Techniques of Communication Management

Terranova brings up the topic of communications management within network cultures throughout her book. I found this topic particularly interesting in relation to the realm of public relations because of the use of “free labor,” as well as the need to deal with how the “masses” receive and react to images, for example how public relations agencies establish brands through advertising campaigns online.

            Shannon brings up the topic of communication management in relation to the discussion between signal and noise. “The new techniques of communication management are crucially concerned with the relation between signal and noise with the explicit intent of generating a ‘media effect.’” (10) Media effect’s must be considered within the informational milieu, “a milieu composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such ‘massless flows’” (8), that Terranova posits information cultures are constituted by. The job of communication managers is then to determine the overall dynamics of the informational milieu are presenting a message that will be preserved across the noise a signal must battle.

            However, Terranova see that communication management theory leaves out certain aspects of the informational dimension of communication in that through enforcing short slogans or logos the “unfolding process of material constitution” (19) is ignored. Ignoring this aspect is due to the crisis of representation in network culture, how to cater to distracted perception that defines their audience. The solution within communications management is to sell to the individual or what Deleuze calls “dividuals” (34).

            This segmentation of mass audiences demands a desire of distraction or a perceived excess of images. In relation to this work, perception management focuses on this perception of images. The public is not seen to have a public opinion, but rather a simulation of truth, the manipulation of the informational milieu, convinces the public. The ability to produce such images makes images work in a new way, as Terranova terms, as bioweapons. Images as bioweapons creates an “artificial informational ecology of image flows” (141) where perception is always already within the images.

            In relation to Terranova’s discussion on free labor: where “cultural flows as originating within a field which is always and already capitalism” (80) – are images now lost within these cultural flows within capitalism? How has communication and perception management changed individual’s relation to images or have they only harp on the changes that occur due to network culture? Can images be bioweapons? Will these forms of management survive over time or are they only temporary fixes for the purpose of selling commodities?