‘Next Generation’ PR: The rise of ‘digital communications’ in a post-neoliberal society

The notion of ‘communication’ has been normatively established as a concept that contributes and nourishes individual agency in democracies, by providing a discursive space for political participation and enabling the percolation and circulation of ideas. Despite competing paradigmatic inflections, ‘communication’ as an idea has been seamlessly implanted into the vernacular, academic disciplinary fields, and industry and professional practice. This paper provides a critique of the concept of ‘communication’ in contemporary settings, arguing that new generation public relations (PR) companies are masking their political function by their prominent use of data, and establishing legitimacy through a ‘non-ideological’ representation. Drawing on theories of public language, power and politics by Jürgen Habermas (1994), the paper analyses these media industries in post-neoliberal settings (Davies and Gane 2021). Unlike PR companies that were established in the twentieth century, it argues that hybridised digital communication consortiums like Meltwater, Cision and Onclusive, which publicise software, data and algorithmic information as key tools in the delivery of their services, are largely unseen as ideological ‘PR’, and thus serve to entrench a reified reading of their activities as natural and politically neutral. The growing aura of generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) highlights the need to examine its interrelationship with politics, and the way this nexus may serve to limit participation in the public sphere or debase this space, rather than give creative expression to, the social imaginary in a post-neoliberal society.