Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Elegy for Mediated Dialogue: Shiva the Destroyer and Reclaiming Our First Principles

The field of public relations has embraced dialogic theory as a valuable theory and paradigm for almost two decades. More recently, scholars have used dialogue as a framework to study mediated communication via the Internet and social media. However, many studies of mediated dialogue have concluded that the communicator/organization failed to be dialogic, or that various social media tools such as Twitter had failed to deliver on their “potential” for dialogue. In this essay, we argue that much of the dialogic scholarship has largely been dialogue in name only, failing to examine most aspects of dialogic communication, and at best having only “dialogic potential.” We conduct a critique of dialogic theory providing suggestions for moving forward.

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