Are we even certain that PR actually exists?

I hesitate to be the first person to say this out loud, but perhaps the question deserves a broader perspective. Anyone who has at least once leafed through the works of Edward Bernays - the widely cited yet somewhat niche founding father of public relations - has inevitably encountered the claim that a new discipline, public relations, was born through his efforts.

However, a closer reading of Bernays' body of work and an examination of the chronology of its publication may lead us to a less obvious conclusion.

Bernays was undoubtedly an outstanding professional of his era. Yet his greatest talent may not have been inventing something entirely new, but rather reinterpreting and systematizing an extensive toolkit for a phenomenon that had been familiar since antient times. In essence, he offered a new framework for understanding the management of public opinion. He did so precisely at a moment when the term propaganda - a concept with which he had long worked quite openly - was acquiring increasingly toxic political connotations.

I wouldn't rush into a crusade against propaganda. PR, advertising, political campaigning, and propaganda are different manifestations of the same fundamental phenomenon: attempts to influence how people think, feel, and make decisions. The differences lie in their objectives, methods, and degrees of transparency.

At their core, all of these practices seek some form of public consent; they are, in one way or another, engaged in engineering their own version of truth.

The toolkit is obviously changing. It is important to understand that not only communication technologies are evolving - media formats, information distribution algorithms, content production speeds, and so forth.

Related disciplines are also transforming: marketing, sociology, psychology, behavioral economics, law, and political consulting. A communication professional must continuously monitor developments across all these fields.

At the same time, in this constantly changing world, it is useful to remember that the center of every act of communication remains the human being. Channels, interfaces, and formats evolve, but fundamental human needs change far more slowly: the need to belong to a group, to seek meaning, to trust authority, to gain recognition, and to experience fear, hope, envy, or inspiration.

For this reason, many phenomena commonly portrayed as uniquely characteristic of the digital age may not be as unprecedented as they seem.

Take post-truth or user-generated content, for example. Viewed through a historical lens, neither is fundamentally new.

What we now call user-generated content has, in a sense, always existed. The chorus in ancient Greek tragedy functioned as a collective social voice, interpreting events for the audience. Folk songs, legends, and urban rumors performed the same role for centuries, producing and transmitting meaning within communities.

Even the large-scale musical finales and collective songs celebrating happiness, friendship, or a brighter future that often concluded films of the 1930s through the 1960s represented a form of public participation in creating and reproducing a particular vision of reality.

Technology changes far more rapidly than human nature. Therefore, the task of a PR professional today, just as it was a century ago, is not merely to master the latest tool but to understand the mechanisms through which people form beliefs, trust, and a sense of belonging.

I would not position PR and provocation as opposites. In fact, provocation is one of the oldest instruments of public communication.

One only has to recall Bernays' famous Torches of Freedom campaign, which was built precisely upon the deliberate violation of social norms and the attraction of public attention through challenging the existing order.

The problem in modern communication is therefore not provocation itself. The problem emerges when provocation ceases to be a mechanism for generating meaning and becomes merely a technology for capturing attention. When it stops asking questions and starts serving nothing but reach and engagement metrics.

We rarely question the role of the court jester in classical drama. Yet the jester is, in many ways, the very embodiment of the provocative element in public discourse.

To me, the jester is one of the most underestimated figures in the history of public communication. Often, the jester enjoyed greater freedom than the king. As a fool - as the bearer of the "other" discourse - he was permitted to say what others could not. He violated the rules of speech, challenged accepted truths, and exposed contradictions.

Through provocation, society gained an opportunity to observe itself from the outside. The jester played an indispensable role in achieving public consensus.

Or public disagreement.

I am probably not the best person to give advice. There are many practitioners whose opinions deserve far greater attention. Unfortunately, many of them are reluctant to give interviews or remain largely unknown to the broader public.

If I were nevertheless to offer a wish to my colleagues, it would concern not practice itself but the profession's self-understanding.

By historical standards, PR remains a very young discipline. We are still debating its origins, its boundaries, and even whether it constitutes an independent field of knowledge or merely one manifestation of the broader art of managing public opinion.

For this reason, I believe it is important to exercise a degree of caution in how we describe our profession to people outside the field.

When PR is reduced exclusively to a set of practical tools, influence techniques, or ready-made formulas for success, it inadvertently devalues its own subject matter. This fascinating, multifaceted, and often challenging discipline should not be reduced to a collection of convenient certainties or pocket-sized truths.