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6 Face-to-Facebook, or the Ethics of Mediation: From Media Ethics to an Ethics of Mediation To recognize that a technology or a medium has some degree of agency is not to assign autonomy to it and thus simultaneously abdicate “our human” responsibility. However, who or what counts as “the human” is undergoing a significant transformation in the new media context, as we have argued throughout the book, which is why the question of agency and responsibility can no longer be perceived, unproblematically, as something that a skin-bound human entity has, or is capable of exercising. Across the increasingly dynamic boundary of media production and consumption, there is therefore a need to rearticulate what has become known as “media ethics” in terms of “an ethics of mediation.” This ethics—in line with our expanded understanding of mediation as a vital process, a way of being and becoming in the technological world, or a way of emerging through time—can also be dubbed “an ethics of lifeness.” This chapter will thus pursue the ethical implications of the ultimate instability and transience of the mediated subject. It will pose the following questions: what moral frameworks become available within the context of ongoing dynamic mediation, and who does ethical responsibility concern if “we” are all “media”? What is entailed in the recognition that “nobody and no particle of matter is independent and selfpropelled , in nature as in the social”?1 The pertinence of ethical questions to issues of media and technology seems selfevident these days, in both an academic and a wider public context, given the ubiquity of moral quandaries and moral calls to action with regard to issues as diverse as genetic modification of humans, animals, and plants; Internet privacy; the independence of media from financial and political influences (or the lack of it); and journalistic practice . It could even be argued that ethical issues concerning media and technology are so complex and all-encompassing that attempting to devise a singular ethical framework that would cover them all would be a task doomed to fail at its very inception, and that there would be nothing on an ontological level that would allow for a rigid and rigorous differentiation between “media ethics” and what Western philosophical 154 Chapter 6 tradition has understood as simply “ethics”: an enquiry into the formation of moral values and forms of conduct in a given culture. This may explain why what has become known as “media ethics” in communication studies has set itself a more modest but also more manageable task of dealing with specific issues concerning traditional broadcast media, and now increasingly “new” media: issues such as journalism ethos; questions of truth, manipulation, and representation; and the relationship between media content and the law. Positioned in this way, media ethics is a form of “applied ethics,” whereby a previously worked out moral theory, or set of rules, principles and values, is applied to specific “cases”— which are then judged according to the rules already in place.2 With its origins in and focus on journalistic practice, media ethics has often taken the form of a “code of conduct” (of a kind that also exists for physicians or business people), more often than not an idealistic horizon against which “real-life” actions and misdemeanors are to be judged. Indeed, the problem of media ethics very often becomes synonymous with the question, as Matthew Kieran puts it, of “what is it that journalists, morally speaking, should do?”3 At the same time, there is a certain urgency within media ethics, in the sense that it is frequently being written up and mobilized “in the white heat of the moment”4 to deal with ongoing developments in the global and local mediascape, and with the “media conduct” that accompanies them. Its standard reliance on predefined moral frameworks and positions—which are being negotiated with regard to specific media cases but do not themselves undergo much of a transformation—may be one way of managing the continued novelty and urgency of media issues. It is not our intention here to mount a critique of media ethics, especially given that we recognize the strategic need for the institutional, procedural, and legislative interventions it is often capable of making. Indeed, its specific focus on predefined issues is what actually makes such “media ethics” workable, although on a philosophical level what its proponents often attempt to accomplish should perhaps rather be situated under the rubric of “policy” or “regulation.” Our aim is...

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