Doc has a post about Internet regulation in Canada where after nearly 10 years of regulation free Internet, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission has just announced that it is to look again at 'broadcasting using the Internet'.
The issue of Internet regulation is a major one and not for this post - although it is edfinitely something I want to follow up in the UK.
Instead. what I wanted to share was Doc's neat summary of why the Internet is important to everyone and everything.
Doc asserts that:
"the Net isn’t just a game-changer for everything it touches, but a subject of transcendent importance, so unique, so unlike anything that preceded it, that it wasn’t like anything."
And this is precisely the problem. All too often (and more like all of the time) people want to know how they use the Internet to improve what they already do, or want to know what impact the Internet will have on their organisation.
But how do you give these people an answer when they are asking the wrong question?
Of course, it is the PR consultant's job to tell the client the right question to ask and then answer it. But it is often difficult to get beyond traditional expectations.
Take this as an example: a client may call on their PR consultant to tell them how to communicate better using the Internet. However, the right answer might in fact be that before the client can change its communications, the way the company operates must be transformed to bring it in line with the expectations, identities, social norms etc of a digitally networked society. Now this is traditionally seen as management consultancy and *not* what the PR agency is paid for.
This position - of course - supports what Grunig has said about PR all along. Unfortunately, it has been an uphill struggle to sell Grunig's ideas first time aprund, let alone when we are working in a digitally networked world which operates as an entirely different paradigm.
Technorati tags: Net Neutrality, regulation, Doc Searls, consultancy, management, paradigm shifts
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