Conclusion. It is probably now appropriate to close a chapter in the history of public communication campaigning. Weaknesses which have usually been seen as instrumental can now be seen for what they are: conceptual failures grounded in compromised ontologies and false epistemologies. As I showed in the last chapter, even when viewed within their own narrow empiricist frame, public communication campaigns fail to satisfy a test of empirical efficacy. But empirical failure reveals a deeper moral failure: the failure of government to properly engage in a conversation with the citizens to whom they are ultimately responsible. Whether public communication campaigns are a symptom or a cause of this failure lies beyond the scope of this thesis. But there can be little doubt that the practice of these campaigns has encouraged the persistence of an inappropriate relation between state and citizens. The originators and managers of mass media public communication campaigns conceive of and execute their creations as persuasive devices aimed at the targets who have been selected to receive their messages. But we do not see ourselves as targets (and there are profound ethical reasons why we should not be treated as such), neither do we engage with the mass media as message receivers. On the contrary, as social beings, we become actively and creatively involved with the communicative events which we attend to and participate in; the mass media, like all other communication opportunities, provide the means for generating new meanings, new ways of understanding, new social realities. But people are constrained from participating fully in public discussion about social issues; the government's construal of individuals as targets and of communication as transmitted messages does not provide the discursive space for mutual interaction. Governments should aim to encourage the active engagement of citizens in public discussion by conceiving of and executing public communication as part of a continuing conversation, not as packaged commodities to be marketed and consumed, or as messages to be received. It is time to encourage alternative practices-practices which open up the possibility of productive conversations which will help transform the relationship between citizens and state. However, as I have argued in this thesis, changed practices must be accompanied by profound changes in thinking, otherwise we continue to reinvent the past. Communication practice is informed by the ontology of communication which is itself embedded within other ontologies and epistemologies. The dominant paradigm of communication is at present in a state of crisis, caught between two views of communication power. On the one hand it displays an obsession with instrumental effectiveness on which it cannot deliver. On the other hand-in an attempt to discard the accumulated baggage of dualist philosophy and mechanistic models of effective communication-it indulges in a humourless critique of language which, as Robert Hughes astutely observes, is little more than an enclave of abstract complaint (Hughes 1993:72). This thesis has been an attempt to open up a space for a new ontology, within which we might create new possibilities.