroscience offers new ways to measure heterogeneity in consumer behavior by measuring differences in individual sensitivity across regions or structural differences in the brain.

(Camerer & Yoon, 2015, p. 424)

We mustn’t claim too much for neuroscience, for now at least, and especially not to the exclusion of other disciplines. Borrowing from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, neuroscience is not Life, the Universe and Everything. It might occasionally be looking in the wrong places. There are ‘serious challenges posed in trying to examine the biological processes underlying or associated with social psychological phenomena’ (Harmon-Jones & Devine, 2003, p. 589). Subjective elements in PR and possibly human biology should alert us to C. G. Jung’s caution that in scientific inquiry: ‘Every answer of nature is therefore more or less influenced by the kind of question asked, and the result is always a hybrid product’ which ‘misses out on all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically’ (Jung & Hull, 2011, Chapter 1).

Not that PR can ignore Science. It is systemizing old knowledge PR uses instinctively, and classifying new findings in highly suggestive ways. Science helps us glimpse what PR is doing to individuality, including its biology. Some research supports the idea that humans communicate competitively to achieve neurological, evolutionary advantages. Communication itself evolves with the advantages that are achieved, creating a higher form communication like PR: higher because it strategically manages public communication between humans in organizations and other groups, applying complex technology as extensions of our principal organs of communication. The new technology of biomedia and the messages it carries could soon participate in reconfiguring the human body. Cognitive science is investigated as well in later chapters. It is a neglected theoretical and practical link between PR and neuroscience.

Advances in the disciplines just mentioned, and others, have enormous strategic, creative and ethical consequences for PR. Will individuals still need to belong in groups, groups that PR finds useful to contact and invent? Is there a point to reaching them if group-directed media is obsolete or ineffective? Are we on the verge of more open, transparent and incredibly creative kinds of PR? A new age for media, messages and manipulators?

The British psychologist and cyberneticist F. H. George (1921–97) deserves to be better known for his thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and communication, and through them to PR. In Philosophical Foundations of Cybernetics he observed:

We can achieve a kind of certainty only about our own feelings and impressions and these are, to the extent that they are certain, private and uncommunicable, or at least difficult to communicate. The observer is certainly imprisoned to some extent in (certainly limited by) his own private world and can only derive so much from his contact with reality.

(George, 1979, p. 81)

In spite of this, the observer is also the target audience for organizations, and frequently desires to admit an organization’s interpretation of ‘reality’ into this private world of feelings and impressions. Why is this so? PR is a key to that desire and it is about to take up technology of unprecedented power.

It is time for PR to understand individuality in more detail. There is much to learn at the place where neuroscience, communication, AI and the individual connect, and ‘society’ is set aside. If a more individual-centred era of PR is coming, science may offer society at least some insights into what PR does with, for and to the individual. We must ask about the ways that human biology, which includes the nervous system, explain our invention of PR as well as its many works. The final answer might well be that our nervous system sheds little light on PR. At the moment there are good reasons for thinking otherwise. At this moment the search for questions and answers must begin.

Future PR may be able to merge the objectives of an organization with the nervous system and psychology at a deep level, deeply diffusing into the ways people feel and reason. Would PR of that sort drop communication and take up pharmacology? This book traces the steady conversion of the human individual into a PR device: into media, message and audience, and perhaps soon, a PR ‘patient’. Finally (for the moment), individuality seems set to leave humans behind altogether, and PR will change once again.

These are subjects all must think about. To build on a recent book in the Routledge series (Brown, 2014) The Public Relations of Everything includes the PR of us. The persuasive part PR plays is not unlike that played by History, which was described 200 years ago by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel as the act of ‘transferring what were previously mere extraneous happenings into the realm of intellectual representation’ (Hegel & Nisbet, 2010, First draft). To get organizations to objectives, PR does with the past, present and future what historians do with the past. PR is everywhere in time and space, unfixed from a single principle, but it is a system of representing knowledge to justify a human need intellectually and by concrete actions.

What follows then is an attempt to understand PR’s impact on each ‘everyone’ it wants to engage. There is no doubt that PR works with and on constituent elements of individuality, but unlike other human activities it can appear to offer few insights or little content of its own when it is at work. Its activities vary historically but at a given moment are often derivative and repetitive. It makes no proclamations and claims of its own. It is premeditated and planned, and made to achieve somebody else’s purpose, usually without the targeted public knowing much about how it happened. Insubstantiality, joined to managing an organization in the public sphere, give PR its peculiar power. Initially it serves those it represents. Eventually the position is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 PR and individuality
• 2 PR and individuality: ‘Roots and beginnings’
• 3 PR, and the inner and exterior lives of individuals
• 4 PR, power and neuroscience
• 5 PR’s future: science and the mind
• 6 Choice’s infinite variety
• 7 Expanding individuality: from human to machine
• 8 Machine individuality and machine to machine PR
• 9 PR and the fate of individuality
• Index