Abstract
The transatlantic field of global media ethics is premised on a search for the conceptual foundations of plurality. This article is a critique of this very endeavor. I offer this critique through works authored by moral anthropologists of Islam and through a close reading of the Urdu text Cyberistan: Muslim Naujavan Aur Social Media (Cyberistan: Muslim Youth and Social Media) authored by Sadatullah Husaini, the current president of the Indian reformist Islamic organization Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. My article is a post-foundational critique of the implicit foundationalism through which “Islam” and “plurality” are related to each other within inquiries into the ethics of digital communication. I take on digital communication because of its increasingly global and synchronic nature that rendered questions concerning plurality in media ethics particularly urgent. I argue that even though it is important to ask what difference means conceptually for a global media ethics today, it can only make space for radical plurality via the negative, by way of its contradictions and structural constraints. If a global media ethics is supposed to be based on openness and plurality, it can be so only by limiting and weakening its own ontological claims – beyond positive metaphysical groundings, cultures, civilizations, Islam, etc. In other words, it requires a reflexivity to its own position as an academic discipline that produces knowledge under certain historical conditions and an understanding of its own political practice.
Highlights
Is there a global digital media ethics? Surely not as an established discipline or a practice that would connect citizen journalists who are, say, from India with those in France
Kramer that many people who lead their lives increasingly online and observe the new scales of global connectedness may have wondered how to act regarding the diversity of values, norms, and virtues required to blaze a trail through the wilderness of digital communication
There exists a field of inquiry – tethered to the disciplines of communication and philosophy – called “global media ethics” which has recently engaged with questions of the digital realm
Summary
Is there a global digital media ethics? Surely not as an established discipline or a practice that would connect citizen journalists who are, say, from India with those in France. There exists a field of inquiry – tethered to the disciplines of communication and philosophy – called “global media ethics” which has recently engaged with questions of the digital realm. The key arguments this field proposes concern the global world in continuation with discussions in journalism ethics. The digital condition poses new questions concerning the convergence of what were formerly more separate media and the participation of all kinds of (non-professional) agents in the production of news (Ess 2014; Ward 2015; Christians 2019). I mean the basic assumptions people have regarding what kinds of things or processes there are in the world, how they are related, and what structures establish both the things/processes and their relations
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