School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Power and counter-power in a global information age: public relations and new media technologies in China
    SIMA, YANGZI ( 2010)
    Through interdisciplinary engagement with political-economic analyses of new media, the public sphere, public relations and environmental communication, this thesis examines the social implications of the Internet for the practice of public relations (PR) in China in both corporate and activist settings. The notion of power is introduced to posit the research within the broader theoretical framework of power-making in the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) by linking the discussion to critical perspectives on cyberpower (Hindman, 2009; Jordan, 1999), technocapitalism (Mosco, 2009; Schiller, 1999, 2007) and technostruggle (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Juris, 2004; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Kellner, 2004). Triangulating traditional and virtual ethnographic methods, fieldwork was conducted at the PR and Communications Department of General Electric Company (GE) China and a Chinese grassroots environmental NGO (ENGO) called the Global Village of Beijing (GVB). Development in Internet technologies, especially the rise of the so-called Web 2.0 applications, has renewed optimism within the PR industry and scholarship about the enhancement of interactivity, which is best embodied by the concept of two-way symmetrical dialogue proposed by James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt (1984). The Internet has also been hailed as a ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) that is capable of bridging the resource gap for activist organisations. Such generalisations lean towards technological-determinism and do not recognise the complex and organic relationship between technology use and its social context. The study offers ‘thick’ descriptions that both document the contextualised incorporation of Internet technologies into daily PR work and connect it with critical theory. It is found that Internet-based technologies are only capable of re-configuring the power balance to a limited degree. The corporate example shows that the interactive and dialogic potential of the Net has not been fully exploited, and most network strategies remain online extensions of one-way and two-way asymmetric PR models. The ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) thesis also proves weak given the resource shortage suffered by activists in constructing their online presence, which is exacerbated by the increasing commodification of information and attention in cyberspace that further disadvantages the resource-short. Nevertheless, it is also found that Internet technologies can assist activists in their self-representation, network building, information brokering, agenda setting, public mobilisation and construction of discourse communities. This demonstrates the counter information flow online in which civil society actors adopt the same network strategies to promote counter ideologies. To a certain extent, the activists’ online activities have contributed to the formation of an incipient and (electronically) mediated counter public sphere in China – a ‘green’ public sphere (Torgerson, 1999; Yang and Calhoun, 2007) that fosters a counter discourse, or ‘greenspeak’ (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäuser, 1999), to counterbalance fast-tracked neoliberal globalisation. The issues that hamper this process are also highlighted, including lingering resource shortage, the fragmentation of online discourse communities, and the marginalisation and ‘caging’ of environmental discourses. The study concludes that neither public relations nor the Internet can be reduced to simple generalisations. Both are dialectical concepts that reflect power contestations. The Internet is not a panacea that can transform public relations overnight and make it two-way symmetrical. It remains to be seen if interaction and dialogue will further enter the (corporate) PR psyche, although little optimism exists given the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between system organisations and discourse ethics. It would be equally mistaken to label online public relations as simply extending the discursive and symbolic power of the powerful, in light of the innovative online public relations strategies adopted by activists and NGOs to set agendas and communicate with their publics.