Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets.

But such views ignore some major issues.

One is that in an open digitally-connected world, there’s more need than ever to conspire – organise, ghettoise, corral – to keep things confidential and hidden behind closed walls.

Indeed, we will see the kind of problem which Freedom of Information rules can produce: a clever, covert, closed decision making in which everything which really matters is centripetally driven to a cabal. (Remember the government of Tony Blair?)

Arguably, the more open things become and the more control bosses relinquish to networks, the more restrictions they will have to impose on those who operate in them. This might, paradoxically, lead to even tighter control on commercially sensitive information than exists today. It might lead corporates to adopt a civil service mantra of only releasing information on a need to know basis.

Another issue that the utopian PR camp ignores is competition. Companies forging various so-called value networks are as likely as not to form lots of them. They are as likely as not to value some more than others and to find themselves involved in contradictory and conflicting chains.

This will lead to lots of tension and uncertainty within corporates and institutions, such as government service providers, as they are forced to choose between their various product ranges, service offerings and partnership relationships, according to either their broader interests or their ability to sustain them. The resolution of such problems, or issues, will remain driven from the centre, from the top, by corporate or institutional bosses concerned with strategy.

Moreover, because of competition, PRs at either end of a chain, not to mention the middle, might find themselves pulling in different directions and unable to always align their interests, messages and narratives. There is no reason to believe that just because we introduce new tools into the workplace that real-world tensions, politics and commercial interests, will evaporate. We should, I warn, avoid the technological determinism trap.

My point is that we should not think that corporations are about to relinquish control to horizontal or flat digital networks. We should not kid ourselves that top-down management and communication are about to die out. Neither should we imagine, as the PR utopians do, that existing internal silos, lines of responsibility and accountability, will be or should be altered very much by commercial Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Here’s what Norman Lewis, Managing Partner at Open Knowledge UK, had to say on this when he commented on my piece There’s no social media revolution:

… it’s definitely the case that social media like any other technology does not alter the realities of the business world. (I very much like your points about the chaos that would ensue in a company if everyone could relate to sales, customers etc). This is based upon the naive hippie prejudice that enterprises can become democracies run in the interests of employees empowered to act like free agents.

Another of the problems that’s being overlooked by utopian PRs is how social media usage in the personal sphere is maturing. They seem to have missed the point that the major stumbling block for social media of all kinds is privacy, trust and control over personal data. It would seem that social media users are emerging from the immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions.

In the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks have been fairly clear from the very beginning.

There is no doubt that knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal. There is also no doubting that patents, IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. It is also obvious, or should be, that for legitimate reasons such as their survival, corporates are going to be reluctant to dilute and devalue their brand value and identity in an undifferentiated network. So the open Web 2.0 information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

Yet there’s even more reason for PRs not to get over-excited about Web 2.0′s ability to transform the workplace as utopian PRs do when they talk about paradigm shifts. Some believe that Michael Porter’s value chain model has already been replaced – or almost so – “by fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics.” But the truth is that Web 2.0′s commercial applicability is in its infancy and has yet to make a great impact.

The point the utopians miss is how much experimentation will be required to ascertain where and how to make Web 2.0 and social media applications work best in the corporate and public sector domain given the virtual impossibility of measuring their benefits accurately.

Don’t get me wrong, however. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications introduced by business and institutions to deliver products and services. I don’t doubt for a moment that they can boost productivity and add great value.

I also accept fully that Web 2.0 and 3.0 provide a new sense of power and control to consumers and poses new challenges to corporates. So of course corporates need to manage this threat and turn it into an opportunity. But that aspect of the story was not what this post was about.

Note: This first appeared here in May 2010.

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1. PR should help leaders lead, not listen

Trivially, it’s worth mentioning that the ex cathedra utterances of Charles Wheeler were in their way as crushingly orthodox as those of James Cameron, that even more famous and worshipped lefty. Too many of us were steamrollered by their brand of liberalism. Let’s have no golden-ageism here please.

I am not inclined to take lessons on media seriousness from Alastair Campbell, whose own persona I do hugely enjoy, in a sleb way. He was part of the process of reducing politics to gossip. And anyway, I think we have a more serious, more substantial, more substantiated, media now than ever we did. To take one example, The Times has more slebbiness than it used, but no more than is necessary to draw in a female audience to its rather serious material.

I imagine The Times’s quotient of gossip is no worse or larger than in any organ of 18th Century journalism.

More importantly, I am a too-lately admirer of Joseph Addison. I have my late father’s battered copy of the essays by my bedside now. I can say that Addison’s, “The Royal Exchange” (if that is the source of Dr Calcutt’s Addisonian adumbrations) does not really say or imply that trade improves morals, though any self-respecting supporter of capitalism believes it does. Rather, it seems more in the manner of the economist (as opposed to the moralist) Adam Smith in saying that trade produces a miracle of specialist co-operation across trades, climates and nations. Yes, Addison does say that this is a peaceable and amiable process, and yes, he has the idea of a “citizen of the world”, but the improvement he sees in all this is material more than moral. I may be wrong, but I think you need to get to later thinking (Hayek, David Landes, and now Matt Ridley) to get the full-on idea that trade generates the class of co-operation which is the conduit of intellectual and moral exchange.

I dimly recall being taught that “commonality” is a Marxist idea, along with its better-known stablemate, alienation. Anyway and whatever, I don’t buy this bit of Dr Calcutt’s case either.

Indeed, we do need an explanation of why the media is more excited by ordinary (and only notionally “illicit”) sex than by murder these days. I don’t think we’ll find it in Marxist theory. See below for a stab at an explanation.

On the appetite for news in general, I’d recommend going back to Addison. His “The Newspaper” is a brilliant account of the way the medium is the message: create the means of disseminating new gossip, and people will become addicted to it. But even hard, serious news has always been information which someone is prepared to pay for. And nowadays, frankly, the supply has outrun the demand. Or, more precisely, the organs of dissemination are multiplying like crazy, and they all have the same sources. What’s worse, almost all news-makers can publish their own information: the organs of the media are becoming more and more obviously derivative. No wonder the media complains the business model for serious journalism is broken. No wonder they seek to stay afloat by being better at showbusiness than their many rivals.

And here I think Dr Calcutt is on the right track (Marxist or not).  I think we like celebrity stuff because we want to prey on the privacy of famous people. I mean that just as we once liked to fantasise that we were hacking at the bodies of the Ripper’s victims, we now want to hack at the souls of poor Brittney or Giggs. I like this sort of account because it is, I think, more spiritual and sound than any cod-Marxist account is likely to be. We think celebrities have made a Faustian pact with us, and when they falter in any way, we want to inflict pain on them as best we can. It isn’t pretty, but it’s human alright. It’s a bloodsport for readers.

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Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair's ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

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This playground spat was sparked by some leaked emails to the blogosphere. It seems Facebook wanted to traduce Google’s new Social Circle offering for violating users’ privacy rights without being identified as the shit-stirrer. The cause of the media “outrage” was an upfront admission from BM in an email trail that:

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet.”

One supposes the reason for non-disclosure was that Facebook’s reputation on privacy matters is arguably worse than Google’s. BM added, however, that the full facts of the case they were advocating were already in the public domain. In other words, they were inviting somebody to follow up some pointers.

So, never mind that BM has apologized for their role in this; I’ll criticize that in a moment. I’m going to argue that their two PRs behaved pretty well (see here for leading PR Steve Earl’s similar opinion).

In this instance, BM were dealing with somebody who knew the agency were being paid by a third party for PR work. The PR agency also believed that their potential advocate supported the views they sought to spread. They outlined some lines of argument which were already in the public domain and not unreasonable. The blogger they approached was advised to check BM’s facts for accuracy and for the degree to which he agreed with them. What does it matter who was paying BM? Would it have mattered if it was the Devil? I think not.

Sure, BM broke their own ethical code of practice. They did not walk the moral talk they spout. But the worst thing about this whole episode was playing the blame game. Questioning a client’s integrity is not a good image for our trade. The denial from Facebook also did the firm no favours. Facebook is now, anyway, once more the main target of the media’s angst about the “betrayal” of user privacy rights.

The best response from both parties to the exposure of their relationship would have been simply to admit to it. Silence might have also sufficed. Unfortunately, my beloved “so what?” would have been problematic given how BM was flouting its own code of conduct.

But let’s not let the media off the hook. Their outrage is bluster. The media rarely tells their readers which story was sparked or parked by a PR working on behalf of a particular client. Readers are mostly left in the dark about the who, the what and how of the birth of a story. If it were not so, the names of PR agencies, political insiders and their staff would be all over nearly every story published.

Quite rightly, the best media – just like the best PRs – look to the accuracy, veracity and fairness of what they say, write and advocate to establish their credibility.

The fact is a writer might have all sorts of interests and prejudices – including commercial – when he states this or that opinion. He might have shares, or old grudges, or – yes – a payment directly from a party to write a particular piece. Does it matter? The answer has to be, up to a point and depending on the circumstances. For instance, a paid employee writing about their firm cannot pretend to be an independent bystander. An analyst or financial journalist recommending a share as a buy, and who has a personal financial motive for doing so, must declare it openly etc..

Nevertheless, as a reader, I am most interested in a writer’s opinion. If I find it interesting (well-argued, peculiar, entertaining, whatever), then I’m likely to be influenced by it. If I see a writer’s byline, I will be drawn to it if he was interesting in the past. Their new bit of writing will either continue to amuse, or fail to, on its merits. I can usually judge those myself. But sometimes I depend on the authority of the writer’s editors for my sense of the writer’s merits. That’s where the reputation of the likes of The Economist or WSJ etc. matters most.

So let’s keep this real. BM did not really sin. Our industry should come clean about how it and the media really functions and about on what premises trust and integrity really rest.

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The media are a jumpy herd. The Guardian newspaper profited from Julian Assange’s release of classified American documents that exposed military intelligence and diplomatic cables. It published them on WikiLeak’s selective, prejudiced and partisan terms. But now the same newspaper has published leaked details of the sexual assault charges that Assange faces in Sweden. I hope he’s innocent, of course. Then we can go back to disliking him for his intolerable smugness.

In the tradition of Xmas seasonal humbug Assange accuses the Swedish authorities of “deliberately and illegally, selectively taking bits of its material and giving them to newspapers”. He also told The Times newspaper that he has become critical of The Guardian’s reporters as journalists and as human beings. It seems that the hand that he fed has got up some nerve and swiped him, and it hurts. The rest of us have the small thrill of watching a leaker leaked-against, and his hating it more than those he leaked against did. “A gentleman” doesn’t tittle-tattle, Assange said, with a straight face. What a po-faced little git of a hero he is, to be sure.

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph has secretly recorded the views of the UK’s Business Secretary Vince Cable on Rupert Murdoch’s quest to acquire the majority equity in BSkyB. Scorning his ministerial obligation to remain neutral in the decision-making process, Mr Cable told undercover reporters that he was intent on blocking the deal on political grounds:

“You may wonder what is happening with the Murdoch press. I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win.”

Someone at The Daily Telegraph seems to have been worried that because of his or her newspaper’s opposition to Murdoch’s ambitions it might not have shared this sting material with us and so leaked it to Robert Peston, of the BBC, which probably doesn’t like the deal either.

It may good or bad news that it is no longer Cable (at Industry) but Hunt (at Culture, Media and Sport) who’s going to take the decision on Murdoch’s empire-building. It depends which way the decision goes; which way you want it to go; and which way you think it might have gone. Good luck in unpicking that little lot.

Before we get lost in the Murdoch stuff, we should gawp at Vince Cable accusing the government of leading a “kind of Maoist revolution”. It won’t be long, I fear, before Mr Cable denounces the Tories as revisionists in need of re-education.

Mr Cable certainly showed signs of having read the “Little Red Book” when he acknowledged Chairman Mao’s insight that real power comes from the barrel of a gun:

“They know I have nuclear weapons, but I don’t have any conventional weapons. If they push me too far then I can walk out and bring the government down and they know that.”

They will also have spotted (and probably Mr Cable has as well) that the point about the nuclear option is that it can also be a form of martyrdom, which is all too fashionable these days, and not the least bit attractive.

Mr Cable has emerged as a man close to events as well as being flaky, vain, and changeable, as well as clever. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his customary dry deftness, described his lefty Lib-Dem colleague as a “powerful ally”, which was deliciously ambiguous. Indeed, one might say the Tories have had a good week: Cable has been allowed to survive and – now being thought a twit by all sides – has been weakened as an enemy and defined as an unreliable collaborator. The left will go on thinking him noble, and a BBC journalist opined:

“…once the kafuffle has died down, he [Cable] may well conclude that the whole episode has played to his advantage.

For the talk of “fighting a war” within the Coalition surely shows the seriousness with which Mr Cable is prepared to go toe-to-toe to stand up for Lib Dem views.

“…All of which can only be music to the ears of apprehensive Lib Dem activists concerned they’ve been rolled over by David Cameron.”

But surely it is also likely that he has started to enfeeble the wider impact of his resignation or sacking, whichever comes first (assuming he doesn’t totter on until the Government falls or faces re-election)? After all, one wonders what odds a bookmaker would give any Lib Dem candidate’s chances of survival at the next general election.

The wider electorate will think Cameron-Osborne were wise to keep the old fellow more or less onboard and the Tories will have gained sympathy for having to deal with such wobbly allies.

What I’m enjoying most from these two parallel headline-making farces is that they show that the mainstream media – dead tree press or otherwise – are far from moribund. There’s still a fourth estate to be reckoned with. It is not easily governed or corrupted by either governments or pompous scandal-merchants such as Assange and there’s always a ready supply of puffed-up chatterers like Cable for it to expose. Sure, the media are not trustworthy or particularly consistent or predictable. They make reputations only to trash them.

The good news is that even the likes Assange and the once-thought-saintly Vince Cable get outed in the end, however much they delude themselves that they are kingmakers beyond public interrogation. So, yes, the media are conflicted. That’s what makes them invaluable and dangerous. But it is precisely because influencing the media over the long-haul is such a tough job that PRs are in such demand.

Talking of future demands, to all the readers of this online review of 21st-century PR issues, I offer my seasonal best wishes. I say farewell to 2010, and I hope that you will welcome 2011 with the same optimism and sense of fun that I hope to keep. Meanwhile, here’s three quotes from comrade Mao to chew on:

“The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.”

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.”

“I voted for you during your last election.”

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So what kind of resolution should we be advising our clients to seek in this brave new world? Well, perhaps we should be telling them to win public confidence.

With the modern mantra people are told to trust only what’s transparent. The opaque will have to make a case for itself. Actually, I think almost all conspicuous transparency is fake. I am sure that in an honest world, we have to live with opacity. We need institutions to be capable of trustworthiness and secrecy and we require a public which accepts that fact.

There’s a difference between trust in individuals and confidence in institutions. Confidence is what brands are all about – it is the emotional bond marketing tries to generate – because it is about convincing people that promises will be fulfilled. As true friends know, true trust requires one to forgo the expectation of reciprocity as the basis of the relationship (call it open-ended). Confidence in firms and institutions, on the other hand, is conditional, negotiated and limited. As Norman Lewis usefully observes:

“Seligman [Adam B. Seligan's book The Problem of Trust] argues convincingly that if a trusting act was based upon calculation of expected outcomes or on the rational expectation of a quantified outcome, this would not be an act of trust at all but an act based on confidence.”

Here Norman Lewis explains:

“Trust not only entails negotiating risk, it implies risk (by definition, if it is a means of negotiating that which is unknown). But the risk is specific. It is based upon the implicit recognition of others’ capacity to act freely and in unexpected ways. Unconditionality and engagement sit at the heart of trust relations.”

Lewis supports Seligan’s argument for minimal state interference in privacy enforcement on the grounds that it would abolish risk and enshrine distrust in legal doctrine. They’re on to something that PRs know about; trust and reputations are about what people say and think about you, what they confer on you. Lewis remarks:

“Trust is therefore a very rare commodity and because it is based on free will, trust cannot be demanded, only offered and accepted. Trust and mistrust thus develop in relationship to free will and the ability to exercise that will, as different responses to aspects of behaviour that can no longer be adequately contained within existing norms and social roles.”

But I’m not sure that I share their distaste for legal sanctions as strongly as they do. Sometimes the law is required to put people and companies in their place. But that’s an issue of degree. I do share their desire to link levels of privacy corporations provide with levels of confidence people put in them. So where there is low trust or confidence there should be low privacy and vice verse.

In short, we should trust our lawyers and doctors with our inner lives. But we should be wary on Facebook of what we reveal and worry about what they will do with the information and why.

The best indication of the levels of consumer confidence that exist in society has to be the choices people make when it comes to spending their own money. Right now, the free services the likes of Google provide, gives them an incentive to betray our privacy. Otherwise they’d have no sustainable means of economic survival; no ad revenue and no innate value to attract investors.

However, that said, the key to success lies with PRs and their work to change social attitudes. This challenge is about managing relationships between firms and institutions and their various stakeholders. That requires that we engage and listen and respond to the real-world’s concerns.

We have to help firms and institutions set realistic and meaningful expectations about the bargain they are striking with different audiences, in return for the level of confidence they demand or expect from others. As Lewis insight-fully observes about life online:

“The tentative conclusion and the fundamental insight this approach offers is that privacy attitudes and behaviours will change according to the level of trust or mistrust people have with regard to the people or institutions they are interacting with. How much they trust the potential beneficiary of their self-disclosure is now [I say going to be] the overriding motivator of behaviour.”

If PRs want to be seen to be advocates for trust, confidence and reputations in society, this is among the biggest debates of all that we should seek to influence.

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PRs are well aware of the “Streisand Effect”, coined by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, as the exposure in public of everything you try hardest to keep private, particularly pictures. Barbra Streisand, of course, tried to put the genie back in the bottle when she took legal action to have photographs of her home removed from the internet.

For celebrities, privacy and reclusiveness used to be a potent means of attracting attention and creating mystique. But, as Andrew Keen pointed out in his muse on Jerome David (J. D.) Salinger’s death, privacy is no longer a guarantor of publicity. We live in new times.

Here’s what Eric Schmidt has been saying recently to the WSJ:

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

“Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”

He goes on:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

And he’s got a point. Upcoming facial recognition software will be able to identify people just from their photographs on the internet. It is unlikely that we will ban or restrict its usage, so we shall just have to learn to live with it.

The WSJ adds that Google also knows where exactly you are located (that’s the wonder of mobile devices). Supposedly, the next generation of smart mobile devices will be able to second-guess what you want. Schmidt claims:

“The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

Schmidt is certainly correct to imply that markets were always in the anticipation business. Goods are mostly produced for people in advance of their purchase and at considerable risk that there will be no demand for them. He says of the future:

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

The logic of Schmidt’s thinking is that he can take risk out of the equation. It is as if he believes that Google can ensure that every player in the marketplace is a winner. He seems to be advocating that we can have serendipitous-seeming planned production (I’ve stretched his logic a bit to highlight the utopianism he espouses).

What Schmidt overlooks, of course, is that his world view only works in “markets” that lack competition, and which favour oligarchical monopolies. I think Schmidt faces antitrust, competitiveness and consumer backlash issues over privacy, which might yet knock his vision for six.

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The hacking of Google email accounts and the stealing of its worldwide log-in authentication code for every Google service, presumably by the Chinese military, threatened the brand’s core being. That’s because Google’s shareholder value depends on a combination of intellectual property and public trust, based on the exploitation of a worldwide web infrastructure it does not own or control. What’s more, Google can only optimise its money-making if its users divvy up more of their privacy in exchange for its world of “Free”.

So the pull-out from China was never about money. It was never about Google’s failure to gain market share in China. Neither was it about defending the right to the free flow of information or the freedom of speech. Google withdrew its co-operation with the Chinese government’s censorship of the internet in retaliation at the hacking of its users’ emails and the theft of the company’s property.

If Google’s users cannot rely on the privacy and security of the firm’s platforms, applications and services, then Google does not have a sustainable business model.

Google’s return to China – like its entry in to the market – comes with the implicit acceptance, however reluctantly conceded, that the government there has the right to restrict access to internet content. This time around, Google simply relocated its servers securely in Hong Kong. It has allowed the Great Firewall of China to censor access to them. It is a pragmatic compromise. As the BBC points out:

“The battle between Google and the Chinese government appears to have ended in a score-draw.”

Of course, Google’s reputation remains a victim of its split personality. On the one hand, the company was built on the premise of an ambiguous “Do No Evil” slogan and on the utopian notion of enabling unhindered free flow of data and information across the web. On the other, Google has always been a profit-driven, share-price sensitive animal, which pushes it to be pragmatic and not to be overly ideological in practice.

The latest development in China highlights how Google is growing up fast. It reveals a company which is learning how to keep hold of its integrity and USPs while remaining sensitive to the real-world forces and issues, many of which it is not in a position to influence. Nevertheless, Google has been scoring some own goals recently. One example was Google Buzz, which failed partly because its clumsy “auto-following contacts” in Gmail upset users. Another was the wifi privacy intrusions by Google’s mapping vehicles.

The PR challenge now for Google is to convince a sceptical world that it can be trusted long term with our personal and social networking details, viewing habits, interests and data. It’s my view that unless Google handles privacy issues well it will be replaced by the next big competitor that comes along. However, the news from China suggests that a grown up Google might survive into old age.

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Before we go on, it is worth building on part 1′s theme: what exactly do the Stockholm Accords expect to achieve? Here’s what the event’s website says about their objective:

“The aim of the Stockholm Accords is to articulate and establish the role of public relations in the “communicativeorganization”[sic] within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.”

In essence, the Accords suppose that we live in a new “networked society in which communicative organizations are vital to organisational success” (forgive the clumsy words, they’re theirs, not mine).

In essence my beef is that this exercise over-complicates everything. Most PR is an effort to help clients both be and appear more attractive. You can usefully enrich that proposition by noting that there are internal and external audiences; that everything about an organisation can be part of its good or bad messages; that building up a good reputation may be useful for when things go wrong (as they will). One may want to stress how non-stop and intrusive and persistent modern observers are. Perversely, the globalised, modern world is more like a village than ever: everybody thinks everything is their business.

As I argued in part 1, the Accords ignore the obvious: society is, and always has been, networks personified. Moreover, all human interaction depends upon communication and relationships, or nothing whatever would have been or will ever be achieved. Of course, the digital bit is sort of new. I say sort of because the internet is now second or third generation. It strikes me that the Accords’ authors are really saying that their thinking boils down to considering technology’s influence on human behaviour. This narrow obsession has sent them and their new definition of PR’s role off in the wrong direction.

There’s no wisdom in a mob, but there’s often treasure buried in crowds. So, of course, I accept there is something in Reed’s Law. (See: “The Law of the Pack”). I accept its proposition that digital networks can scale exponentially by transforming technological platforms into social networks that add value. But in the business world, Reed’s Law is just a statement of potential. It remains a theoretical construct that might prove to be hopeless if taken too far. The commercial world is in recession. It is not currently up for the risky experimentation and investment that would be required to test the weaknesses and strengths of Reed’s Law. This is something I discussed in part 1 No. 2 & No. 14 (without mentioning Reed). In part 1, I also cited SM’s irrelevance in the British General Election and its only fleeting influence on American politics.

My charge is that the authors of the Stockholm Accords lack historical or sociological insight. Most of today’s social developments from the breakdown of traditional politics, to the shift in community alignments, or the fall of religious influence, to the decline in trust in, and authority of, traditional institutions, pre-dates the internet.

In other words, the internet and social media usage were shaped in the wake of already existing currents, including the already declining mass media. That was particularly the case with SM, which is more often used as a retreat from public life rather than as its lifeblood. That’s one thing China’s SM usage has in common with the West’s. There’s mass disengagement and passivity in society, which is the polar opposite of empowerment, which so many public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) like to crow about. That’s not to say SM is irrelevant, or that it does not have influence or empower people, sometimes, in this or that circumstance or usage.

It is the failure of the Stockholm Accords to look at these real world tensions during the boom and now during the recession, and the Accords’ myopic worship of all things digital, which I criticise. But let me make it plain. This blog celebrates technology and advocates innovation. It is obsessed with understanding them and with exploiting their potential. But it does not endorse technological determinism, which I believe the Accords’ authors do.

So, that’s the preamble. Let’s now look at the Stockholm Accords one by one.

Stockholm Accords on governance:

“The increasingly adopted stakeholder governance model empowers board members and organisational leaders as ultimate custodians of stakeholder relationship strategies and policies, as well as of monitoring their implementation.

“In today’s value networks, a communicative organization requires timely knowledge of economic, social, political, legal and environmental developments, as well as opportunities and risks affecting the organisation, its direction, its actions and its communication.

“Public relations professionals:
• co-create organizational values, principles, strategies, policies and processes;
• constantly report on the dynamics of stakeholder involvement;
• inform, shape the organisation’s overall communication abilities;
•  measure, evaluate and account for results;
• deliver timely analysis and recommendations to ensure an effective governance of stakeholder relationships, enhancing transparency, trust and sustaining the organisation’s ‘licence to operate.’”

My reply

I dealt with the above extensively in part 1. But let me now add a few more brief remarks;

• The stakeholder governance model or doctrine is seriously flawed. An organisation can’t look to outsiders as the first source of its probity and efficiency.
• Firms, governments and institutions primarily pursue self-interest. This will include a measure of enlightened and widened self-interest.
• PR is indeed uniquely useful in our complicated, media-orientated times. But we should beware over-stating the newness of our skills and roles.

Stockholm Accords on management:

“Effective and timely decision-making related to operations and resource management are essential for organizations seeking to enhance their license to operate. These management choices must be sensitive to the concerns of internal and external stakeholders, seeking equilibrium between societal and organizational goals.
A communicative organization listens to its stakeholders, uses this input to improve the quality of its decisions, and communicates through its behavior.

“Public relations professionals:
° help understand and interpret broader societal, political and economic interests and aspirations;
° participate to the solution of organizational issues and lead those that are particularly focused on stakeholder relationships;
° help to legitimize the organization; by increasing the communicative value of products, processes, services; and building financial, legal, relational and operational capital.”

My reply

Yes, PRs are the professional diplomats of the modern organisation’s internal and external relationships. But we won’t do the job better by having theories and ambitions which are too fancy for the valuable but recognisable work they have to do. Way too much of the Stockholm Accords’ approach brings in more posy sociology, management-speak, media studies, post modern guff. This is the way to lose the interest of clients and audiences alike.

Stockholm Accords on sustainability:

“An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions.

“In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity for the communicative organization to enhance it’s license to operate and demonstrate success across the triple bottom  line.- economic, social and environmental.

“Public relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
• interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate);
• creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener);
• ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter);
• going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, by engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).”

My reply

Sustainability has to do with robustness and flexibility, which can be darn hard things to reconcile. We need to be modest: sustainability is about the future, a thing we know very little about. We should not pretend to know the recipe for survival (or to assume, for instance, that environmentalists are any cleverer at it than supposedly un-green capitalists).

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of internal communication:

“Internal communication enhances recruitment, retention, development of employee loyalty and commitment to organizational goals by ever more diverse and segmented publics.

“In the network society a communicative organization goes far beyond today’s traditional definition of full-time employees, understanding that internal stakeholders now include full-timers with tenure generally shortening, part-timers, seasonal employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, agents, distributors, volunteers and more.

“Public relations professionals constantly address:
° how organizational leaders communicate;
° how knowledge is shared;
° how decisions are made;
° how processes and structures are created;
° and expand communication to include many boundary publics that are also often considered as highly trusted sources of information about the organization and essential players contributing to the organization’s success.”

My reply

Yes, many of an organisation’s relationships are now both important and fleeting or arm’s length. Actually, that will often require an unattractive wariness. The need for secrecy, privacy and caution is greater than ever and has to be communicated as well as possible.

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of external communication:

“The network society mandates that a communicative organization expand its scope and skills to focus on customers*, investors*, communities*, governments*, active citizenship groups*,  industry groups*, mainstream, digital and social media*, and other situational stakeholders*.

“Public relations professionals:
° promote, support and contribute to modify products, services or processes;
° bring the voice of the organization into regulatory and community decisions;
° adopt social networking and research skills and tools to listen to stakeholder demands and report to management so that they may be appropriately interpreted and, where relevant and effective, integrated into the decision making process;
° strengthen brand loyalty* and equity*, thus reinforcing the organization’s license to operate;
° work with all organizational functions, through every step of production and delivery, to craft and implement effective communication programs*.
° actively participate in dialogue*, evaluate and measure results*, and accordingly adjust their practices.”

My reply

This looks like PR’s pitch to stick its nose in everywhere. Nice try, and to some extent justified.

Stockholm Accords on co-ordination of internal and external communication:

“In value networks, each communicative issue* is multi faceted*, multi stakeholder* and inter relational within and between different networks* and positioned in diverse legal frameworks.

“The communicative organization must balance global transparency, finite resources and time sensitive demands dealing with dynamic changes in inside/outside territorial borders and new conflicts of interests emerging from multiple stakeholder participation*.
Dialogue with internal, boundary and external stakeholders must be coordinated with the organization’s mission*, vision*, values*, implementation*, promises*, as well as actions* and behaviors*.

“Public Relations professionals:
° research, develop, monitor and adjust organizational behavior and communication behaviors providing leadership for issues based on stakeholder and societal relationships;
° develop a knowledge base that includes social and psychological sciences, best practices and formative research to create, evaluate, measure and implement programs for continuous improvement.”

My reply

This looks like a pitch for PRs to be rulers of the universe: all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. I don’t mind this accord but it is not so much edifying and energising as yawn-making. How about: “Almost every aspect of your work will convey a message about your organisation, so expect a good PR to take an interest in everything you do.”

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