What is Communication and what it should be? Problems with Modern Public Communication

Abstract

In regard to public and strategic modern communication, at least in one respect everybody agrees - there are serious issues and ever larger categories of population seem to be increasingly difficult to reach by official messages and narratives, there are increasingly numerous left and right radicals and consensus, social cohesion and trust in authority and institutions is ever decreasing not only in Romania, but throughout the Western world. Not to mention proliferation of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories. The simple question is “Why?” But, going a bit further, the subsequent question this analysis is asking is whether “Do we really care to know why or we do not?” Are we really ready to know why and to admit why? Or are we the senders of public communication, part of the problem, and not only the recipients, the lack of education, as we like to think, or just hostile entities like the Russian Federation or others? As Stănciugelu et al. (2014, p. 338) stated that: Have we not diverted from the status of public communication issued by an impartial sender, as theory states it should be?

Keywords

• disinformation
• fake news
• communication
• sociological bias
• ideology
• superiority complex