We need to discover ways to move beyond thinking of public relations as a function of compliance experts and learn to think of it as an ongoing and inclusive process of discussion. Ordinary people need to develop independent ways and means of understanding and airing public problems and issues and of acting on them. With its bounteous amusements, he argued, a modern consumer culture was deflecting people from the functional responsibilities of citizenship. To move beyond this predicament and to rediscover itself as a social force, Dewey asserted, the public must move beyond its status as an audience of consumers and learn to communicate actively with itself. Without such communication, the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.
Communication can alone create a great community.
To move beyond this circumstance, a number of changes need to be made. The vast power of the commercial communications system today lies in its unimpeded control over the avenues of public discussion. Though camouflaged by business as usual, the capacity to make such a change is within sight. For a negligible licensing fee, private corporations harvest an incessant windfall of public influence. If 15-25 percent of all advertising expenditures in the United States were applied this way, the crisis in funding for public arts and education would evaporate.