Associate Professor Ira Wagman has just published two chapters reflecting his various research projects. The first, entitled “Forgiving without Forgetting: Contending with Digital Memory” appears in Images, Ethics, Technology, a collection edited by Sharrona Pearl and published by Routledge. The chapter explores ethical issues associated with the Internet’s incredible capacity for capturing and redistributing personal information about people. The chapter focuses on the recent decision by the European Court of Justice that granted citizens a “right to be forgotten” when it comes to certain aspects of their digital life. As valuable as such efforts are, Wagman wonders whether a more robust ethical position for contending with digital memory would be to privilege ideas about forgiveness more than ideas about forgetting for addressing how to live in a world where people “cache” more information about others than ever before.
The second chapter, entitled, “Locating UNESCO in the History of Communication Study” appears in The International History of Communication Study, edited by Peter Simonson and David Park and published by Routledge. This chapter explores the challenges of thinking about the UN agency as a “laboratory” for the development, sponsorship, and distribution of communication research. He argues that many communication scholars may have worked for UNESCO in the past, but few have worked on understanding the relationship between the organization and the development of communication as a transnational field of study. He also argues that we lack the methodological subtlety to better understand the activities and impacts of efforts undertaken by multilateral organizations such as UNESCO. He provides a case study on UNESCO’s sponsorship of collective television and radio reception experiments from the 1950s to the 1970s, called “radio-clubs” and “tele-clubs” to illustrate how the organization incorporated and developed communication research in different national contexts.
Thursday, December 10, 2015 in Communication News, News
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