Media Challenges to Digital Flourishing

This book engages broadly with the impacts of media practices on our prospects for thriving as moral beings in today’s digital spaces. It brings together senior and junior scholars in communication and philosophy originally convened for a symposium on the theme of Media Challenges to Digital Flourishing. Using perspectives ranging from virtue ethics and media sociology to care ethics and moral psychology, the authors anticipate and analyze cutting-edge ethical issues at the nexus of media and technology.

Topics covered include the moral standing of artificial intelligence, the characteristics of virtues and moral exemplars in digital spaces, the prospects for moral autonomy under the terms of surveillance capitalism, and the obligation of media ethicists to proactively flag emerging ethical problems. In short, this book attempts to identify and address the impacts of digital media practices on our prospects for thriving as moral beings in terms of both the virtuous and the virtual.

This interdisciplinary volume is a helpful resource for students and scholars of media, communication, journalism, technology, moral psychology and ethics, as well as practitioners and policy makers with related interests. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Media Ethics.