ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the connections across protest PR, activist PR, and dissent PR, focusing on the unprecedented potential of an expanding network terrain where new communication tools are being used and created by activist groups and public relations practitioners worldwide. We ask how and whether those typologies of activist, dissent, and protest PR are both the same and different, what types of activities they are describing, and whether they are at all useful terminology. We also ask who engages in these types of PR practices and who benefits? Is it various publics, corporations, governmental and nongovernmental bodies, or perhaps all of them? We are also interested in examining what makes a successful dissent, activist, or protest PR campaign and what makes that PR campaign turn into a social movement. In the past 20 years or so, several scholars have engaged in the examination of what is most usually termed in US PR scholarship as activist PR. We don’t think it is coincidental that the emergence of this scholarly interest coincides with the emergence of the Internet and networked communication. Digital media have enabled the production of communication tools that are being used by numerous social actors to accelerate and to expand their grassroots power. In many ways, this chapter will draw connections between journalism as activism and PR as activism because it’s been increasingly difficult to discern which is which in the new media environment. In that respect, we will also attempt to discern which communication tools are being used by each and what is the economy behind this use.