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Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)Rethinking Relations: Digital Public Relations as an Inquiry into Communication Governance
The Guiding Questions and Research Agenda of the Asian Journal of Digital Public RelationsJunbin Su, Managing Editor
Public relations research has reached a moment that calls for repositioning.
For decades, public relations have been understood primarily as the management of communication between organizations and their publics, and research has centered accordingly on reputation, crisis response, brand communication, and stakeholder engagement. These concerns remain important. Every society needs more truthful, effective, and accountable communication between organizations and publics, and no public relations scholarship can dispense with concrete organizational practice to speak of publicness in the abstract. Yet if the field confines itself to supplying communication strategies for organizations, technical solutions for management, and patches for existing institutional arrangements, it risks being locked into an unduly narrow frame as an applied discipline.
The communication environment itself has changed the question.
“Relations” today are no longer formed solely through the transmission of messages between organizations and publics. They are increasingly shaped by platform architectures, algorithmic distribution, data profiling, automated content production, and cross-platform flows of public opinion. Publics do not receive information in a flat, transparent, and open communicative space; the issues they can see, the organizations they encounter, the controversies they join, and the emotions they express have often been pre-sorted, filtered, amplified, or muted by algorithmic systems. Organizations, for their part, are no longer merely the initiators of public communication; they are simultaneously reshaped by platform rules, data metrics, the tempo of public opinion, regulatory regimes, and public action.
“Digital public relations,” therefore, cannot mean merely “public relations plus digital tools,” nor simply social media management, social listening, intelligent customer service, AI-generated content, and gains in branding efficiency. We prefer to define digital public relations as a question of relational order: under conditions in which platformization, datafication, and AI-mediation compound one another, how are the relations among organizations, publics, platforms, algorithmic systems, states, and transnational societies produced, computed, maintained, damaged, repaired, and re-institutionalized?
These are the guiding questions this journal seeks to establish.
AJDPR does not intend to be a narrowly practice-oriented public relations journal, nor to treat “the digital” merely as a set of communication tools and operational techniques. Our concern is not how public relations can use new technologies more effectively, but how new technologies are changing the visibility, computability, governability, and accountability of relations. Nor is our concern limited to how organizations influence publics. We ask how publics are identified, classified, mobilized, and governed; how platforms rearrange communicative relations; how algorithms participate in allocating visibility; how data become a new relational resource; and how responsibility is redistributed among organizations, platforms, technical systems, regulators, and publics.
In this sense, digital public relations research should be more than a digital extension of the traditional field; it should serve as an important entry point into the study of communication governance in AI era. It must examine organizational communication practice, but also platform power, public trust, algorithmic responsibility, intercultural relations, regional communication, and social governance — understanding both how technology transforms communication and how communication, in turn, shapes the social consequences of technology.
From this starting point, we especially invite the scholarly community to advance research along, but not limited by, the following lines.
First, we need to rethink “publics.” In traditional public relations theory, publics are typically treated as the targets of organizational communication, as stakeholders, or as opinion actors in crisis situations. In platform societies, however, publics are not naturally given. A public may be an audience segment carved out by data labels, an emotional collectivity temporarily aggregated by algorithms, an action network formed briefly around a particular issue, or a diasporic community sustaining its identity across borders. The question is thus no longer only “how organizations face their publics,” but “how publics are discovered, named, classified, represented, and summoned.” Who has the power to define a public, who holds data about publics, who can convert silent populations into computable objects, and who is excluded from public communication in the process — these should become foundational questions for digital public relations research.
Second, we need to rethink “relations.” Public relations merits scholarly attention not because it offers a repertoire of organizational communication techniques, but because it touches the relational structures among organizations, publics, media, technologies, and institutions in modern societies. Digital technologies have transformed these structures anew: relations can be quantified as interaction data, converted into influence metrics, incorporated into recommender systems and reputation scoring, and rearranged by platform rules. What we need to study is not only how organizations “manage relationships,” but how relations themselves are technologized, platformized, metricized, and turned into assets. In particular, we must ask: when relations are converted into data, traffic, profiles, rankings, and predictive models, is public relations advancing mutual understanding, or intensifying the identification, management, and manipulation of publics?
Third, we need to rethink “trust.” Trust used to be understood chiefly as the outcome of organizational image, informational transparency, social responsibility, and long-term interaction. Today, trust is increasingly technologically mediated. Whether an organization is trustworthy depends not only on what it says, but on where the information appears, who shares it, which algorithms recommend it, whether it has been fact-checked, whether accountability can be traced, and whether publics are able to understand the data and technical mechanisms behind it. Trust is thus no longer merely a question of communication effects; it is a question of sociotechnical order. Digital public relations research needs to examine how, in a communication environment where generative AI, automated content production, deepfakes, algorithmic recommendation, and platform governance coexist, trust is produced and depleted; how it is exploited by organizations and contested by publics; and how it becomes at once a resource for governance and a crisis of governance.
Fourth, we need to rethink “responsibility.” In intelligent communication systems, responsibility is often dispersed among organizations, platforms, algorithm developers, data suppliers, content producers, regulators, and publics. Precisely because it is dispersed, it is also more easily shifted, diluted, or obscured. Digital public relations research cannot confine itself to how organizations “respond to criticism.” It must ask: when communicative acts are performed through human–machine collaboration, when reputational risks are amplified by platform mechanisms, when public emotions are shaped by algorithmic environments, and when organizations deploy intelligent systems for opinion forecasting, risk identification, and audience intervention, how should responsibility be defined? How can transparency, explanation, accountability, fairness, and public participation be translated from abstract principles into workable governance mechanisms? This is not a peripheral issue of technology ethics; it is a core question of communication governance.
The four lines above concern the reconstruction of the field’s basic concepts. The remaining three concern, respectively, the standpoint, the site, and the methods of research.
Fifth, we need to bring power and inequality back into public relations research. If public relations scholarship studies only how organizations communicate effectively, it will easily relapse into organization-centrism. What deserves greater attention under contemporary conditions is how communicative capacity itself is unequally distributed. Platform visibility, access to data, the capacity for algorithmic optimization, multilingual communication, and crisis response are becoming new forms of relational power. Who can be seen, and who can only be profiled; who can respond, and who can only be monitored; who can shape an agenda, and who can only become its object; who can work platform rules to their advantage, and who can only endure them — these questions determine whether digital public relations research genuinely possesses the explanatory power and critical edge of a social science.
Sixth, we need to reposition “Asian experience.” Asia should not serve as a mere supplier of cases for digital public relations theory; it should become a vital site of theory generation. Asian societies feature highly active platform ecologies, rapidly developing digital economies, diverse political systems, complex religious and cultural configurations, dense transnational population flows, and rich practices of regional communication. Here, public relations is often not simply relationship management between firms and consumers, but the composite governance of relations among firms, governments, platforms, local communities, transnational migrant networks, international organizations, and transnational publics. From Southeast Asian platform economies to the digital communities of transnational migrants, from digital government to urban governance, from international communication on maritime issues to cross-border reputation management, Asian experience is raising new questions: they cannot be answered off the shelf by classical Euro-American public relations theory, nor should they be hastily folded into a homogenizing “Global South” narrative. We hope that research on Asia will not merely supplement existing theories with cases, but will work back upon those theories, revising their basic assumptions about publics, organizations, platforms, states, and transnational society.
Seventh, we need to be more open, and more reflexive, in our methods. Interviews, surveys, textual analysis, and case studies remain important, because public relations research ultimately confronts social relations that are meaningful, historical, and situated. In platform environments, however, many processes of relation-making are deeply embedded in data structures, algorithmic mechanisms, and cross-platform communication chains. Computational communication research, social network analysis, platform data studies, digital ethnography, algorithm auditing, multilingual corpus analysis, experiments, and comparative research can all serve as methodological resources for digital public relations. At the same time, methodological innovation must not degenerate into technical display. What matters is not how sophisticated a researcher's tools are, but whether those tools help us understand more accurately the relational structures, distributions of power, and governance consequences of contemporary communication.
On the basis of these questions, the journal hopes to foster digital public relations research of greater scholarly ambition. We particularly welcome studies that derive theoretical questions from concrete digital communication practices; studies that connect public relations with platform governance, algorithmic accountability, digital publicness, and intercultural relational orders; studies that draw on Asian experience to revise, challenge, or extend existing theory; and studies that are methodologically rigorous without treating technical methods as ornament.
By the same token, the journal does not encourage research that treats social media as just another communication channel and stops at describing reach and exposure; research that revolves solely around marketing conversion and reputation maintenance as instrumental ends; or research that offers case description without a theoretical question. We are especially wary of buzzwords — “AI empowerment,” “digital transformation,” “smart communication innovation”— standing in for substantive analysis. Digital technologies have indeed opened new possibilities for public relations practice, but scholarship cannot content itself with celebrating those possibilities; it must ask who commands them, what ends they serve, what consequences they produce, and what constraints they should accept. The same empirical material is welcome in these pages whenever researchers are willing to move from describing efficiency and conversion to interrogating mechanisms, power, and consequences.
In this sense, digital public relations research can become a crossroads of inquiry: from here one can enter algorithmic governance, the ethics of intelligent communication, the institutional analysis of platform societies, crises of public trust, the building of international communication capacity, and the modernization experience of Asian societies themselves. Public relations should not remain an auxiliary tool of organizational management; it should become a field of knowledge about how social relations in our time are produced, maintained, broken, and rebuilt.
The Asian Journal of Digital Public Relations takes this as its point of departure and invites colleagues to expand this field of research together. The articles we hope to publish are not only those asking “how to do it more effectively,” but also those asking “why is it so,” “how ought it to be,” “who is responsible,” and “who is included or excluded.” We believe that only when digital public relations research dares to pose these more fundamental questions can it genuinely respond to the communicative transformations of our time — and make, within the international scholarly community, contributions grounded in Asian experience and possessed of real theoretical explanatory power.
