Communicating Europe beyond the digital age: new challenges for European public institutional communication

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the expanding significance of digital technologies has been pervading all spheres of European society and providing new challenges for the improvement of European public institutional communication. Although not legitimated in the same way as other areas of European public policy, and therefore often left in the background, public institutional communication constitutes in itself a key area of action. This, on account of its double potential of informing and engaging with citizens. Nevertheless, communicating Europe is a challenging process and European institutions still suffer from a multifaceted deficit that does not involve only communication: information, participation and democracy are affected as well. As a consequence, the EU has long been criticized for being too distant from its popular base and disruptive phenomena such as populism, euroscepticism and eurocriticism fully entered the European public space undermining its quality. Starting from these theoretically and empirically verified premises, the digital transition opened up new perspectives for facing and counteracting such challenges. The development of platformed and networked societies, alongside the hybridization of media systems and, in more recent times, the rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence have drawn the attention of European institutions to both potentialities and risks that these new frontiers may offer for the renewal of their communication strategies. To date, there is sufficient evidence to assume that European public institutional communication is gradually evolving towards a citizen-oriented, multi-level and user-friendly model pivoting around the main core of digital communication. In this sense, some recent European measures undertaken in the fields of information, communication and participation seem to validate the hypothesis that digital is no longer a possibility, but a fact and as such has to be seized in both limits and opportunities coming along with it and that become explicit the interaction between online and offline practices. In particular, the progressive transition from the uni-directional Web 1.0 to the participatory Web 4.0, rather centered on the interactions among human beings, platforms and algorithms, shifted the focus to such a condition of hybridization and opened new reflection perspectives. This is why “communicating Europe beyond digital”.