Media and Morality [antikvár]

Preface and AcknowledgementsThis book picks up where my previous one, Why Study the Media?, left off. It deals with what I am beginning to see as the second of the great envi-ronmental crises with which global societies are increasingly having to deal: the crisis in the world of communication. This is a moral and an ethical as well as a political crisis, and I argue in this book not only that the pollution of this mediated environment is threatening our capacity to sustain a reasonable level of humanity, but that it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incompréhension and inhumanity.Many individuals have helped me along the way both directly and indirectly. Some indeed have had the dubious privilege of reading portions of the manuscript way before they should have been released for any kind of consumption other than my own; and I thank Lilie Chouliaraki, Richard Sennett, Steven Lukes, Nick Couldry, Maggie Scammell, Tom Hollihan and Helena Bejar for undertaking what none of them reasonably should have been asked to do. Terhi Rantanen was the first to read the whole of the manuscript in near final draft and made a huge number of helpful suggestions for its improvement. Otherwise, and it is not at all an otherwise, thanks are due to my many students, colleagues and friends in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, whose intellectual presence has been, and indeed remains, constantly invigorating.Thanks are also due to my colleagues, especially Dean Geoffey Cowan, at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, who generously hosted a period of sabbatical time in the spring of 2004, which was sufficiently calm and stimulating to enable me to under-take the research which led to the writing of chapter 3.The last year of the manuscript's writing was by no means straightfor-ward. Many doctors, both in London and Mexico City, are owed immea-