Came across a fantastic quote earlier this week about how contempiorary society is being changed by technology and post-modernism (no! wait… keep reading!).
US academic, Sherry Turkle:
“identifies a close ‘fit’ between network technology and ppostmodernist visions of contemporary life. She writes of a ‘nascent culture of simulation’ in which the self is constructed and the rules of social interaction are built, not received’. In consequence we ‘are inventing ourselves as we go along’.”
How good is that? Amazingly it was written *way back* in 1995 in Turkle’s book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, I came across it in James Watson’s Media Communication: an introduction to theory and process.
It definitely chimes with my own thoughts about online identity posted the other month. And I also believe it has very important lessons for anyone in PR to learn.
Essentially, how can you attempt to communicate with the public if you don’t understand them? Well, traditionally, it was easy. You picked the relevant publication: you knew what the journalist liked and trusted them to know what their audience (broadly your target public) liked.
But in the online networkled world we are dealing with individuals – real people – and the broad brush-strokes of traditional PR and media relations become obsolete.
That why people like Tom Coates get pissed off – by being treated as another part of the traditional PR process.
Again, for me proces is part of the problem. Real social interaction doesn’t have a fixed process. PR implants a process on building relationships so we can manage it. But look at what social interaction is like in a post-modern (contemporary)society. According to Turkle: “the rules of social interaction are built, not received”.
So doing PR in the online space means working at building relationships as we go along, not using our pre-determined processes for planning PR activity that works for mass, broadly undefined audiences but fails when building real relationships with real people. Which would you prefer your client or organisation to have in the long-run?
Technorati tags: public relations, PR, post-modernism, network technology
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