Transforming Communication Flows Between Organizations and Their Publics in the Context of Emerging Web 3.0

The research aims to analyze the nature of the changes occurring in public relations due to the emergence of Web 3.0 as a new information technology reality. The research uses systemic and structural–functional approaches, retrospective analysis, and analytical methods. The ubiquity of Web 3.0 technologies and the powerful PR campaign regarding the lack of alternatives to the broad adoption of ESG goals for positive reputation and success of organizations somehow conflict with traditional business goals. The shift of dominance toward the public and the weak controllability of emerging communication channels and schemes that sometimes simply remove the organization from communication on its account require transforming the practices of interaction between organizations and their public. Based on the analysis of changes in marketing, ESG, PR, and Web 3.0 practices, the authors identified significant contradictions for organizations: (1) economic and ideological—between the idea that business is responsible only to its shareholders and the idea that business has a broad responsibility to society or a multitude of stakeholders; (2) economic—between business interests to maximize profits for shareholders and the inevitable additional costs of implementing the ESG agenda; (3) technical and ideological—related to the incompatibility between the “control paradigm” over communication flows and the “democratization of communication” paradigm; (4) technological—between the need for the existing hierarchical centralized communication structure for full control over the organization’s information flows and the decentralized architecture of the growing Web 3.0; and (5) “PR-ideological”—competition between the manipulative model and the model of two-way symmetrical communication.