Abstract
This chapter concludes the book, locating PR’s professional discourses within broader scholarship on digital disruption of professional work. The chapter situates the PR profession amidst emerging digital and big data specialisms and considers the long-term future for PR amidst the growing prospect of commoditisation and automation of PR skills by digital platforms. The chapter draws on studies of platformised labour conditions to argue that the quest to relocate PR skills further upstream of digital platformisation must begin sooner rather than later, so that PR exerts greater control and agency over its digital future. The chapter further reflects on long-term prospects for PR if all professions were to become irreversibly disrupted by platformisation. The chapter concludes by outlining the intriguing opportunity the ‘end of professions’ might create for PR to adopt a more ethical role in representing the marginalised and addressing the planet’s increasing digital divide.
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Notes
- 1.
There are many other workers not included in this brief discussion, including content moderators; and workers involved in data mining, who are not generally experts in big data manipulation or analysis (See Kennedy 2016).
- 2.
Agile dates its provenance to the authors of the Agile Manifesto, a set of programmer values devised in 2001 (See more in Posner [2022]).
- 3.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
- 4.
Here, the term ‘Big Tech’ includes not just the big social media platforms, but also Amazon. While not a social media platform Amazon is one of the world’s largest players in digital advertising. Amazon’s foray into social media via Spark, was short lived; the service was limited to Amazon Prime users.
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Bourne, C. (2022). Conclusion: Be Platformised. In: Public Relations and the Digital. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13956-7_8
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