Throughout this week's content I began to be more interested in our ethics in relation to speech and feeling ones gets from listening to information. I had never really thought about how our motives could be changed simply based on the way information is delivered. One thing that really stood out to me was in the Cooper article "Emotional interpretation is the first stage in a process of emotional self-organization that takes place over repeated cycles of the intentional arc." (Cooper 12) I believe having the ability to successfully give a speech to a mass audience can shape what you take from the information. While reading the article I also thought about the different aspects one takes from given information from a cultural standpoint. I thought it was interesting reading about Obama and the reaction people had when he talked about the issue of race vs. other politicians that don't have a diverse background. It is more powerful coming from someone who has either been affected in some way or can truly understand things in a different perspective that you ever could.
In our current society I think we have a problem with communicative ethics. There are various examples I could give but I think the best one is the lack of diversity in journalism. I believe a lot of people in the US are marginalized based on their race or culture because we do not represent them in the ways that we should. In the US many newsrooms and news organizations are dominated by a mostly white population. This can have negative effects on the transparency of stories. We also seem to all have different communicative ethics when it comes to online communication. It's hard to get a true feeling of what someone is saying or what they mean online. Things can be taken way out of context and its very interesting to me how different people react to those things. In order to truly understand communicative ethics we must look at all forms of communication which seems very difficult to me based of how many different streams of information are out there and the various cultures they come from. Although it is a difficult task this could potentially change our whole society.
I think your point on the lack of diversity in journalism and online communication contributing to ethics problems makes a lot of sense. The lack of possible perspectives in the media that we fail to notice or give voice to creates dissonance between groups of people, and from the media to their audience in general. It isn't necessarily ethical to say you represent an entire country's news when only certain people are showcased on news broadcasts. In terms of online communication, I think this is a very interesting topic. I definitely have had experiences where people have been more willing to say unacceptable things online, under the shield of an anonymous identity via a website. I think the anonymity gives certain people this idea that their words have no consequences, and they turn to crude and hateful remarks because they feel safe enough to say those things. I have to wonder though, is it possible to police online platforms for this type of speech completely? There are so many corners of the internet where people have free reign to say whatever they want, it is interesting to think about how to crack down on hate speech everywhere.
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