Elizabeth's discussion of communication models sent me back to the PR textbook I used in graduate school. Grunig and Hunt identified four PR Communication Models in Managing Public Relations [James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Harcourt, Bace Jovanovich (1984), p. 21].

The two earliest forms of PR communication, according to the authors, were one-way publicity (such as a publicist promoting a movie), followed by the less overtly commercial communication of one-way public information (such as may be practiced by a government public affairs officer).

Grunig and Hunt held that public relations functions at a higher level when it practices two-way communication. They saw corporate PR largely functioning at the level of two-way asymmetric communication, and some regulated utilities achieving the ideal of two-way symmetric communication.

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Public relations was once almost synonymous with media relations. With new tools and new media in the digital, online world, what's happening to media relations ?   more »

In the introduction to his book, Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold wrote: "The 'killer apps' of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs, but social practices." [p.xii, Smart Mobs, 2002] I open our discussion today with this statement, because I believe that "social practices" is what has historically been given short shrift in the world of technology -- and technology-based communications. We professional communicators adopt the latest-greatest tech tools (often rather slowly!) but we don't generally give much deep thought to what these tools mean to those we apply them against, nor do we have any sense of what the consequences (unintended, especially) are of using these tools over time. I will be getting into a discussion about the politics of tools later, but for today, I want to look at social practices within the frame of "cooperation."   more »