Mats Heide on Berger...

My most recent lecture was a chapter from Mats Heide’s book, a chapter entitled “On Berger – A Social Constructionist Perspective on Public Relations and Crisis Communication”, the main topic of which is crisis communication analyzed from a social constructionist point of view, i.e. from a point of view of Peter Berger.

First of all, it is important to point out that according to Heide, crisis is commonly perceived as a result of some external threats in the surrounding environment, hence it is normally understood as objective and a real thing, which hits and affects organizations at full strength, requiring immediate action (Heide 2009).

It is also important to note that Berger regards sociology as having as its focus an understanding of contemporary society as a large complex of human relationships and that the goal of sociology is to uncover the different levels of meaning hidden from the consciousness of everyday life – to “see through” and “look behind” and to receive a better understanding of what goes on in a particular context in terms of social interaction (Heide 2009). Moreover, Berger states that people’s worldviews are already given in a society’s language (Heide 2009), in other words, meaning that society’s language contains people’s worldviews and opinions. In that sense, the attempt of analyzing crisis management through sociology is quite understandable as it allows to understand people’s demands, wishes and thoughts.

According to Berger, things are not what they seem and that reality has many layers of meaning (Heide 2009), which means that things can be interpreted in a number of different ways and often have a few, sometimes hidden meanings. Hence, in order to be able to objectively understand reality and to develop sociological consciousness, Berger proposes analyzing it while adhering to his four proposed motifs: debunking motif – which essentially is centered around being inquisitive, tenacious and thinking ‘outside the box’; unrespectability motif – which suggests reality should be understood from all social classes perspective rather than just from the perspective of the superior middle class; relativization motif – suggesting that the world should be understood looking at it from the perspective of different cultures with diverse values; and cosmopolitan motif – which says that “sociologists ought to have an open mind and be interested in other cultures and eager to understand new horizons of human meaning” (Heide 2009). It is worth pointing out that the use of these motifs can be extremely helpful as it appears to be a set of guidelines one should use in order to have as objective view on reality as possible.

Summarizing, Public relations unquestionably plays an important role in crisis management. With it, the reality can be assessed objectively, social construction, society’s wishes, demands and expectations can be assessed more easily, which in effect, makes it a lot easier to manage a crisis situation and ensure appropriate level of communication with our dynamic society.

References:

Heide, M. (2009) On Berger – A Social Constructionist Perspective on Public Relations and Crisis Communication. pp. 43-61.

Public Relations vs Network Society.

The final article I have read was written by Kaja Tampere and is entitled “A walk in the public relations field: Theoretical discussions from a social media and network society perspective”.

Firstly, I don’t want to be a suck-up since Kaja is one of my lecturers at University of Tallinn, but boy was I glad to read her article, honestly. It was written using academic, yet a lot easier vocabulary than vocabulary used in Castells’ articles and in effect was much easier to understand than the previous three articles. I felt like Castells’ observations and discoveries were described by Kaja with significantly more clarity, which was of great help, judging by how his articles were not cleared up in class and after reading them I was left with somewhat of a cocktail of mixed feelings and slight confusion.

More importantly though, Tampere attempts to describe what is the best way for public relations to successfully cope with the new network society impacted by globalization, which is a new environment for public relations. Castells said, presented in Tampere’s article (2011), that “in a new, network society organizations break down their bureaucracies that are an obstacle to efficiency and create relationships with their stakeholders that are based on positive experience, which is deeply connected with public relations goals to build up dialogue and trust”. This evidently connects with the fact that many practitioners in public relations field note that public relations' essential contribution is to build up trust, dialog, the public information system, communication networks, through which democratic society functions (Tampere 2006). This is indeed true, especially the dialog and trust part – I do not think one would like to use a company which is not perceived by the general public as honest and trustworthy, nor would he find it credible. Therefore the inclination to improve the trustworthiness should be one of the main focuses for companies.

The second important process in need of implementation by contemporary PR practitioners is the aforementioned stakeholder relations, the nature of which

“is based on the fact that an organization treats other organizations and persons in its environment mostly ‘vertically’. This means that the organization and its stakeholders form a network where the parties are equal and relations between the different participants are based on the principles of cooperation and competition, they are dialogical” (Tampere 2011).

This, together with the use of various electronic and technological tools, which, if I understand correct are the same tools responsible for creation of network society in the first place, “in turn increases the quality of relations and makes the processes underway more precise and also more rapid” (Tampere 2011) and should essentially make it easier for the field of public relations to cope with the environment of network society.

References:

Tampere, K. (2011) A walk in the public relations field: Theoretical discussions from a social media and network society perspective. Central European Journal of Communication 1 (2011), pp. 49-61.

Global public sphere. Aye or Nay?

In the third article entitled “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance”, Manuel Castells describes the process of evolution of Public Sphere in the contemporary society.

The public sphere is the space of communication of ideas and projects that emerge from society and are addressed to the decision makers in the institutions of society (Castells 2008). In other words, the public sphere is the place of dialogue between society and the government. It is understandable that with the change of our society the public sphere changes as well. It is said that public sphere exists within the political/institutional space that is not subject to any particular sovereign power but, instead, is shaped by the variable geometry of relationships between states and global nonstate actors (Guidry, Kennedy, and Zald 2000 in Castells 2008). Therefore, since we live in a globalized world, the model of public sphere is changing accordingly into a global public sphere, where many international institutions come to life, which deal with issues on a global scale (e.g. NATO, EU).

Unfortunately, I think there are some limitations as to the concept of global public sphere. As Castells argues, “more often than not, governments do not share the same principles or the same interpretation of common principles" (Castells 2008). This can indeed cause problems and disarray as governments often have to choose between what is best for their own nation or what is best for everyone. The best example would be European Union since it frequently happens that some member countries vote for, and other countries vote against a particular proposal or project, most likely passing judgment as to what is in their nation’s best interest.

In that sense, it looks like there is a line which sets certain limitations to global governance. According to the author, “the more the globalization process proceeds, the more contradictions it generates (e.g. identity crises, economic crises, and security crises), leading to a revival of nationalism and to the primacy of sovereignty” (Castells 2008), which in my humble opinion does not sound too optimistic, judging by the fact that the world is becoming more and more globalized. I begin to doubt if the concept of global public sphere will flourish more and if we will see more examples of global governance in the future. What do you think?

References:

Castells, M. (2008) The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2008 616. pp. 78-93.

The importance of mass self-communication.

This time, Manuel Castells (2007) attempts to describe and analyze the interplay between communication and power relationships in the technological context that characterizes the network society. I have to say the thing that caught my attention the most in this article is how power relations were transformed in network society and especially what vital role did mass self-communication play in it.

The author states that “the communication system of the industrial society was centered around the mass media, characterized by the mass distribution of a one-way message from one to many” (Castells 2007). It is indeed true that it was mass media that used to be in the center of communication system, where one TV station was responsible for carrying various messages to the whole society and was therefore considerably responsible for shaping people’s minds.

However, it seems like things have changed significantly when internet came into existence. Appropriating the new forms of communication, people have built their own system of mass communication, via SMS, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, and the like. (De Rosnay & Failly, 2006; Gillmor, 2004; Drezner & Farrell, 2004; and Cerezo, 2006 in Castells 2007). The aforementioned forms of communication, plus things like various social media, Youtube, file sharing websites etc. all have essentially led to “the rise of a new form of socialized communication: mass self-communication” which “is self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many that communicate with many” (Castells 2007).

Simply put, this new communication form puts a lot of power into individual’s hands, as if inspired by the famous ‘Power to the People’ slogan. The beauty of internet is that everyone can create new internet content – just like me and my fellow students creating numerous blog entries. Respectively, everyone can record a movie and upload it e.g. on Youtube and in effect send a message to many recipients, which before, used to be done mostly by mass media. This changes the power relations in contemporary society and I will dare to say it looks like mass self-communication takes over significant amount of mass media’s power, as it is no longer in the center of contemporary communication system. Now it is not only mass media that can shape and influence people’s minds – it is pretty much everyone. A good example would be how social media are commonly used by people to communicate their ideas by starting different groups, which can occasionally lead even to launching riots or revolutions. This could be observed e.g. through the events of the 2011 London Riots, where the rioters used Facebook and Twitter to set up meeting points and new attack targets.

I always used to think it was mostly mass media who shape and influence our minds, underestimating, or perhaps not even realizing the power that lies within internet and individuals. Don’t get me wrong – I still think mass media plays an important role in the communication process in contemporary society, it would be foolish to think otherwise. I am just saying it’s good to finally grasp the importance of mass self-communication in the network society that we all live in.

References:

Castells, M. (2007) Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society. International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), pp. 238-266.

My thoughts on "The contours of the network society" by Manuel Castells

I have recently read quite an interesting article by Manuel Castells entitled “The contours of the network society”.

Let me start off by saying  that I was positively surprised about the information contained in the article. Mainly, I really appreciated all of the observations the author made about the contemporary society as I never wondered how it actually works and never tried analyzing different aspects of it. I also liked how easy it was to individually assess the validity of his observations since all of us live in contemporary society – I don’t know about other students but personally, I had many moments where I thought “Oh yeah, that’s indeed how it works”. Then again, perhaps that is the nature of reading one’s scientific observations.

At any rate, the article has definitely opened my eyes in terms of educating what is the current structure of our society and noticing how well-chosen was the term “network society”, coined by Castells. He argued that “network is by definition an instrument of cooperation and competition with other networks and cooperation within the network, in which every node needs the other node for the function of the network” (Castells, 2000), which sounds similar to how modern society works.

The article also made me think about the future and where our society is heading. Castells (2000) argues that:

 “The fact that we have new technologies allows possibilities of social and economic organization that did not exist before. In other words, the new information technologies are not the cause of the social transformation, but without these technologies the processes that lead to social transformation could not happen.”

This is definitely a valid point as it is fairly easy to deduce how technology played a vital role in changing our society – computers, internet, various social media such as Facebook or Twitter, VoIP communication software allowing real-time audio and video calls to virtually anywhere around the world – you name it. Perhaps most importantly, all of it allowed faster access to various types of information.

Now, in the light of Castells’s observations I cannot help but wonder: What happens if the technological development goes even further? What if it opens more doors for new processes leading to new social transformations? How different will our society be in 20 years if it has already been impacted to such extent by technologies present for roughly 20 years?

I am afraid there is no way of objectively assessing it at this point (at least none that I can think of) but it will definitely be something for me to ponder on.

References:

Castells, M. (2000) The Contours of the Network Society. The Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy, 02 (02), pp. 151-157. Camford Publishing Ltd