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ABSTRACT
In our current historical moment, marked by increasing technological mediation of human communication, this essay investigates the relationship between, and effects of, technological mediation on intersubjective intentionality and moral consciousness. Beginning with an explication of the phenomenological concept of intersubjective intentionality as a key component in the structure of moral consciousness, this essay then investigates how media ecology can provide insight to the effects of technological mediation and digital communication technologies on our intersubjective relationships and our moral experiences.
Notes
1 Corey Anton, “Phenomenology,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen et al. (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 9.
2 This statement paraphrases Neil Postman’s reflection upon the printing press’ effect upon European culture in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993).
3 Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932).
4 Steve Duck and David T. McMahan, “Self and Identity: Transacting a Self in Interaction with Others,” in Bridges Not Walls: A Book About Interpersonal Communication, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 86
5 See John Stewart, “Foundations of Dialogic Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64, no. 2 (1978): 183–201; Richard L. Johannesen, “The Emerging Concept of Communication as Dialogue,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 57, no. 4 (1971): 373–82; Stanley Deetz, “Words Without Things: Toward a Social Phenomenology of Language,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (1973): 40–51; Ronald C. Arnett, “Toward a Phenomenological Dialogue,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 45, no. 3 (1981): 201–12; Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber’s Dialogue (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986); Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics (New York: Guilford Press, 1996); Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna, Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004); Pat Arneson, ed., “Philosophy of Communication: Entering the Conversation,” in Perspectives on Philosophy of Communication (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), 1–17.
6 This will be detailed later through the work of Calvin O. Schrag, “The Structure of Moral Experience: A Phenomenological and Existential Analysis,” Ethics 73, no. 4 (1963): 255–65.
7 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), 67.
8 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2002), 16.
9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
10 Ibid., 68.
11 Ibid., 163.
12 Ibid., 162.
13 Ibid., 163.
14 Schrag, “The Structure of Moral Experience.”
15 Ibid., 255, 256.
16 Ibid., 257.
17 Ibid., 265.
18 Ibid., 258.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Martin Buber, “Elements of the Interhuman: Elements of the Interhuman,” trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, Psychiatry 20, no. 2 (1957): 105.
22 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010).
23 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
24 Ibid., 202–203.
25 Arnett and Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age.
26 Buber, I and Thou, 3.
27 Ibid., 7.
28 Francis Bacon and Joseph Devey, Novum Organum (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010), 58.
29 Postman, Technopoly, xii.
30 Clifford G. Christians, “Religious Perspectives on Communication Technology,” Journal of Media & Religion 1, no. 1 (2002): 38–40.
31 J. M. van der Laan, “Language and Being Human in Technology,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 32, no. 3 (2012): 242.
32 Postman, Technopoly.
33 Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979), 90–91; Technopoly; Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 2015).
34 Thomas Gencarelli, “The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology in the Work and Thought of Neil Postman,” The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8, no. 1 (2000): 94.
35 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982).
36 Lance Strate summarizes Eric A. Havelock’s scholarship, particularly concerning thought structures regarding the concept of justice in Lance Strate, “A Media Ecology Review,” Communication Research Trends 23, no. 2 (2004): 13–14.
37 Postman, Technopoly, 13.
38 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 13–14.
39 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
40 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2012), xii.
41 Ellul, The Technological Society, 379–80.
42 Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1985), 5–47.
43 Ibid., 113–14.
44 Ibid., 123.
45 Douglas Rushkoff, “The New Nationalism of Brexit and Trump Is a Product of the Digital Age,” Fast Company, July 7, 2016, http://www.fastcoexist.com/3061574/the-new-nationalism-of-brexit-and-trump-is-a-product-of-the-digital-age.
46 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
47 Ibid., 61–130.
48 TEDx Talks,“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive: Phuc Tran at TEDxDirigo,” YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeSVMG4GkeQ.
49 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 68.
50 Rushkoff, “The New Nationalism of Brexit and Trump is a Product of the Digital Age.”
51 Scott Timberg, “The Digital Media Age Is All About the Past: ‘The Internet Is Not an Extension of Television,’” Salon, July 7, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/07/07/the_digital_media_age_is_all_about_the_past_the_internet_is_not_an_extension_of_television/.
52 Rushkoff, “The New Nationalism of Brexit and Trump is a Product of the Digital Age.”
53 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41.
54 Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016, http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006.
55 Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1776–80.
56 Francine Deutsch and Ronald A. Madle, “Empathy: Historic and Current Conceptualizations, Measurement, and a Cognitive Theoretical Perspective,” Human Development 18, no. 4 (1975): 267–87; Helene Borke, “Interpersonal Perception of Young Children: Egocentrism or Empathy?” Developmental Psychology 5, no. 2 (1971): 263; Heidi Lene Maibom, Empathy and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1; Martin L. Hoffman, “Interaction of Affect and Cognition in Empathy,” Emotions, Cognition, and Behavior 3, no. 4 (1984): 103–31; Mark H. Davis, “Measuring Individual Differences in Empathy: Evidence for a Multidimensional Approach,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44, no. 1 (1983): 113; Maibom, Empathy and Morality, 5.
57 Daniel Goleman, “Emotional Intelligence. Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” Learning 24, no. 6 (1996): 49–50.
58 Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5; Schrag, “The Structure of Moral Experience,” 257.
59 C. Daniel Batson and Adam A. Powell, “Altruism and Prosocial Behavior,” in Handbook of Psychology, ed. Irving B. Weiner, Theodore Millon, and Melvin J. Lerner, vol. 5 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 474.
60 Ibid.
61 See C. Daniel Batson et al., “Empathic Joy and the Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, no. 3 (1991): 413–26; Nancy Eisenberg and Paul A. Miller, “The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors,” Psychological Bulletin 101, no. 1 (1987): 91–119.
62 “Internet Trolls and the Gyges Effect,” Milinism, August 24, 2013, https://milinism.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/internet-trolls-and-the-gyges-effect/; David R. Iverson, The Ring of Gyges: Anonymity and Technological Advance’s Effect on the Deterrence of Non-State Actors in 2035 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air War College, 2011); John Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321–26; Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak, “Effects of Anonymity, Invisibility, and Lack of Eye-Contact on Toxic Online Disinhibition,” Computers in Human Behavior 28, no. 2 (2012): 434–43.
63 Stephen Marche, “The Epidemic of Facelessness,” The New York Times, February 14, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-epidemic-of-facelessness.html.
64 Postman, Technopoly.