Valuation and Media Ecology: Ethics, Morals, and Laws (facebook group)

Valuation and Media Ecology: Ethics, Morals, and Laws

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How are ethics, morals, and laws related to communication and communication technologies? In what ways—and to what degree—do communication technologies shape, maintain, and/or alter moral practices and sensibilities regarding justice and the good? In this provocative and engaging collection, Corey Anton brings together noted scholars and media ecologists to address these questions and many more. A must have anthology for anyone seeking to understand how communication and communication technologies bear upon valuation and life more generally.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
 
Chapter 1 Ethicality, Morality, Legality: Alignments of Speech, Writing, and Print, respectively, by Corey Anton

PART I: OVERVIEWS AND ORIENTATIONS
Chapter 2 Ethics Unwired: Some Retrospections, by Lee Thayer

Chapter 3 Why is There no Such Thing as a Bad Shark?, by Frank E. X. Dance

Chapter 4 Altruism and the Origin of Language and Culture, by Robert K. Logan

Chapter 5 Concerning Media Ecology, by Eric McLuhan

PART II STUDIES AND APPLICATIONS
Chapter 6 René Girard as Media Ecologist, by Phil Rose

Chapter 7 Fugue in D Minor, by Stephanie Gibson

Chapter 8 The Digital Dark Ages: A Retro-Speculative History of Possible Futures, by Phil Graham & Greg Hearn

Chapter 9 Aristotle’s Energeia as a Necessary Attribute for Moral Communication in the new “Flat World,” by Kathryn S. Egan

Chapter 10 Communication at the Speed of Life: Tele-vision, Intimacy, Community, and Nostalgia, by Frank Macke

Chapter 11 Getting our Bearings about Western Culture and the World Today: Walter J. Ong versus Sayyid Qutb as Guide, by Thomas J. Farrell

Chapter 12 On Matters of Imagination and Possibility, by Amardo Rodriguez

_____Early Reviews_____

“This phosphorescent book shows genius in every chapter. Each is intellectual dynamite -- from the majestic first where values, morals, ethics and law are woven into an organic whole, to the world of imagination and possibility in the last. Along a horizon of erudite to brilliant, splendidly well-written, this book establishes a fresh way of thinking about ethics "in an age of legality."… some of the finest thinkers in communications, writing with a creativity and verve that is truly astonishing. In the tradition of Burke's Language as Symbolic Action, Ong's Orality and Literacy, and Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, Valuation and Media Ecology is destined for history.”
--Clifford G. Christians, Research Professor of Communications, University of Illinois-Urbana

“Corey Anton has therefore done a great service, to the field of media ecology, and to scholarship in general, by bringing focused attention to bear on precisely this aspect of our intellectual tradition, and by bringing these different scholarly voices together in harmony and counterpoint to underscore the strength and complexity of media ecology as a moral and ethical approach to human life.”
--Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University

“Media ecology, and its insistence on communication as the environment in which we live, offers a new perspective on communication ethics and valuation in general. If the means of communication change human experience, human thought patterns, and human interaction, then they also influence ethics. These essays explore how speech, writing, print, electronic and digital media affect the public sphere, power, law, morality, and even religion. One can only wonder how we never noticed the key role of communication in the central concerns of human life before.”
--Paul A. Soukup, S.J., Santa Clara University

Published at Hampton Press as part of their Media Ecology Series.

There are No Things Without Language (Utube)

There Are No Things Without Language.

Language is the mother of all things. Just as Korzybski noted, 'Whatever you something is, it is not,' so too we should equally admit that it is only by language that we can say what something is or is not.

As Lee Thayer suggests, there may well be a world beyond what we say about it, but no one can ever say what that world is.

See Video

Scholarly Quotations to Consider

And through Burke The Lord spoke to Satan: "And in any case, you will agree that, even if their ideas of divine perfection were reducible to little more than a language-using animals' ultimate perception of its own linguistic forms, this could be a true inkling of the divine insofar as language itself happened to be made in the image of divinity." (The Rhetoric of Religion, 1970, p. 289-299).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "If we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it."(The Visible and the Invisible, Trans. A. Lingis. 1968, p. 155).

Read More Quotations to Consider

Suggested Readings

Please see these suggested readings.
A multidisciplinary list of readings for basic orientations to communication theory. Sorry for so many omissions.

New Article in Afterimage

Media, Biases, and Environments

An afterimage article by Corey Anton on the 2005 Media Ecology Conference.

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