Content-Era Ethics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21245494 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tess Mcnulty, T Michael McNulty (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Cultural Analytics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2371-4549 • E-ISSN: 2371-4549 |
| Publisher | CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.22148/001c.22220 |
| OpenAlex | W3153509735 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 8 |
New media forms affect a culture, in part, by reshaping what is seeable and sayable: what “ideas,” as Neil Postman once put it, “we can conveniently express.” In this essay, I ask what one of today’s major new media forms—viral, digital “content”—compels us to see and say. To address that question, I em-brace a makeshift, hybrid methodology, informed by theory, sociology, arts criticism, and the digital humanities, and eschewing media theoretical orthodoxies that have been dominant across the humanities (namely: an exaggerated emphasis on the “medium” at the expense of the “message”). From this poly-glot perspective, I analyze content contained in a database that I have compiled, indexing 205,147 of the most-shared pieces of viral media on sites like Facebook and Twitter, from 2014 to 2019. After survey-ing this content’s basic features, I focus on one, particularly popular and quintessential content genre, which I call the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, sentimental account of a heroic act. The uplifting anec-dote, I argue, promotes a novel type of ethics, ideally suited to the content economy. I then track this ethics’ dissemination into the broader culture, through a discussion of two prominent, aesthetic artifacts: George Saunders’ prize-winning, best-selling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and NBC’s popular sitcom, The Good Place (2016-2020)
Aesthetics · Anecdote · Art · Criticism · Digital content · Digital media · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Digital Games and Media · Law · Media Influence and Health · Misinformation and Its Impacts
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |