Abstract
This publication, produced for the Routledge New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research series, provides a brief overview of the history of public communication and public relations from ancient times to the 21st century, and then assesses the cultural and information communication technology (ICT) aspects of public relations in the postmodern era. In addition, the author attempts to conceptualize the universal principles of public relations as a tool of analysis and better understanding of this professional field, claiming that there are many cases of misunderstanding and misconceptualizing the very nature of public relations among scholars and professionals.
Robert E. Brown teaches as a professor of communication at Salem State University and as an instructor at Harvard University Extension School. He has authored numerous writing assignments as a former speechwriter for two Fortune 500 companies and has served as a member of editorial boards of Public Relations Review and Public Relations Inquiry journals. He researches applied communication and public relations practices in the corporate environment, conceptualized in relation to current public relations theory. In this volume, the author argues that public relations is no longer limited to the management of communications and relations between organizations, but emerges as “the lived, dramatic experience of human beings in the social world.”
The 10 chapters of the monograph are divided into two parts: the first (Chapters 1-5) covers the history and evolution of certain concepts related to public relations. The second part (Chapters 6-10) covers the modern dynamics of conceptual frameworks in public relations, which emerge as “the voice of a culture that arises from the way it understands the world and its place in it.” The notional springboard for this research book is a set of 20 principles introduced by the author in Chapter 1, which are “intended to suggest ways to understand public relations in what has been called a postsymmetry age.” These principles suggest departing from the mainstream definition of public relations as management of communications and “exclusively a phenomenon of modernity, or technology,” to move toward a much broader concept. This new understanding of public relations is inclusive not only of the experience of public relations professionals, but also individuals who are involved in public relations activities for personal or social purposes. Brown argues that the foundation of this change and the need for reevaluation comes from a crisis that “has moved from the periphery of PR as a special application to the center of PR” due to the digital-social revolution and its behavioral consequences “in the digital-social era of instantaneous, globalized communication.” As a next step, the author defends his arguments by both reviewing his deconstruction of major public relations theories and by looking at the history and evolution of public relations spanning all the way from Aristotle’s rhetoric, early medieval performances, and Reformation Propagandio to the emergence of “web sites, links, tweets, press releases, blogs, Facebook posts, anonymous critiques, voicemails and YouTube videos.”
Brown begins the second part of the book by suggesting a new approach to public relations that recognizes four cultural–historical–expressive voices: “prophetic, academic, aesthetic and artistic.” He also explains how his new vision of public relations reflects and interprets the traditional public relations roles, such as persuasion, political or public affairs actions, and public relations ethics. Here, too, Robert Brown claims that public relations has changed radically due to the emergence of “neopersuasion in the social-digital era,” where “visuality and screen-culture have become the dominant coalition of persuasion.” In the conclusion, the author summaries his points by claiming that according to his new “archetypical model of public relations . . . public relations belongs with the humanities” and by redefining it as an inclusive social science concept. He strongly believes that “PR scholarship has yet to receive an invitation to the broader cultural conversation,” although the 21st century offers cultural and social changes such as a significant convergence linked to the “rapid rise of the World Wide Web.”
The strength of The Public Relations of Everything lies in its reevaluation of mainstream theories of public relations, offering not only broader definitions but also new principles and concepts that re-situate the field as a more inclusive “vast, strange, new and radically changing communication space.” However, in doing so he offers a quite radical criticism of the writings of his colleagues and of major public relations theories, drastically blurring the boundaries between public relations, social communication, and the media world, ultimately almost merging them under the rubric of public relations experience. The numerous citations, references and allegories make this book difficult to read, as it moves through the major theoretical and empirical arguments whereby the author “challenges the theory of symmetry, which has been the dominant paradigm of the field for almost half a century.” Nevertheless, it is an interesting research exercise on the changing nature of relations between societies and cultures, and between citizens within individual societies, as new social media significantly changes both the nature of relations between people and the tools of communication in the emerging information society.