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Digital Media and Society Series
Digital Media Ethics
The original edition of this accessible and interdisciplinary textbook was the first to consider the ethical issues of digital media from a global, cross-cultural perspective.
This third edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the latest research and developments, including the rise of Big Data, AI, and the Internet of Things. The book's case studies and pedagogical material have also been extensively revised and updated to include such watershed events as the Snowden revelations, #Gamergate, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy policy developments, and the emerging Chinese Social Credit System.
New sections include "Death Online," "Slow/Fair Technology", and material on sexbots. The "ethical toolkit" that introduces prevailing ethical theories and their applications to the central issues of privacy, copyright, pornography and violence, and the ethics of cross-cultural communication online, has likewise been revised and expanded. Each topic and theory are interwoven throughout the volume with detailed sets of questions, additional resources, and suggestions for further research and writing. Together, these enable readers to foster careful reflection upon, writing about, and discussion of these issues and their possible resolutions.
Retaining its student- and classroom-friendly approach, Digital Media Ethics will continue to be the go-to textbook for anyone getting to grips with this important topic.
This third edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the latest research and developments, including the rise of Big Data, AI, and the Internet of Things. The book's case studies and pedagogical material have also been extensively revised and updated to include such watershed events as the Snowden revelations, #Gamergate, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy policy developments, and the emerging Chinese Social Credit System.
New sections include "Death Online," "Slow/Fair Technology", and material on sexbots. The "ethical toolkit" that introduces prevailing ethical theories and their applications to the central issues of privacy, copyright, pornography and violence, and the ethics of cross-cultural communication online, has likewise been revised and expanded. Each topic and theory are interwoven throughout the volume with detailed sets of questions, additional resources, and suggestions for further research and writing. Together, these enable readers to foster careful reflection upon, writing about, and discussion of these issues and their possible resolutions.
Retaining its student- and classroom-friendly approach, Digital Media Ethics will continue to be the go-to textbook for anyone getting to grips with this important topic.
348 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2009
11 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 31, 2011
Facebook, privacy, video games (I'm writing an assignment of VGs and morality! ^^J), pornography, piracy, copyright, definitions of identity... all parts of the greater discussion on digital media ethics, options, moral frameworks (and consequently ways of tackling them) and institutional approaches showing more or less malevolent understanding of the current cyber-landscape's true nature. There's not much else out there on the matter and even if there was, Digital Media Ethics would still probably take the cake as the most comprehensive book on the matter out now.
One of the good things I got from it was how it really helped me understand the differences between the frameworks that exist to tackle ethical problems. Chances are each one of us, seldom with us being conscious about it, has a combination of degrees of the following:
Utilitarianism → For the greater good (ethics quantified)
Deontology → But you promised! (positive and negative human rights)
Feminist ethics → Ethics of care and emotion (stop DUALISM cartel! Both/and logic)
Virtue ethics → Practicing excellence as a human (can't you use your time any better?)
Confucian ethics → We are our relationships (I'm a different onion layer with everyone)
Meta-ethical frameworks:
Ethical relativism → Oh, you know, this tribe... (Hitler = Mother Teresa)
Ethical absolutism → I hold the end-all be-all truth! (Dogmatism much?)
Ethical pluralism → There must be a single truth out there... (...but all we can see are multiple interpretations of it!)
My explanations derive from Charles Ess's very clear and easy-to-understand writing.
Another reason I like this book, perhaps the most important was because the was the teacher for the Digital Media Ethics course I took in Aarhus University as an exchange student last autumn. It was a pleasure to take this course but now I have to have my respective assignment ready within less than two weeks. Wish me inspiration and hard work.
One of the good things I got from it was how it really helped me understand the differences between the frameworks that exist to tackle ethical problems. Chances are each one of us, seldom with us being conscious about it, has a combination of degrees of the following:
Utilitarianism → For the greater good (ethics quantified)
Deontology → But you promised! (positive and negative human rights)
Feminist ethics → Ethics of care and emotion (stop DUALISM cartel! Both/and logic)
Virtue ethics → Practicing excellence as a human (can't you use your time any better?)
Confucian ethics → We are our relationships (I'm a different onion layer with everyone)
Meta-ethical frameworks:
Ethical relativism → Oh, you know, this tribe... (Hitler = Mother Teresa)
Ethical absolutism → I hold the end-all be-all truth! (Dogmatism much?)
Ethical pluralism → There must be a single truth out there... (...but all we can see are multiple interpretations of it!)
My explanations derive from Charles Ess's very clear and easy-to-understand writing.
Another reason I like this book, perhaps the most important was because the was the teacher for the Digital Media Ethics course I took in Aarhus University as an exchange student last autumn. It was a pleasure to take this course but now I have to have my respective assignment ready within less than two weeks. Wish me inspiration and hard work.
October 31, 2013
For the sceptics among us, the ubiquity of an online world has changed nothing (or not much) – we’re sceptical to the verge of cynical, oozing our seen-it-all-before confidence that we know what’s going on…. For the digital boosters among us, everything, and I mean everything, has changed as we’ve blended our online and meatworld lives to the extent that our friendships mediated by binary code are as important as the friendships mediated by the bar at the local pub…. Equally, the ethics of online and other media are equally polarised – we’re either being corrupted by our digital lives or they offer us freedom to be all we want to be. Oh if it we only that simple.
This is the messy world Charles Ess takes us into in the excellent, provocative and engaging textbook/study guide/philosophical exegesis on the ethics of digital media and therefore of our digital lives. One of the book’s many strengths is that Ess bases much of his case of changes brought about in our social lives as a result of the growing expansion and ubiquity of digital media, while remaining acutely aware of the digital divide both as it relates to access to and use of digital media and to philosophical and other theorising about digital media. He is, therefore, equally aware of the northern Euro-American dominance of theoretical and analytical work in this area, while also alert to developments in debates majority world contexts, especially East Asia but recently also in southern Africa; he also notes the limitations of language in terms of access to Central and South American analyses. This sort of global consciousness and recognition of cultural difference, including within the northern Euro-American sphere, is all too rare in academic work on these kinds of issues, and even more so in journalistic and more popular discussions – Ess has my respect for this, if nothing else.
There is much else as well, but I need to note here that I am not a philosopher, although I have a reasonable working knowledge of the major philosophical traditions. This means that I am comfortable in big picture terms with Ess’s uses of consequentialist (mainly utilitarian), deontological, feminist ethics and ethics of care, some of the ideas he lumps rather clumsily into ‘African’ approaches which seem to include a range of indigenous outlooks and with virtue ethics; given that none is my field I am taking on trust his representations of especially some of the more recent work in each area.
Ess suggests that there are two ways to read the book; I read it as a straightforward narrative so beginning to end, but it also works well as a circular, dialogic discussion between the content specific chapters (2-5) and the exposition on the main approaches (in addition to those noted earlier, Confucian-based ethics also features here) in chapter 6. It is designed as a text book so Ess, in the manner of a teacher of philosophy, sets out to open up areas for debate, discussion and consideration – but even if this were not a textbook given the relative novelty of not just digital media ethics but computer and related forms of ICT-ethics and intercultural information ethics of communication I’d expect such an open approach. More than open and non-dogmatic, Ess’s approach suggests the importance of virtue ethics and more importantly ethical pluralism in his work in that throughout he develops reflective and writing projects for readers that are designed to get us to consider our own ethical outlooks and then develop analyses of the various issues using approaches we, as readers, are less comfortable with.
There is nothing especially surprising in the issues Ess explores – privacy in digital media settings, especially given the emergence on increasingly interactive online platforms and user generated content; intellectual property issues; the meanings of friendship in various digital settings but linked here to what we mean by and understand as democracy, which allows him to link friendship and citizen journalism; sex and violence – so there is a good discussion of sex, pornography and games and gaming. What is engaging here though is the currency of Ess’s examples and his ability to link across a range of examples and issues to draw out both complex ethical points and illustrate the potentials and limitations of various ethical and meta-ethical (ethical absolutism, ethical relativism and ethical pluralism) approaches.
I am used to working around IP-related issues including those of publishing, distribution and copying (and have written about these issues in contemporary academic work) but even so I found much to engage and challenge me in this discussion. More stimulating, however, were his discussions of privacy (a lot of my work in academia deals with research ethics, and privacy is an important discussion point there) and even more so the linking via democracy of friendship (sociability) and citizen journalism. The centrality of democracy to this discussion I found stimulating and to create unexpected associations; if for nothing else, this made the book valuable.
Ess has an engaging style and his continuing dialogic approach between cases and the theory as well as between ‘instructor’/author and ‘student’/reader through his inventive and provocative (as in stimulating) writing and reflecting activities makes this an excellent book both for students of the field (so as a textbook) and for a more general readership. I’ll be encouraging some of my students to take a close look at this; using elements (especially regarding privacy) in my teaching; using the democracy and IP sections in my research. This is a sophisticated but not alienating piece of applied philosophical analysis – I expect I’d enjoy his classes – that comes highly recommended.
This is the messy world Charles Ess takes us into in the excellent, provocative and engaging textbook/study guide/philosophical exegesis on the ethics of digital media and therefore of our digital lives. One of the book’s many strengths is that Ess bases much of his case of changes brought about in our social lives as a result of the growing expansion and ubiquity of digital media, while remaining acutely aware of the digital divide both as it relates to access to and use of digital media and to philosophical and other theorising about digital media. He is, therefore, equally aware of the northern Euro-American dominance of theoretical and analytical work in this area, while also alert to developments in debates majority world contexts, especially East Asia but recently also in southern Africa; he also notes the limitations of language in terms of access to Central and South American analyses. This sort of global consciousness and recognition of cultural difference, including within the northern Euro-American sphere, is all too rare in academic work on these kinds of issues, and even more so in journalistic and more popular discussions – Ess has my respect for this, if nothing else.
There is much else as well, but I need to note here that I am not a philosopher, although I have a reasonable working knowledge of the major philosophical traditions. This means that I am comfortable in big picture terms with Ess’s uses of consequentialist (mainly utilitarian), deontological, feminist ethics and ethics of care, some of the ideas he lumps rather clumsily into ‘African’ approaches which seem to include a range of indigenous outlooks and with virtue ethics; given that none is my field I am taking on trust his representations of especially some of the more recent work in each area.
Ess suggests that there are two ways to read the book; I read it as a straightforward narrative so beginning to end, but it also works well as a circular, dialogic discussion between the content specific chapters (2-5) and the exposition on the main approaches (in addition to those noted earlier, Confucian-based ethics also features here) in chapter 6. It is designed as a text book so Ess, in the manner of a teacher of philosophy, sets out to open up areas for debate, discussion and consideration – but even if this were not a textbook given the relative novelty of not just digital media ethics but computer and related forms of ICT-ethics and intercultural information ethics of communication I’d expect such an open approach. More than open and non-dogmatic, Ess’s approach suggests the importance of virtue ethics and more importantly ethical pluralism in his work in that throughout he develops reflective and writing projects for readers that are designed to get us to consider our own ethical outlooks and then develop analyses of the various issues using approaches we, as readers, are less comfortable with.
There is nothing especially surprising in the issues Ess explores – privacy in digital media settings, especially given the emergence on increasingly interactive online platforms and user generated content; intellectual property issues; the meanings of friendship in various digital settings but linked here to what we mean by and understand as democracy, which allows him to link friendship and citizen journalism; sex and violence – so there is a good discussion of sex, pornography and games and gaming. What is engaging here though is the currency of Ess’s examples and his ability to link across a range of examples and issues to draw out both complex ethical points and illustrate the potentials and limitations of various ethical and meta-ethical (ethical absolutism, ethical relativism and ethical pluralism) approaches.
I am used to working around IP-related issues including those of publishing, distribution and copying (and have written about these issues in contemporary academic work) but even so I found much to engage and challenge me in this discussion. More stimulating, however, were his discussions of privacy (a lot of my work in academia deals with research ethics, and privacy is an important discussion point there) and even more so the linking via democracy of friendship (sociability) and citizen journalism. The centrality of democracy to this discussion I found stimulating and to create unexpected associations; if for nothing else, this made the book valuable.
Ess has an engaging style and his continuing dialogic approach between cases and the theory as well as between ‘instructor’/author and ‘student’/reader through his inventive and provocative (as in stimulating) writing and reflecting activities makes this an excellent book both for students of the field (so as a textbook) and for a more general readership. I’ll be encouraging some of my students to take a close look at this; using elements (especially regarding privacy) in my teaching; using the democracy and IP sections in my research. This is a sophisticated but not alienating piece of applied philosophical analysis – I expect I’d enjoy his classes – that comes highly recommended.
May 31, 2017
Solid ethics textbook.
December 10, 2016
Of the chapters I read (only had to read chapters one, two, and six for my class), this was an interesting and thought-provoking read.
November 30, 2023
Read for my Ethics and The Media Class. Good clear textbook.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews