Sustainability and Social Responsibility in the Media, and of the Media: An Introduction

This chapter introduces the diverse, ethically oriented book aimed at a broad audience of practitioners, researchers, scholars and advanced students alike. The breadth of topics, already significant at this stage, commands an inclusive and purposeful approach. The notions of media competence in cultural terms, fused with multifaceted sustainability and corporate social responsibility demand such a take on the subject. Should this volume see new editions, they will indeed move with the times and technologies, media formats and methodologies that shall emerge. This introductory chapter serves primarily as an overview. It introduces the reader to the broad complexity of media-related subjects within a variety of contexts. Some contributions have been designed to focus on technology. More than technology, however, at the heart of this book are the human communicationMedia communication needs, the demand for insight and entertainment, the community-driven uses of media, as are indeed the evolving meanings of the terms ‘medium’ and ‘media’. This chapter concentrates on a diverse, yet integrated set of foci presented in the book. The multitude of authors’ perspectives explore a variety of subjects in media ethicsMedia ethic, sustainability, pragmatism and more, including: applied ontological analyses, legal and policyPolicies angles, community-oriented discourses in healthHealth and customs alike, various notions of fake newsFake news, and debatable forms of contentContents and modes of interaction. Lastly, we call for an exploration of the perimeters of technology not yet prepared for media use: Ones that may in the futureFuture of media cause an extensive and novel deep-seated transformation, likely to be disruptive. These may soon trigger new ethicalEthical debates around policiesPolicies fit for processes as disrupting as those accompanying the advent of the Web or the current commanding impactImpacts of AI. Media, in the broadest sense, may again evolve, qualitatively so. It is therefore argued that we may soon need to direct our gaze to new technologiesNew technologies emerging from the advances in sciences of the human mind.