Now that you have read through the materials and reflected either on your own careers or on what you want to learn about public relations, let’s discuss what you did and didn’t know about the history of public relations and how that affects how you define it.

The purpose of the discussion is to immediately start exploring what you know about public relations and making connections to both research and application of public relations. The discussion in no way commits you to a research agenda or a topic that you might want to explore throughout your assignments (although you could). Rather, the discussion is meant to spark connections with history, theory, and application, as well as help yourself and us, get to know the different ways in which public relations is applied and the lenses through which it is discovered.

Instructions:

• If you were going to pick out a part of public relations history that interests you, what would that be? Why?

• How does that interest help you redefine your public relations job or confirm what interests you about public relations?

• Were there any concepts or points that made you want to know more about it?

Please post your initial response by 23:59 CST Sunday of Week 1 (3/21), and comment on the posts of two classmates by 23:59 CST Monday (3/22). (On your syllabus the final deadline is the latter, but please try to comment early in the week, so others have time and substance to discuss!)

Submission Instructions:
Respond directly to the posts of your classmates using the etiquette guidelines provided in the “About” module. Be kind, be interested, and add to the discussion, rather than just agreeing or “piggy backing.”

Relate “your moment in time” to something from the ppts or reading materials (and anecdotally cite it–like the highlighted references in “Hints for Hinton).

1. Write a narrative discussion combining your conversation and what you read.

2. Respond to someone else’s post by providing additional insight.

Hints from Hinton:

There are some points for garnering good discussion. Help your classmates out by spreading the love (i.e. responses) out among all your classmates. For instance, if you notice the first post has received 4 or 5 responses, choose a different post to respond to.

It is important you hit the deadline on this assignment so your classmates and finish by responding to other posts.

An example of how to discuss these personal questions comes largely from the way I started this module with the P.T. Barnum discussion, so my post might look like this:

I have always had a bit of a fantasy of “running off with the circus,” so the fact that a lot of what we DO in public relations is based on his initial ideas of promotion, according to Grunig’s Press Agentry/Publicity is really interesting to me on an organic level. I think a lot of people still define public relations solely based on the idea of promotion and publicity because that is often the face of public relations. I think this relates to what Dr. Hinton said in the introduction to this module about learning from the good and bad, and recognizing the ethical path. For instance, Barnum’s circus posters are gorgeous, I think they added to the “landscape” and were precursors to things like Times Square billboards. Purists think that “disney-fies” Times Square or Picadilly Circus in London and detracts from the cultural essence of the public space, but I think these two “piazzas” as well as others in the world, help define world commerce in a way that you really could connect to socio-economic issues, wealth, business leadership, culture and yes, art. And, when you couple that idea with rhetorical history outlined on the timeline, like Cicero connecting style to substance in the effective delivery of persuasive communication, you can see that the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square has things to teach us about culture, whether or not those aspects are good or bad. I haven’t seen “The Greatest Showman,” and I am not sure why Dr. Hinton liked it so much, especially after reading the National Geographic link with the real story, but I might have to check it out.

Then a response to that might be something like:

What really strikes a chord with me, is your comparison of vintage circus posters to Times Square electronic billboards. I have to design a lot of fliers for events in my job and I have never really thought of promotion as art before or even connected it to my undergraduate public speaking class (which I hated)! But when you look at the timeline and that discussion of Cicero, for instance, it helps me understand the significance of those ridiculous little fliers I produce in Canva! I think the next one I produce will be more purposeful thanks to your post and Dr. Hinton’s awesome links. Also, between P.T. Barnum and Ivy Lee, I find it interesting how those original concepts have been built upon by Bernays and others. The people themselves, people like us studying public relations are public relations stories in and of themselves. Self-promotion is often considered undignified, and as slide 3 in the powerpoint “What is Public Relations?” points out, if public relations is good, no one recognizes it as public relations. That is a fine line these men walked. It’s also quite devoid of women’s voices. We, speaking for all women, I guess, are often not good at self-promotion, negotiation or walking into a newsroom and announcing our intentions, like Barnum apparently was. I will be interested to see some of the gender gaps in public relations–like Doris Fleishman, who was behind her husband’s success and doing the actual work of the agency, while Bernays was promoting his ideas and Fleishman’s work.