Communication Ethics in an Online Age

In this book, Kati E. Sudnick and Matthew P. Mancino engage the work of major communication ethics and media ecology touchstones to understand social media’s effect on human communication and interaction. Working from the McLuhan (1964) perspective that electronic media expands the human central nervous system into the universe, we engage with various types of social media to understand the unintended consequences of using this variegated medium as our central means of human interaction. The book utilizes virtue ethics as founded by Aristotle and further explored by Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) as the primary communication ethics lens to understand why these unintended consequences of social media use matter for the human condition, describing potential steps forward as we continue to navigate an online world. Ultimately, this book serves as a theoretical pathway for understanding media ecology and virtue ethics in a postmodern age as they attend to the virtual space.