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.