Public Interest Communication

Abstract

Public interest communication (PIC) is an emerging disciplinary field in which social change rather than market-based objectives is the stated purpose of a communication campaign, strategy, or relationship. Prioritizing purpose driven by cultural values, the inverse notion of PIC appears at distance from corporate “PR,” but it draws on and/or adapts its apparatus, grammar, and functionalist “logic” to promote new activist styles of advocacy. Increasingly identified with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), not for profits, and activists competing in the digital media space, PIC campaigns attempt to ply open ground in public opinion forums by invoking imagination, visceral narratives, playfulness, poetry, and artistry in media packaging. Tactics that “call to action” include community building days, skills training and workshops, petition drives, deep canvassing, participatory social media campaigns, and call-in days. The modality of PIC subscribes to ideas about agency and empowerment within social structures to action a “progressive vision” where individuals can “change the world.” The rise of PIC has accelerated since Web 2.0 in 2004, and the establishment of social media like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube provides platforms that enable quantitative metrics to measure influence and success. These social media platforms allow NGOs and activist groups the ability to bypass media gatekeepers to directly contact supporters with email messaging, online petitions, direct campaigns, invitations to follow or subscribe to various platforms, offer conference registrations, donation requests, and merchandising. Building personalized online collaborations with users, PIC campaigns that build support for a cause can be shared and cross promoted through transmedia storytelling, hashtagging, memes, and online contagion. PIC as an interdisciplinary hybrid of public relations, psychology, political science, and journalism and may, in prevailing neoliberal cutures, produce meanings through the lens and the language of the market; thus, in this sense, it needs further critical development.