Media Ethics

The principal purpose of this course is to introduce the students to the contemporary public debate on the ethical and political implications in the use of traditional and new media. Media ethics has in fact become a new area of applied ethics and has acquired a central role in philosophy, especially with the increase in number of platforms, their means, and the variety of arenas in which public discourse confronts new social problems. This course intends to offer a critical analysis of the instruments and the dynamics of the various forms of contemporary communication in order to identify possible restrictions, intrinsic values and normative indications. The course aims to illustrate how the target of all media (television, journalism, advertising, social networks, cinematic narrations, political and professional communications) is no longer a simple recipient of a message, as was often in past models of communication. The course will start with the rehabilitation of a normative conception of rhetoric, the one by which it is possible to make good reasons win over the wrong ones. Subsequently, the course will provide a historical reconstruction of the development of media, and this will be proposed in order to provide the students with the knowledge necessary to understand the evolution of these means of communication as a premise to their critical analysis. Each media will have its module, in which both theoretical explanations and practical examples will be offered. Finally, a monographic part will be dedicated to the relationship between media and the exercise of political power, starting from the first philosophical reflections on this topic (the School of Frankfurt, Existentialism and Foucault) to the more recent researches on web politics and its new conception of democracy. This course will provide and develop student competences coherently with the intention of training potential political consultants, who will be able to elaborate efficient social campaigns and informed communication strategies.

At Understand the structural changes of the relationship between politics, society and communication in the new Millennium;
2)Recognize communication strategies in both traditional and new media;
3)Analyse one of the most important political arena of the contemporary world critically - both from a descriptive and a normative perspective;
4)Develop their understanding of media and improve their personal ability for critical judgment of the latter through practical exercises (i.e. proposals of social campaigns, rhetoric analysis of public discourses and different forms of narrations, etc.)