Provocative.

A group of students in “Advanced Organizational Communication” at Northeastern University are penning a blog along with their professor and they’ve come up with a new way of describing a corporate blog:

Synthetic transparency involves using blogs to give the impression of openness, honesty, and transparency but without really doing so.

This notion is based on Norman Fairclough’s* idea of “synthetic personalization”** which he defines as:

… a compensatory tendency to give the impression of treating each of the people ‘handled’ en masse as an individual. Examples would be air travel (have a nice day!), restaurants (Welcome to Wimpy!) and the simulated conversation (for example, chat shows) and bonhomie which litter the media…”

Waddya think?

[via Fredrik Wackå]