It has always seemed right to me to point out that communication must be substantially differentiated from information and that the former, pure communication, is ultimately an expression of the anarchy of 'change' which has not yet made its interpretative paradigm of society explicit and seeks its own path of inclusion in the social construction by polluting itself with the incident variables: population increase, transformation of the availability of natural resources, climate change, etc. Social networks are an expression of this 'insecurity' of communication which, however, is equipped with an important relational framework and which assumes a strong value connotation. It is as if two parallel structures lived: the technological one, with a strong space-time uprooting, with its network of immaterial nodes and information flows, with its inhomogeneous structure (for example, service providers are more informed than those surfing the net, or companies and governments have more information than ordinary citizens and consumers); and one closely anchored to local data, characterized by family relationships, friendships, experiences in the area. This lack of homogeneity has been well highlighted recently by Manuel Castell, but Darin Barney, starting from Castell's observations in 2004, has summarized even better the problems connected to centralized and decentralized network communication, distinguishing 5 fundamental dimensions: 1.informational capital, as a new phase of capitalism; 2.geographic boundaries, within which goods and people move, relocated and distinct within the network where they move with greater speed; 3.disruption of time and space, where even work loses its classic local and above all collective connotation assuming a different dimension of the collective as an exchange of information on the net. The work is placed between the second and the third point as it is then particularly disadvantaged compared to the capital driven by the financial markets that move faster and more flexibly on the net. This data causes the immigration/emigration processes to explode; 4. power mechanism which immediately identifies the centers and the peripheries, the poor and the rich, the interacting they interacted [ie those who know how to use the new technologies, interacting, Eco defines them as 'the integrated ones' and those who suffer from the new technologies, the interacted ones]. Herbert Simon highlighted that on the web the lines of social stratification are more visible and this failure 'social restructuring of power relations' represents 'the black holes of informationalism'; finally the 5^ dimension locates the alienation between the Net and the Self which generates a conflict on a social level by creating antagonisms that attempt to replace participation from below.
It is different for information, which is an absolutely political datum and which mainly assumes the aspect of the source from which it emanates.
Having said that, nothing new has been said, I suppose, except having to add how important it is to distinguish the various functions and forms of communication and information, which at this point become very relevant for orientation
Let's start with communication: it can take on the connotations of public, political, social, crisis, service communication….
While communication in general configures messages from many to many, specialist communications configure a message from an institution to many, even without the need for feedback. We find the feedback in the institutional path of the relationship with the citizen and we find it both as an automatic adjustment to the message, and as a postponement of understanding and a possible request for dialogue.
From here we understand how communication can fall within the field of 'power' for and over society if it weren't for the value connotation - mentioned earlier - of a network of relationships that it has been acquiring above all with social networks and which transform it into place of communication, of dialogue.
But to become 'paradigm of public' and/or 'organisational' communication communication must deal with the 'Force' that it can give to the relations between the institutions and the citizen.
In fact, on that force, on those relationships, a myriad of other subjects and shores are inserted which are authoritative shores of information traffic. So what a message builds (what once the round of recipients is finished, returns in the form of a pertinent stimulus for the management and planning of change - provided that the institution is listening!) can have not only many recipients, and perhaps with different subjects, but also many senders but with only one subject.
When the object of 'specialist' and/or differentiated Communications coincides, we could, yes, have an excess of information, a redundancy, but also a healthy 'unpacking' of the communication which, as in the faces of a prism, could solicit a critical and multi-channel information. A sort of multitask of institutional information, if, of course, it manages to make use of the synergistic aspects of contiguous action. But there can also be an 'overlapping' of public communication with other social communications.
Rolando says: 'public communication, when it changes gears and adds to its service capabilities also that of interpretation and promotion, enters a field of action in which – albeit with different roles, functions and objectives – other sources produce strong signals. This description favors the synergistic aspects. But it also warns about the natural antagonisms that ongoing experience already allows us to detect'
In the following slides it seemed appropriate to highlight three cases of dynamics of public communication towards the user having a single common object but interesting different bodies. They fall within the disciplines of Organizational Communication.
In the first case, we can see an object that affects different bodies, for different aspects. For example: it is necessary to communicate to the Italian population that 'you retire at 52!'. The subject in question is of interest to both the Presidency of the Council, as regards political communication, the trade unions as regards social communication, the INPS as regards service communication, and the public administration as regards Real public communication, internal and external. We see that if the case occurs that each body externalises a communication for its individual organizational aspect, it will be a complex reality that is not easy to understand
In the second slide, the case in which a single object affects two different bodies was summarized in an elementary way and the case may occur in which the more 'authoritative' body (easily the political one) takes over the less authoritative body (generally the administrative one) This is the case in which it would seem important to rely on a communication company that can create a specialized and 'superpartes' message. For example, the Anci intends to stop the drills at sea. The Parliament approves the law in this regard. At that point the messages to the citizen could be discordant and conflict, creating difficulties of understanding. Rai is interested in commercials concerning both parliamentary political communication, the administrative communication of the Anci, and the specialist communication of the wwf or environmental associations.
Finally, the third case, i.e. the example for which in all these years we have fought in order to obtain an efficient, comprehensive, inclusive 'Public Administration' aimed at the citizen: the synergy between the bodies that produces good practices and correct understanding
Public communication is a message from one or more entities public affairs aimed at citizen users but unlike a few decades ago it has become a place of intermediation, and therefore of 'power', between the public body and the user. It need not necessarily think that it has failed to deliver its message if other communications, such as politics, take the upper hand or if it does not have media exposure as well as other communications. Public communication is above all a direct message with the user, a face-to-face relationship, a phone call, an e-mail. To achieve this result it must be able to organize a precise and correct internal communication, between its own offices or between the same entities of equal, lower or higher degree and to listen to the citizen but also to the other institutions. Open data is the main tool through which this listening, information and knowledge passes, mainly among public bodies, to organize a correct understanding of reality for the private citizen user.
This is the epochal transformation: public communication, without media exposure, allows the public body to adapt to the real needs of the citizen, rather than attempting to transform the citizen into an imaginary archetype of reference. It is the power of public communication.
In practice, public communication is the transmission of organizational information