Media and Morality E-Book

Roger Silverstone

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Roger Silverstone's compelling new book places the global media at the heart of the moral future of civilisation. It argues that the media (the press, broadcasting, the Internet and increasingly peer-to-peer technologies and networks) have a profound significance for the way in which the world is understood by its citizens. It also argues that without a clear understanding of that significance, and without a critique of the way in which the media go about their daily business, we are likely to see an erosion in the capacity of human beings to understand and respect each other, especially those whom they see and hear only in their mediation.

In a world of increasing polarisation and demonisation, the media have a powerful role to play. They can reinforce or they can challenge that polarisation. The book proposes that we should think of the global media as a mediapolis, a single space of political and social communication, in which the basis for the relationships between neighbours and strangers can be either constructed or destroyed. The mediapolis is a moral space, a space of hospitality, responsibility, obligation and judgement. And questioning its present and future requires attention to issues of media justice, media literacy and media regulation.

Media and Morality is essential reading for all students and scholars of the media but will be of equal fascination to anyone interested in the workings of our modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface and Acknowledgements

1 Morality and Media

Introducing morality and ethics

Globalization

Cosmopolitanism and pluralism

Media work

The sequence

2 Mediapolis or the Space of Appearance

The mediapolis

Plurality

Thinking, speaking, listening and acting

Conditions for the mediapolis

The burden of representation

3 The Rhetoric of Evil

The problem of evil

The mediation of evil

The presence of evil in American popular and political culture

Consequences and questions

4 Contrapuntal Cultures

The contrapuntal

Media and minorities in Europe

Mediating the contrapuntal

Informing the moral agenda

5 The Mediapolis and Everyday Life

The mediation of everyday life

Distance

Trust

Complicity and collusion

Responsibility

6 Hospitality and Justice

Hospitality

Justice

Responsibility

Obligation and truthfulness

7 Regulation and Literacy

Media as environment

Home and away

Towards media literacy

Conclusion

References

Index

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren both present and future.

Copyright © Roger Silverstone 2007

The right of Roger Silverstone to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-10: 0-7456-3503-2

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3503-3

ISBN 10: 0-7456-3504-0 (pb)

ISBN 13: 978-07456-3504-0 (pb)

ISBN 13: 978-07456-5787-5 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN 13: 978-07456-5788-2 (Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

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Preface and Acknowledgements

This book picks up where my previous one, Why Study the Media?, left off. It deals with what I am beginning as see as the second of the great environmental crises with which global societies are increasingly having to deal: the crisis in the world of communication. This is a moral and an ethical as well as a political crisis, and I argue in this book not only that the pollution of this mediated environment is threatening our capacity to sustain a reasonable level of humanity, but that it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity.

Many individuals have helped me along the way both directly and indirectly. Some indeed have had the dubious privilege of reading portions of the manuscript way before they should have been released for any kind of consumption other than my own; and I thank Lilie Chouliaraki, Richard Sennett, Steven Lukes, Nick Couldry, Maggie Scammell, Tom Hollihan and Helena Bejar for undertaking what none of them reasonably should have been asked to do. Terhi Rantanen was the first to read the whole of the manuscript in near final draft and made a huge number of helpful suggestions for its improvement. Otherwise, and it is not at all an otherwise, thanks are due to my many students, colleagues and friends in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, whose intellectual presence has been, and indeed remains, constantly invigorating.

Thanks are also due to my colleagues, especially Dean Geoffey Cowan, at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, who generously hosted a period of sabbatical time in the spring of 2004, which was sufficiently calm and stimulating to enable me to undertake the research which led to the writing of chapter 3.

The last year of the manuscript’s writing was by no means straightforward. Many doctors, both in London and Mexico City, are owed immeasurable gratitude for keeping me alive. But beyond anything, I want to record the extraordinary care and devotion of my wife Jennifer, my children, Daniel, Elizabeth and William, and their partners, and my brother Anthony for supporting me (and each other) at moments and indeed periods of great stress. Let this book, in part, be a token of my love and thanks to them.

Parts of the book have involved significant rewriting of previously published material, as follows:

Chapter 5 substantially develops arguments in my ‘Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life’, New Literary History, 33 (4), 2002, 761–80.Chapter 7 does likewise with respect to ‘Regulation, Media Literacy and Media Civics’, Media, Culture and Society, 26 (3) 2004, 440–9.

1

Morality and Media

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

And foolish notion.

Robert Burns, To a Louse

I have a memory of an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on The World at One during the height of the war in Afghanistan which followed hard on the heels of the attack on the World Trade Center. It was with an Afghani blacksmith who, having apparently failed to hear or understand the US airplane based, supposedly blanket, propaganda coverage of his country, offered his own account of why so many bombs were falling around his village. It was because, his translated voice explained, Al Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles. He was not, of course, entirely wrong.

There is much that is striking in this otherwise insignificant piece of reportage. And much of what is striking goes to the heart of what I want to explore and argue during the course of this book.

The first point of note has to do with the blacksmith’s mere presence in the British media. The second has to do with what he says. In one sense presence is all – a certain kind of presence that has transcended geographical, social and linguistic distance; a certain kind of presence which brought this voice into the living rooms of suburban England, not just from a war zone, a soon to be replicated war zone, our war zone which is almost by definition, now, somewhere else, but from another age, distant in time as well as space. This was a real voice, but an unfamiliar voice. And its unfamiliarity had everything to do with, was overdetermined by, the blacksmith’s capacity to offer an account of us as well as to us: we, in the West, with our donkeys and our castles, we with our losses, we in our equivalence. His understanding, his misunderstanding, was touching, naive, easily patronized. Yet it was true: a translated truth, a cultured truth, and a truth meaningful for him. Just as we had and have our views of what life might be like for a blacksmith in Afghanistan, he has his views of what life, and death, might have been like in downtown Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001. In both cases those views are, at best, filtered through the prejudice of ages and the immediacy of images. At worst they enter into judgements and through judgements into actions which, for those who have the power, are likely to be consequentially misinformed and fatal in their consequences.

His appearance in our mediated space, albeit in this case his audible appearance only, represents the appearance of the other, the strange and the stranger, in the familiarity and comfort of home. He appears to us as a representative, a rare representative, of the doubly distant: the proverbial man in the street, or in this case the man in the smithy, and as someone as far away from us, perhaps in time as well as space, as it is possible to conceive. Ordinary and usually unheard. But now speaking about our misfortune as well as his. And his appearance represents a life, too, when we might otherwise only see – indeed we normally do only see – a body. A silent body, a body perplexed, a body in pain, a dead body. A victim.

So here is the blacksmith speaking, and he is speaking, albeit briefly, about us. Here he is talking about us in his terms, through his view of the world. Are we going to listen? What are we going to hear?