Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis

Michael Bromley, Australian Journalism Review

"What a wonderful book! A thoughtful and convincing narrative, theoretically enlightening, and explaining the necessary question: how is the medialized cosmopolitan public sphere – the mediapolis – possible? A new Habermas! A new cosmopolitan critical theory of the emerging global civil society and its contradictions."

Ulrich Beck, University of Munich

"This is a very intelligent and original book by one of the most consistently interesting writers on the media. It is the most penetrating discussion of the moral challenges posed by our relationship to modern media systems, technologies and institutions that I have read to date. Roger Silverstone tackles big and complex issues here which go quite beyond what has come to be regarded as the normal agenda of “media ethics”. In doing so he generates some original and I believe powerful analytical concepts which should begin to establish the new moral-critical agenda that he rightly judges to be so lacking in contemporary media studies."

John Tomlinson, Nottingham Trent University

"Roger Silverstone's delicate meditation offers a guide to the perplexed for the citizen-audiences of the emerging global media sphere. Confronting a full agenda of problems facing humanity such as terrorism, theologico-military empires, and the proper distance toward minorities in an integrating world, Silverstone finds splinters of hope in the contradictory mess of mediated life today. The fact that media somehow bring the world together in a space of appearance, he argues in a style that is at once critical, nuanced, and bold, is enough to encourage us to think of media and morality in the same thought."

John Durham Peters, University of Iowa