Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Shani OrgadOn 16 June 2006, exactly a month before Roger Silverstone's shocking death, we had our annual Media@LSE "Away Day": an occasion in which members of the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE talk to one another about current and future research interests, sharing their passions, concerns, anxieties and hopes.We went to the historic and beautiful Cumberland Lodge, set in the heart of Windsor Great Park -a stark contrast to the setting of our London offices.There, on a perfect English sunny summer day, ensconced in the greenery of the Park, Roger talked about the issues that occupied his thinking in the last couple of years, which he had developed most profoundly in his last book, Media and Morality (2006).He spoke about the moral significance of the media as the primary framework for people's understanding of the world.He described his conception of the 'mediapolis', which draws on Hanna Arendt's thinking, to describe contemporary media as a global space of appearance.For him, the notion of 'mediapolis' underlined the moral role of the media, in providing, in his words, "a shareable support for difference".On that now very special and memorable day, Roger described the projects he planned to undertake in the future, all part of what he saw as a broader critical project of establishing the primacy of the ethical in social life and, in particular, of the thinking around how the media might be seen to enable or disable, facilitate or deny, moral life. I want to focus in this piece on what I see as some of the implications of RogerSilverstone's work on media and morality for the study of new media and the Internet in particular.This account does not come close to doing justice to his rich and complex work, which extends far beyond the study of new media and the Internet, and even beyond the study of the media.However, as a scholar who was deeply interested in, and fascinated by, the promises and challenges of the Internet since its early days, and, indicatively, as one of the founders of this journal, Roger Silverstone left a very substantial legacy for researchers in the field.I draw particularly on his book Media and Morality (2006), and an earlier (Silverstone, 2003) piece in which he developed the concept of 'proper distance' and proposed some preliminary implications for the
Source: New Media & Society
Author: Shani Orgad
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2075434215