Ancient Greeks used to say that the fortunate in life are those who are intellectually ignorant; that is, life is sometimes easier when you know less.
But nowadays, in a world that has become more and more complicated and demanding, this adage sounds a bit trivial, at least to me.
In fact, when it comes to technology and its ongoing advances it seems that exactly the opposite exists: the less you know the less ready and 'armed' you are to deal with the challenging and highly competitive field of business communications.
As a public relations postgraduate student, and nearly in my 30’s, I would never have realized before how far I have been left behind in terms of ICT’s knowledge. And if it wasn’t for my first PR &Technology course at the University of Stirling, I would still be in the dark.
Maybe, it’s the Generation Y syndrome, I don’t know. What matters is that this course is an excellent starting point to ‘meet and greet’ with ICT concepts and actually learn something useful and up-to-date that books alone can’t teach.
My journey to technology and public relations is still at its start but at least now I know for sure that the terms blog, podcasting, social media press releases, RSS etc are no longer part of an unknown realm to me.
However, moving a step forward to being less ‘intellectually ignorant’, at least in terms of ICT, I must also admit that now I am more concerned than ever about the development of Public Relation practices for the years to come.
In a world that constantly changes and where news is disseminated throughout within seconds, via the World Wide Web, can Public Relations practices remain as they are? Or should it be altered, reinvented even, to fit ‘new’ circumstances?
How can we still discuss corporate image and branding, crisis communications practices, organizational culture or employees motivations without considering, for instance, the massive expansion of blogs, forums or podcasting? Moreover, should we keep on implementing public relations strategies and campaigns to reach target audiences through the use of traditional communication vehicles when the structure of the communication itself, has changed throughout the years because of the internet?
These questions are not at all new to several practitioners and academics, especially in the UK and the US. And definitely there are no straightforward answers to these questions.
Whilst there is still much room for progress, in terms of both practice and education, the significant impact of information communication technologies to Public Relations cannot be underestimated.
Yet, it would be more comforting and promising for the future of public relations to see more universities adding to their curriculum courses that address these issues so as future pr practitioners can benefit in the years to come. And that comes from the mouth of a postgraduate student…
1 comment:
Very thoughtful Eleni! Learning about 'new' technologies when they are already reasonably embedded in what appears to be these select, techno-savvy communities - particulary social media networks of which you may have limited knowledge and are not a participant - can be very daunting indeed!
PR practitoners certainly need to keep up with developments because, without wanting to sound like something out of George Orwell's 1984, if large sections of the public, no matter what the demographic, are communicating with eachother, people working in major organisational communications need to know about it!
I came accross a article recently which was discussing PR and Technology, and the headline was 'Coming to terms with losing control'. If we're talking about more traditional frameworks, relationships and ways of thinking regarding the whole communicative process, I think there is a lot of truth in that statement.
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