Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

PR Grey Zone Professionalism: XP#CharlieDilemme, a Serious Game on Regulation, Deontology and Ethical Dilemmas

Résumé

Lucile Desmoulins examine the representation dilemmas faced by both lobbyists and a group of researchers and practitioners who have created a serious game on dark communication. Graphic representations of the appearance and professionalism of lobbyists pose numerous problems. Most lobbying activities can be represented graphically through very banal, unspectacular office work situations: solitary or collective moments of brainstorming, monitoring work or writing on the computer, making phone calls, chatting during a lunch meeting, roundtables and cocktails hosting. A strong suspicion of illegal or unethical practices taints political influence activities. The visual representation of abstract concepts such as influence, revolving doors, conflict of interest, astroturfing, pseudoscientific arguments, is not a matter of course and would often rely on pejorative terms and derogatory stereotypes. Lucile Desmoulins will give feedback on the preliminary work she and her multidisciplinary team (political science, communication, pedagogy, game design) had to do on the graphic representation of PR and lobbyists before creating a serious game. For example, they carried out a comparative semiotic analysis of lobbying agencies' corporate communication websites and a discourse analysis of lobbyists' business cards. Called XP#CharlieDilemme, this serious game tackles a sensitive issue: regulation, deontology and ethics in the field of public relations in general and lobbying and advocacy in particular, and the gap between textbooks and dark practices: outright illegal, morally unacceptable or just uncomfortable grey areas. She will describe the creative process (writing a scenario, creating episodes, writing dialogues, drawing characters and sets) and the dilemma of the authors: what graphic specifications should the authors give to the illustrator to get drawings of the main characters of the serious game that would give the players a "fair" representation of PR and lobbyists? What work situations should be depicted? How "artful" methods and dark PR techniques should be depicted? How could these representations avoid two risks: "lightening" or caricaturing influence strategies and the professionalism of lobbyists? But also, how to describe lobbyists' professionalism in a fair and balanced way that reflects their lack of diversity, or both the highly technical nature of their work and the importance of soft skills such as friendliness and creativity. If lobbyists' PR people are creative, they should use graphics on their websites and label lobbyists' professionalism on their business cards. The XP#CharlieDilemme team of writers, designers and illustrators also had to be creative to avoid Charybdis and Scylla: both sanitised and caricatured representations of lobbying.

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Dates et versions

hal-04921578 , version 1 (30-01-2025)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04921578 , version 1

Citer

Lucile Desmoulins, Zineb Serghini. PR Grey Zone Professionalism: XP#CharlieDilemme, a Serious Game on Regulation, Deontology and Ethical Dilemmas. EUPRERA Annual Congress: The Art of Communication Bridging the Future and Past of Strategic Communication in a New Technological Ecosystem, University of Bucharest, Facultatea de Litere, Sep 2024, Bucharest, Romania. ⟨hal-04921578⟩
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