Digital Public Relations Through the Lens of Affordances: A Conceptual Expansion of the Dialogic Principles

Abstract

We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. The manuscript's previous versions, circulated as "Remaking dialogic principles for the digital age:The role of affordances in dialogue and engagement" and "Digital public relations through the lens of affordances: A conceptual update of the "ease of interface" dialogic principle, " were presented at the 69th annual meeting of the International Communication Association as the Top Faculty Paper of the Public Relations Division and the recipient of the Robert Heath Award.

Revisiting trust in the digital era: the interplay of online trust and online dialogic communication from the practitioners' perspective

“…Overall, this study addresses recent controversies of online dialogic communication (e.g. Kent and Theunissen, 2016;Wirtz and Zimbres, 2018;Zhou and Xu, 2020), as well as enriches the theoretical understanding of dialogic communication and its relationship with online trust from the practitioners' perspective.…”

“…With the increasing attention to the application of dialogic communication in social media, Kent and Theunissen (2016) argued that it may not be possible to enact dialogue via social media, which is a tool that mainly facilitates anonymity instead of relational transparency, because of its limitations regarding interpersonal communication and relationship building (Zhou and Xu, 2020). However, the private communication options on social media (e.g.…”

“…LinkedIn may be better; as a JCOM 26,3 substantial proportion of its audience are professionals, and its messages are more personalized" (Interviewee 12). Such a personalization of messages on LinkedIn also represented the dialogic potential (Kent and Lane, 2017) and the favorable affordances of online communication platforms (Zhou and Xu, 2020).…”

“…In recent years, scholars stated that dialogic communication refers to “interactions between organizations and publics that seek to create mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefits” (Wirtz and Zimbres, 2018, p. 26). Zhou and Xu (2020) also concluded that dialogue is a relational orientation of communication activities that facilitates ethical public relations practices, whereas dialogic communication is a communication practice that maintains dialogues between organizations and their stakeholders based on dialogic orientation. Kent and Taylor's concerns (1998, 2002) about dialogue and dialogic communication have drawn significant attention from scholars over the past two decades.…”

“…the structure of the interface that enables users to leave comments or make dialogic conversations) would affect the nature of online dialogic communication. In response to the “ease of interface” principle, one of the digital dialogic principles proposed by Kent and Taylor (1998), Zhou and Xu (2020) argued that the principle of favorable affordances may be more up to date for investigating the possibility of dialogic communication on online communication platforms. Following Sommerfeldt and Yang's (2018) discussion of the “ease of interface” principle, Zhou and Xu (2020) commented that its relevance in the Web 2.0 context is declining, while the concept of favorable affordances, which concerns online communication platforms' favorable properties or consequent abilities that let the communication parties enact mediated communication, may enable a more up-to-date discussion of how online communication platforms (e.g.…”