Postmodern Public Relations

Postmodern, an adjective derived from postmodernity, describes attempts to identify the period that comes after modernity as being distinct and distinctive. Postmodernists oppose modernist attempts to see contemporary reality as objectively or scientifically identifiable. They distrust explanations that claim to be valid for all cultures, genders, and groups. Their attempts to identify a change in reality and to win assent for the naming of a new period is not just a matter of academic concern. At stake is the public understanding of contemporary reality, which, in turn, sets parameters on what is considered possible in the present. Because of this impact on issues of power, disputes about how to characterize an age will not be solved by scholarly decision alone, nor resolved by easy consensus.

Framed in this way, postmodern public relations can be broadly defined through the following four major characteristics: (1) it sees the world as having changed sufficiently since modernity to merit the coining of a term for this new stage; (2) it seeks to go beyond Western modernizing based on autonomous human subjects as the only way, or even the best way forward for this new social stage; (3) it presents postmodern thinkers as key to identifying and engaging with the new stage that is increasingly global in its reach; and (4) it acts on that thinking by developing individual contributions imported from other fields—particularly those contributions that address power issues directly, that are sensitive to the many Others of Western modernity. All four themes have political implications and, although individual writers import different external thinkers and emphasize differences between modern and postmodern public relations, elements of all four surface in postmodern public relations writing.

Some scholars drew from French theorist, Jean Baudrillard's ideas about the nature of contemporary reality in general, and of his concept of the simulacra in particular. They saw these as identifying a new stage of society through how media have become both ubiquitous and so powerful that the signs of the media have become virtual realities of their own. Taking that difference as key, these scholars analyzed such examples as Hill & Knowlton's Citizens for a Free Kuwait campaign in the 1990s. In the U.S. Congress, they foregrounded Hill & Knowlton's use of eyewitness testimony, alleging that Saddam Hussein's forces committed atrocities by taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die on a concrete floor. Although the testimony was later shown to be fabricated, it circulated widely in the media and illustrated how false, yet seemingly real, representations could not only pass for real, but also have material effects with life and death consequences. The emphasis on media power is not original, but postmodernists argue that the sheer critical mass of mediation makes it a characteristic of the present age demanding specific attention as a distinguishing characteristic. Designed to bring the United States and other nations into the first Gulf War (1991), the Hill & Knowlton campaign, in retrospect, resembles a practice run for the weapons of mass destruction rationale that contributed to the later 2003 war in [Page 667]Iraq, which attracted the sobriquet of weapons of mass deception. Both campaigns brought leading contemporary practitioners into disrepute and raised public concern about the ethics of modern public relations.

...