Silverstone-mediation - technology, ethics

Silverstone-mediation - technology, ethics

1. technology

   • 1.基本概念
     • Technology is the defining character of mediation. Technology involves networks, skills and knowledge. Technology: both perceived threat and anticipated savior.
   • 2. what is new about new media? - how to study shifts
     • Need different approaches to technological innovation + theories of relationships between technology and social change.
     • 举个
       • Raymond Williams (1974)[d3] The raise of radio 1)       Initially as result of generalized social needs 2)       After First WW, as a one-to-many device mobilized by the state and capital as an instrument of solidarity and selling. “Media technologies are doubly articulated into the social: both as technologies whose symbolic and functional characteristics claim a place in both institutional and individual practice, but also as media, conveying through the whole range of their communication the values, rules and rhetorics of their centrality for the conduct of the quotidian.”
   • 3. 21st century - the return to communication
     • Only this time the conversation is mediated, on a global scale, in text and in image, by the Internet. 1.Interactivity as a new hybridity – Quantity, certainly, turns into quality in the matter of communication. 2. Media change : incremental and radical 3. The history and sociology of media technology are a history and a sociology of its uses.. 4.  最后，以前很多人研究community和identity啦。鼓励大家多研究offline和online的relationship，不要只是研究online的谢谢。

2. mediation and the moral self

   • what is the moral dimension of mediation?
     • Media’s capacity to bring people together, while simultaneously keeping them apart.
     • Receiving communications from a world otherwise out of reach to find and act on a moral response to what they see and hear.
       • distant suffering
   • Heart of this matter: Distance
     • proper distance
       • a crucial component of what it is to be moral.
       • Levinas’s notion of proximity: link between and separation of, self and other. – the separation enables both respect and responsibilities
       • intended to sensitize us to the ambiguities in our relationships to the other.
       • Ambiguities that are significantly overdetermined both in broadcast and cyber space.
       • 媒体始终都在进行着creating some sense of proper distance的作用
         • All involve in one way or another a negotiation between the familiar and the strange, as the media try, forlornly, to resolve the essential ambiguities of contemporary life.
       • 核心问题： create some kind of comfort and pleasure for those on the receiving end of such mediations
         • Polarization
           • Baudrillard (1995) and Luhmann (2000): this is a world, information is seen to replace knowledge, reporting substitutes for understanding..
         • Indifference and guilt vic with each other as consequences of such mediation
           • Bauman,1989 : “ Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an other