When Data Is the Issue: Re-conceptualizing Public Relations for the Platform Economy

This chapter discusses the ways in which digitalization and datafication challenge public relations (PR), arguing that technological developments create a need to re-conceptualize PR so as to account for data as affordance and actor. In so doing the chapter is conceptual; it discusses existing communicative theories in relation to current changes in the media landscape and its technological underpinnings. Focusing on the areas of crisis communication and issues management, we argue that datafication provides new ways of dealing with issues and, in turn, presents new issues for PR professionals. Thus, the chapter presents a novel conceptualization of PR in which technological affordances and agencies go hand in hand with human efforts in the configuration of communicative assemblages. More specifically, we argue that viewing data solely as an affordance merely provides new tools for solving existing issues. When the independent agency of data is recognized and employed, more effective means of solving such issues appear, but data itself also becomes an issue. The dilemma is best illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the broader discussions about electoral manipulation and other covert uses of data it incurred. In this regard, balancing the dual demands of efficacy and ethics is as pressing a concern for PR as ever. The conceptualization of PR in terms of communicative assemblages, we suggest, may not only explain processes of issues formation better, but also provide a starting point for handling such processes ethically and effectively.