Strategic Communication and Public Relations in the Philosophy of
Byung-Chul Han: A Pro-materialist Critique Against the Hypertrophy of
Storytelling and the Destruction of the Public Sphere
Comunicación estratégica y relaciones públicas en la losofía de
Byung-Chul
Han:
Una crítica promaterialista contra la hipertroa del storytelling y la destrucción de
la esfera pública
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ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
How to cite this article:
García Muñoz, C. (2025). Strategic Communication and Public Relations in the Philosophy of Byung-Chul Han: A Pro-materialist Critique Against
the Hypertrophy of Storytelling and the Destruction of the Public Sphere.
Doxa Comunicación
, 40, pp. 169-182.
https://doi.org/10.31921/doxacom.n40a2012
César García Muñoz.
Communication Professor at ESIC University. He was previously a Full Professor at Central
Washington University (CWU). He specialises in teaching and researching public relations and strategic communication.
He also has more than a decade of professional experience in Europe, having worked for international rms such as
Edelman and Pleon. He has published over 45 peer-reviewed articles, primarily as a sole author, which feature in relevant
public relations and global communication journals such as
Public Relations Review
,
Public Relations Inquiry
,
Journal
of Communication Management
,
Public Relations Journal
,
International Journal of Strategic Communication
,
Journal
of International Communication
and
International Journal of Sport Communication
, among others. Several articles
analyse the intersection between public relations, culture, politics, and economics. He has participated in three R&D
projects nanced by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. He has authored three books:
American Psique
(2011);
Historia de un Estereotipo. Intelectuales Españoles en Estados Unidos (1885-1936)
(2009), and
La Opinión Pública
en Santayana (Public Opinion in Santayana)
(2006). Moreover, he has contributed several chapters on the history of
communication in several academic books.
ESIC Business & Marketing School, Spain
[email protected]
ORCID: 0000-0003-4866-2970
is content is published under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. International License CC BY-NC 4.0
Received: 02/11/2023- Accepted: 08/04/2024 - Early access: 25/04/2024 - Published: 01/01/2025
Recibido: 02/11/2023 - Aceptado: 08/04/2024 - En edición: 25/04/2024 - Publicado: 01/01/2025
Abstract:
is article takes a communicative approach to the work by Byung-Chul
Han. e philosopher criticises how advertisers and organisations,
through the incessant and abundant supply of information, have
appropriated the public sphere by excessively emphasising storytelling.
Han advocates for materialism, condemns the ination of storytelling
and suggests the need for message ecology to make the public sphere
less distracting and more sustainable. e author highlights that Han
Resumen:
Este artículo realiza una aproximación a la obra de Byung-Chul Han
desde el punto de vista comunicativo. El lósofo denuncia cómo los
publicistas y las organizaciones, a través del suministro de información
abundante y continua, se han apropiado de la esfera pública al enfatizar
excesivamente el storytelling. Han reivindica el materialismo, condena
la inación del relato y sugiere la necesidad de una ecología de mensajes
para hacer la esfera pública menos distractora y más sostenible. El
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1. Introduction
It is typical for books outside the realm of communication or marketing to describe public relations as an undesirable byproduct
of capitalism. e term “spin doctor” is still used to label persuasive communicators who have no qualms about manipulating
the masses for their own interests.
In
e Power Elite
, Wright Mills (1956) already blamed public relations for the de-ideologisation of society in the late 1950s,
stating that “on the right and in the centre”, public relations, which can be hired, full any need for ideology” (p. 330). Habermas
(1991) directly accused public relations rms of disrupting the public sphere as a domain of discussion by “invading the process
of `public opinion by systematically creating or exploiting news events that attract attention” (193). Habermas (1991) spoke of
the decline of the public sphere, understood as a citizen’s realm for deliberation on public aairs, and its transformation into
a consumer space dominated by marketing and corporations. More recent books focusing on public relations’ role in shaping
modern consumer society highlight its promotion of materialism, its service to the interests of large corporations and the
conversion of citizens into consumers (Ewen, 1996; Tye, 2002). Edward Bernays considered the father of public relations, is
consistently described as a manipulator and promoter of modern consumerism, “although most Americans had never heard of
Edward L. Bernays, he had a profound impact on everything, from the products Americans purchased to the places they visited
to the foods they ate for breakfast” (Tye, 2002, p. viii). In the most famous documentary about Bernays, titled
e Century of the
Self
(Lessig, 2016), he is portrayed as a ruthless manipulator. e documentary cites Paul Mazur’s book
American Prosperity:
Its Causes and Consequences (1928)
to illustrate the impact of the emerging public relations industry
: “
We must shift America
from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old has been entirely
consumed... Man’s desires must overshadow his needs” (Lessig, 2016). In another part of that book, Mazur (1928) holds the
advertising industry responsible for this change, “advertising is an educational force. If eective, it increases desires, elevates
the standard of living, and boosts consumption” (224).
In general, the history of public relations and advertising is based on a negative anthropology of human beings who struggle
to reconcile their instincts with reality. e masters and ideologues of public relations, such as Bernays and Walter Lippmann,
are described as Machiavellian gures who take advantage of human weaknesses. Lippmann, who collaborated on the World
War I Propaganda Committee, is depicted as a defender of public relations to “tame and shape the minds of the masses to
make sense of a world in which technology seemed out of control and the old order appeared to crumble” (Tye, 2002, p. 232).
opens up new avenues for the development of the eld of corporate
communication and public relations by suggesting a novel concept of
CSR that involves restricting message dissemination.
Keywords:
Public Relations; strategic communication; public sphere; storytelling.
artículo expone que Han abre nuevos caminos para el desarrollo del
campo de la comunicación empresarial y las relaciones públicas al
sugerir un concepto de RSC novedoso que implica la restricción en la
emisión de mensajes.
Palabras clave:
Relaciones públicas; comunicación estratégica; esfera pública;
storytelling.
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In a more recent work, Morris and Goldsworthy (2008) also portray Lippmann as an expert in propaganda and a manipulator
of consciences.
Public relations criticism has also emerged from academics working and teaching in the eld. Postmodern eory of Public
Relations is based on the premise that power relations always exist between an organisation and its public, in which the former
logically seeks to impose its hegemony and control over the latter (Holtzhausen, 2000; 2002). e postmodern approach is
holistic and suggests that resistance and activism should be considered in the relationship between organisations and the
public, “public relations must be understood and examined in a broader social, cultural, and political context rather than
solely as a function of organisations” (Holtzhausen, 2000, p. 95). is approach does not propose an entire amendment to
the social role of advertising and public relations. Instead, it suggests that what is lacking is for the public to express conict
and dissent against organisations openly. Holtzhausen (2012) considers dissent more ethical than consensus by proposing a
communicative paradigm that oers dierent perspectives instead of a single one that seeks to be imposed on the interlocutor.
Since 2005, the Excellence eory in Public Relations “indicates how public relations make organisations more ecient, how
they should be organised to achieve this purpose, the ideal conditions organisations should have to be more eective, and
how to measure the monetary value of public relations” (Grunig, 1992, p. 27). However, this theory is starting to be questioned
as a normative ideal. Pieczka (2006) argues that public relations privilege the interests of the ruling classes. Furthermore, she
criticises that the characteristics of dialogue are not interpersonal and that the professional management of an organisation’s
relationships with its public does not generate aectivity (Pieczka, 2011). McNamara (2009) suggests that organisational
communication remains too one-way and “does not adapt to the philosophy, culture, principles and practices that characterise
the web” (p. 5). L’Etang (2008) also questions whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) serves any other purpose other
than to control the will of the public and prevent them from being an obstacle to their plans.
e Critical eory in Public Relations questions the lack of organisations’ sincerity in engaging with their audiences due to
their desire to control and inuence (McKie & Munshi, 2011; Coombs & Holladay, 2012; L’Etang, McKie, Snow & Xifra, 2016).
is theory emerges as an alternative to the Excellence eory and places audience activisim at the centre of the strategic
communication paradigm. Young (2016) considers that “public relations is central to activism” (p. 470). Munshi, Kurian and
Xifra (2017) rebel against the fact that public relations has traditionally been aligned with elites by considering that there has
been and should be a counterbalance between elites and non-elites.
We live in an attention economy in which attention is scarce (Falkinger, 2008; Franck, 2020). At the same time, we come
from a public sphere degraded by the importance of commercial communication (Habermas, 1991). Han’s work is part of
an intellectual tradition that has historically denounced the role played by public relations, specically storytelling, as a
contaminating and distracting element of the public sphere.
is article aims to review Han’s work for the rst time from a public relations and strategic communication perspective, a eld
yet to be addressed in academic research. is study vindicates Han’s gure as part of a critical tradition in these two elds.
e Korean-German philosopher argues in his writings that ecology should also be applied to the public sphere, not just the
environment. According to Han, the public sphere has become consumed by messages due to the power of storytelling and
digital communication, which multiplies the number of senders and information messages. is saturation would require a
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restriction that allows activism and organisations that seek to position themselves in the eld of sustainability to dierentiate
their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) eorts.
1.1. Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han is one of the most popular philosophers in the world. His readership extends beyond the realm of
philosophy. A Google search of his name yields over four and half million search results. Seventeen of his books have been
translated into English, and several more have been published in German and Spanish, growing at a rate of two or three
books annually. Despite being born in South Korea, his philosophical training is German, the adopted language in which he
writes his philosophical work. One of his academic interests is media theory, where he rst worked at Staaliche Hochschule
für Gelstaltung de Karlsruhe and the University of Arts in Berlin. Two of his latest works,
Non-ings
(2021) and
Infocracy
(2022), focus primarily on the existential impact of information overload generated in the digital age. is is a theme he had
already touched upon in his work
Society and Transparency
(2013), in which he criticises the voluntary disclosure of all types
of information by organisations and individuals as one of the alienating consequences of neoliberalism.
2. Methodology
is article employs the critical-conceptual method. It reconceptualises “themes from secondary qualitative analysis of
existing sources and reviews of published qualitative texts” (Protheroe et al., 2008, p. 3). e authors review Byung-Chul
Han’s philosophical work from a communicative perspective, specically within the eld of public relations and strategic
communication. ey analysed 22 philosophical books by the author, translated into Spanish from a communicative
standpoint. is analysis positioned Han among the critics of the impact of commercial communication on the public
sphere. e words and concepts used to narrow the search were parts of his works where his criticism pertains to the impact
of organisational communication on society and the public sphere, as well as the following terms: storytelling or narrative,
narration or narrativity, communication, audiences, information, public sphere, public opinion, commercial communication
and advertising.
After analysing his work, eight books primarily provide a communicative perspective in Han’s oeuvre, which includes
e
Transparency Society
(Han, 2013).
In the Swarm
(Han, 2014a),
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Forms of Power
(Han,
2014b),
e Expulsion of the Other: Perception and Communication in Today’s Society
(Han, 2017a),
Please, Close Your Eyes
(Han,
2017b),
e Burnout Society
(Han, 2017c),
Non-ings
(Han, 2021) and
Infocracy
(Han, 2022). is essay provides an overview
of his work on strategic communication from a fundamentally critical standpoint while also adopting a constructive outlook
from which organisations can benet in the pursuit of sustainability and a new approach to Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR).
3. Results
In his work, Han questions the social role of content creation by companies and organisations without explicitly mentioning
terms such as public relations or corporate communication because it is not only companies and organisations that contribute
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to the information overload in the public sphere. In particular, Han criticises, echoing the same critique that Habermas (1991)
made decades earlier, the destruction of the public sphere in which a public community of citizens have become passive and
private consumers,
information is disseminated without passing through the public space. It is produced in private spaces and sent to private spaces.
Social media expands this communication without community. No political public can be formed from inuencers or followers.
Digital communities are a form of community reduced to a commodity. (2022, p. 25)
Han’s critique focuses on the disappearance of the public concept, the excess of information, the hypertrophy of storytelling,
the pernicious eects of the contagion generated by virality, and the production of a dataistic and surveillance society
whereby decisions are not made by humans but by data. e philosopher implicitly proposes an ecology of content creation
that is dumped into the public sphere, which does not stray far from concepts in vogue in other elds, such as ecology and
sustainability.
3.1. e Phantom Public
According to Han, digitalisation and the excess of irrelevant information deny the existence of the public as a political
subject and agent of change. e classic public, driven by the process of individualisation promoted by digital culture, has
been transformed into a disaggregated and conformist mass of individuals who passively receive or comment on irrelevant
information provided by manufactured opinion leaders, “Digital outrage
cannot be chanted.
It is incapable of action, or
narration. Rather it is an aective state that does not develop any powerful force or action” (Han, 2014a, p. 12). Han calls this
new eeting
mass
of individuals a
digital swarm
that “dissolve as quickly as they have emerged… they do not develop political
energy” (p. 16). is mass has a narcissistic and dispersed character: “e digital swarm is not a mass because it is not inherent
to any soul, to any spirit. e soul is congregating and unifying. e digital swarm consists of isolated individuals” (p. 14). Han
criticises the collective and political notion of the public as being transformed into a
target
of isolated individuals pursuing
their personal interests in the world of consumption.
e digital swarm lacks a soul or a mass spirit. Individuals who come together in a digital swarm do not develop any sense of “we”…
e digital swarm, as opposed to the mass, is not coherent per se. It does not manifest in one
voice
. at is why it is perceived as
noise
(p. 14).
e metaphor of the swarm of isolated individuals in cells is new, but the idea that the public as such does not exist in the
deliberation on public aairs is not. In fact, Han’s description is reminiscent of what Lippman articulated a century earlier in
e Phantom Public (2007), where the public is dened as a “mere phantom” or “abstraction” (p. 67) due to its ineectiveness
in engaging with signicant issues. In this work, and the earlier
Public Opinion
(1997), Lippmann, like Han, but in the context
of the explosion of mass communication, denies the existence of the public as a political entity. Instead, he sees it as “a group
of people who are interested in an issue and can inuence it by supporting or opposing its main actors” (p. 67). e main
dierence between Lippmann, who had engaged in propaganda, and Han is that Lippmann admits that the public could be
activated under certain circumstances. Han considers it unfeasible in a digital context that is heavily marked by individual
interests.
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3.2. e hypertrophy of storytelling
Han does not criticise, as in the past, the management of communication by companies to promote consumerism and
materialism. For Han, the problem lies in the storytelling developed by communication experts and informers, which strips
things of their essence. is is the
leitmotif
of his book
Non-things
(2021), in which he contradicts the traditional attitude of
intellectuals towards marketing and communication. e philosopher blames communication (and likewise the information
generated by the media) for leading us to a post-material world in which things have lost all their meaning in favour of a more
or less articial story to which they have been connected.
Products are infused with emotions through storytelling. For creating value, the production of distinctive information that promises
consumers special experiences or the experience of something special is crucial. Information is always more important than the
appearance of the commodity. e aesthetic-cultural content of a commodity is the true product. e economy of experience
substitutes the economy of the thing (Han, 2021, p. 15).
e pernicious eects of information overload are a recurring theme throughout his work, not only by hindering the human
ability to discern reality, “more information and communication alone do not clarify the world” (Han, 2014a, p. 73) but by
reducing the individual’s connection to the material, “the ood of information to which we are exposed today undoubtedly
diminishes, the ability to reduce things to its essence” (p. 52). e chaos generated by the constant ow of communication
opposes the factuality of existence, “the noise of communication has suocated silence. e proliferation and massication of
things have displaced emptiness. Heaven and earth are full of things (Han, 2017c). Han (2021) contrasts the enduring, factual
Heideggerian human world,
to the nascent digital order, in which the world ‘remains a system of information that can be requested’. ings do not condition the
digital order, while the earthly order arms the human being conditioned by things. (p. 66).
It is what Heidegger (1994) calls “being-in-itself from producing” (para.12) that symbolises the thing, and that is lost with the
abuse of storytelling that turns it into mere representation, into information capitalism that “unlike industrial capitalism, also
commodies the immaterial” (Han, 2021, p. 18). is is a capitalism of ction in which objects disappear because they are
unnecessary; only the production of reality is (Verdú, 2003). Han (2021) condemns the excess of emotion at the expense of the
material,
For example, the information content of things, a brand’s image, is more important than their use value. We primarily perceive the
information contained in things. When we buy things, we buy and consume emotions. Products are imbued with emotions through
some form of storytelling (p. 15).
Han vindicates Heidegger’s Potter’s jug in his essay
e ing
(1994) since “consumer products end up in the trash so quickly
because we do not use them because we no longer possess them” (Han, 2021, p. 16). e blame lies in the lack of narrative
communication that marketing professionals provide. Strategic communication disregards materiality, consumed by the
plasma in which digital information is consumed; “the layer of information that covers things like a membrane without
openings prevents the perception of
intensities
” (p. 53).
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3.3. Information and Communication Overload
According to Han (2017b), not only do things disappear, but time as well. e excess of communication and information “has
led us to a time incapable of silence or of concluding any process, a time that no longer exhales any scent. But thought is not
possible without silence” (p. 127). e omnipresence of storytelling and the constant ow of communication between brands,
media, and audiences do not generate a narrative, a meaningful time.
Neither the tweets nor the information is recounted to give rise to a
narration.
e timeline does not tell any life story or
biography. It is an additive, not a narrative. e digital Man
digitises
because he is constantly counting and calculating. e
digital absolutises numbers and counting... Even inclinations are counted in the form of ‘likes’ (Han, 2014, p. 33).
Han (2017a) criticises the obsession with capturing attention, which prevents us from being interested in or engaging
with the distinct to facilitate communicative ow. Han (2017a) wonders what Heidegger would say today in the face of
“the noise of communication, the
digital storm
of data and information” (p. 6), which “testify the
lack of truth,
and even
the lack of being”
(2017b, p. 23). e attention economy betrays the distinct and monopolises the self, “this hypervisibility,
this hypercommunication, this hyperproduction, this hyperconsumption, that lead to a rapid stagnation of the
sameness
are obscene” (Han, 2017a, p. 7). Strategies for capturing audiences’ attention succeed because “communication reaches its
maximum speed where the same responds to the same, when a
chain reaction
sameness
takes place” (Han, 2017b, pp. 12-13),
as what is sought is always to resort to the familiar, to the
sameness
, to overcome barriers to entry in a noisy world. ings lose
their uniqueness by expressing themselves “completely in the dimension of price” (Han, 2017b, p. 12).
Another aspect Han criticises is the positivism of communication, as “the positive society avoids any form of playing with
negativity, as this halts communication” (p. 23). Negativity is perceived as unpleasant and anti-consumption, and, ultimately,
it does not allow for the building of mutually benecial relationships between organisations and the public. “ e mass of
communication also raises its economic value. Negative verdicts undermine communication. ‘Likes’ are followed more
quickly by connective communication than ‘dislikes’” (p. 23).
Noisy commercial communication, with its emphasis on the self, has led individuals to become products themselves: “Each
individual produces themselves. Silence produces nothing. at is why capitalism does not love silence. Information capitalism
produces the compulsion to communicate” (Han, 2021, p. 71). e self disintegrates on the Internet, where “one advertises
mainly about oneself” (2017a, p. 55). Commercial communication has become a constant process of self-production.
3.4 Symmetrical communication
On the positive side, Han absolves the new digital communicative paradigm by favouring equality between sender and receiver,
as receivers, as previously mentioned, also produce themselves and generate content. In this sense, he conrms the activist
conception of Critical eory in Public Relations (Coombs & Holladay, 2012; L’Etang et al., 2016),
e digital fabric favours symmetrical communication. Today, participants in communication do not simply consume information
passively. Instead, they actively generate it themselves. No unequivocal hierarchy separates the sender from the receiver (Han, 2014,
p. 8).
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Han (2014b) admits that institutionalised communication senders continue to seek hegemony and control; therefore,
although shitstorms are possible and frequent, the asymmetry of power causes silence, an ability in the receiver to “control the
shitstorms of the network” (p. 10), in the receiver, breaking that asymmetry.
3.5. e destruction of the public sphere
Like Habermas (1991), Han (2021) believes that “today freedom of action is reduced to freedom of choice and consumption”
(p. 12). e public sphere has been corrupted because the public space is no longer necessary “since the digital medium, as
such, privatises communication by shifting the production of information from the public to the private sphere” (Han, 2017a,
p. 6). e public sphere, far from being that space of deliberation in eighteenth-century cafés described by Habermas, has been
congured as a place of passion, of mass turmoil fueled by a feeling of protest, “the shitstorms or ‘digital lynchings’ constitute
an uncontrolled avalanche of passions that do not shape any public sphere” (p. 55). Digital communication keeps us in the
private sphere because “to obtain information or products, I do not have to move into the public sphere” (p. 55). e digital
world only allows the sender, whether a person or a brand, to self-promote and shuns the debate on public issues,
ere is no mention of problems we could address and discuss collectively on Facebook. What is shared is mainly information that
does not require discussion and only allows the sender to promote themselves. In the “like” community, one only nds oneself and
those like oneself. (p. 55).
In contrast, “the political space is a space where I meet others, talk to others, and listen to others” (p. 55). Going viral, the dream
of any public relations or digital marketing campaign poses a threat to democracy by spreading trivial content that distracts
the public’s attention:
In the era of digital media, the discursive public sphere is not threatened by mass media entertainment formats or infotainment but
by the viral spread and multiplication of information, that is, by the infodemic (Han, 2022, p. 17).
Han (2022) discusses the privatisation of the public sphere, “the public sphere disintegrates into private spaces. As a result,
our attention is not focused on issues relevant to society as a whole” (p. 17). e smartphone, enthroned in advertising and
public relations textbooks as the key to invading citizens’ private sphere at all times and places with organisational and
product messages, appears as an apparatus of subjugation, producing consumption and communication zombies instead of
empowered citizens” (p. 24).
It is worth highlighting the similarity between some of Han’s texts regarding the lack of rationality and the contagious nature of
digital communication and the theorists of mass psychology from the late 19th century, such as Gustave Le Bon. Han (2014a)
considers that digital communication “not only takes the form of a spectrum but also of a virus. It is infectious because it
occurs immediately on an emotional or aective level.
Contagion
is a post-hermeneutic communication, which does not
properly oer anything to read or think about” (p. 48). He attributes the same emotional and viral character discussed by
communication professionals in any manual.
At the height of mass media societies, Le Bon spoke of how “contagion (mainly through the mass press and the masses) is
powerful enough to impose not only certain opinions on people but also certain ways of feeling (…) Opinions and beliefs
spread through the mechanism of contagion, and very little, however, through reasoning” (Le Bon, 1986, p. 96). According to
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Han, the digital swarm remains a mass individualised by consuming information through devices. A perspective that is not
new, as Gabriel Tarde formulated it at the beginning of the 20th century, stating that imitation and contagion did not require
physical contact or proximity since the men of his time “no longer rub shoulders, nor see each other, or understand each
other… What is the bond that unites them? (Tarde, 1904, p. 3). at bond is called the “printed press” (Nocera, 2008, p. 7).
Han (2014a) describes how information or content, even with little signicance, “spreads rapidly through the network like an
epidemic or pandemic. Any weight of meaning does not burden it
.
No other medium is capable of this virus-like contagion”
(p. 48). Both discourses share the identication of new communication channels with a greater speed and a loss of meaning in
the content being transmitted and its ability to create trends. Han (2022) considers that the concept of virality is incompatible
with truth “because the images do not argue or justify anything… Arguments and reasoning have no place in tweets or memes
that spread and proliferate at viral speed” (p. 23).
Han (2014b) also describes the eect that gamication of communication used by brands has on human communication as
a whole, “with the logic of gratication from
likes, friends
or
followers
, social communication is now subjected to game mode.
e ludication of communication runs parallel to its commercialisation. It destroys human communication” (p. 46). Han
aligns with other authors who question the moral validity of what has come to be called the attention economy (Franck, 2019;
2020), surveillance capitalism (Zubo, 2020) or surveillance advertising (Klein, 2022).
3.6. Surveillance Society
Han also devotes part of his work on communication to reecting on the transition that the digital world has brought about,
which he calls biopower, in the manner of Foucault (2012), whereby humans self-discipline their bodies through access to
the means of production, to psychopolitics According to Han (2022), corporations will continue to exercise their power over
citizens, but in a dierent way than in the past, “the decisive factor in obtaining power today is not the possession of the means
of production, but access to information, which is used for the surveillance and behavioural control and forecasting” (p. 2).
Han (2014b) understands the network as a digital panoptic whose inhabitants, unlike the disciplinary society that subjugates
the body mainly in the work setting, “create a network and communicate intensely with each other. What makes total control
possible is not spatial and communicative isolation, but networking and hypercommunication” (p. 60). Han calls this new
modality
psychopower
, which “with the help of digital surveillance, can read thoughts and control them” (p. 64). As Zubo
(2020) states, capitalism, under the guise of optimising the eciency of strategic communication, counts likes, the number of
followers, the time spent on a website or the quantity and quality of the audiences’ comments, is a surveillance capitalism that
“degrades people to the status of
data and consumer livestock”
(Han, 2022, p. 2). is surveillance will be more eective: “e
more data we generate, the more intensely we communicate” (p. 5). Companies have managed to inltrate this domain into
everyday life “behind the pleasantness of social media, the convenience of search engines, the lulling voices of voice assistants
or the eciency of
smarter apps
” (p. 7). e knowledge of our audiences, through the
feedback
they provide by accessing
social networks and the Internet, replaces the traditional droning repetition of messages in traditional media, “e decisive
factor in gaining power is now the possession of information. It is not mass media propaganda, but information, that ensures
dominance” (p. 11). Paraphrasing Neil Postman (2005), whom he frequently cites, stakeholders are producing and consuming
information “to death” (Han,2022, p. 16). Unlike the biopower of the disciplinary society. “the information regime, by contrast,
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has access to
psychographic
information, which it uses for
psychopolitics
” (p. 17). In sum, Han holds commercial organisations
responsible for establishing surveillance capitalism to promote the construction of relationships between organisations and
the public to monetise those relationships.
4. Discussion
In this article, through an analysis of Han’s philosophical work, greater attention is advocated for the role that public relations
and strategic corporate communication play in the public sphere. Business organisations are incentivised to place and send as
many messages as possible in the public sphere since “the amount of information can never be considered too much as long
as it is true and strengthens the organisation’s reputation (García, 2022, p. 332). Its marginal cost is close to nothing, thanks to
the benets of technology. However, this does not apply to losing collective attention towards essential issues (Farrer, 2022;
Klein, 2022). In the past, the gatekeepers and liberal media values used to control access to the public sphere of debate. is no
longer occurs, or at least it only happens in a tiny proportion of all circulating messages. Including corporate media messages.
ese lters seem inadequate in the world of social media and emerging communication technologies (Bak-Coleman et al.,
2021; Illing & Gershberg, 2022), algorithms (Bucher, 2018), digital advertising (Hwang, 2022; Klikauer, 2021) and the weakness
of news companies that make journalists look to PR rms for news (Waters et al., 2010; Erzikova et al., 2018). Social media is
an extractive technology for business organisations, and it is often argued that it was created for this purpose ((Hwang, 2022;
Klikauer, 2021; Zubo, 2020). It is within this context of perceived insincerity and utilisation of the public that Postmodern
eory (Holtzhausen, 2002; 2012) rst emerged in the academic eld of public relations, followed by the Critical eory in
Public Relations (Coombs & Holladay, 2012; L’Etang et al., 2016).
erefore, it is time to analyse and bring Han’s work into the history of communication. In the era of sustainability and ecology,
one of his merits, whose style can sometimes be excessively poetic, is to suggest that too much information causes pollution in
the public sphere and detracts us from reality by including products from a purely material perspective. In this sense, Han’s use
of the term storytelling, understood as the verbiage surrounding things (including products) preventing us from appreciating
them correctly, is not arbitrary and expands the ethical scope of strategic communication. Han is proposing an ecology of
communication and information not because less is more, as is sometimes suggested. Still, because less does not distract our
attention, it does not demobilise us as citizens and allows us to focus on what is real. In ethics classes and textbooks, what is
usually taught to future professionals is that information should be truthful but not necessarily scarce or measured.
Any information or communication capable of generating audience loyalty is considered positive if it is
true.
A competent
professional must be a good storyteller. e ability to organise an event or pseudo-event to attract attention through quality
storytelling is considered a professional success that deserves to be shared through a case study. However, the amount of
information deemed optimal for dissemination in the public sphere is not considered one of the features of corporate CSR.
Some companies claim to be responsible by managing data (although Han also criticises this and calls it a digital panopticon) or
by promoting responsible consumption of their products. Still, they have never considered limiting the amount of information
they disseminate to their audiences in the public sphere.
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5. Conclusion
Although philosophy in recent decades has paid attention to new phenomena arising from mass communication, mainly
digital communication and the emergence of social networks, it has not placed them at the centre of the debate as Han does.
e Korean-German philosopher believes that smartphones are at the heart of this and aligns himself with theorists, primarily
from the eld of political communication (Farrer, 2022; Illing & Gerhsberg, 2022), who place the lack of attention stemming
from the attention economy at the centre of the debate. is has repeatedly occurred when new forms of mass communication
emerged in the landscape. It rst happened with the emergence of the mass press in the early 20th century, when Lippmann
wrote about modern man’s inability to analyse reality for himself. Subsequently, Habermas addressed this issue following the
rise of new media, such as commercial television and its contamination of the public sphere.
ere are several similarities. All of them discuss the impact of technology on communication. Likewise, they diagnose
that citizens have become mere consumers due to the distraction exerted by these new media and the inability to process
information. In any case, for scholars in the eld of communication, it is good news that a philosopher such as Han,
controversial as his gure may be, is addressing this discipline and giving it a prominence that it seemed to have lost in favour
of technology. We may be talking about a particular circular thinking in the history of communication that occurs when new
technologies emerge. All of them question the status quo of the public sphere, which is vilied by new forms of content that
call into question an individual manipulated by desires and emotions.
Within this analysis framework, a key idea in Han’s work is the importance he attaches to the factor of attention. In an attention
economy where the ability to pay attention has become a major cultural issue (Crawford, 2015; Franck, 2020), Han (2021)
considers that the lack of attention weakens human relationships. For this reason his work is essential in this context. Ideally,
after reading Han, organisations and communication professionals should reect on the need to disseminate a post, a photo or
a press release, even if it is theoretically targeted at the desired audiences. Public relations researchers, such as those in Critical
Public Relations eory, can apply specic measures to encourage corporate activism on the attention issue. Furthermore,
students, professors, and researchers in the eld should think more often about whether communication strategies can
unintentionally aect society beyond their persuasive eectiveness.
6. Acknowledgements
is article has been translated by Sophie Phillips, who I would like to thank for her work.
7. Conict of interests
e author declares that there is no conict of interest contained in this article.
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