Images, Ethics, Technology (Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies)

Images, Ethics, Technology explores the changing ethical implications of images and the ways they are communicated and understood.

It emphasises how images change not only through their modes of representation, but through our relationship to them. In order to understand images, we must understand how they are produced, communicated, and displayed.

Each of the 14 essays chart the relationship to technology as part of a larger complex social and cultural matrix, highlighting how these relations constrain and enable notions of responsibility with respect to images and what they represent. They demonstrate that as technology develops and changes, the images themselves change, not just with respect to content, but in the very meanings and indices they produce.

This is a collection that not only asks: who speaks for the art? But also: who speaks for the witnesses, the cameras, the documented, the landscape, the institutional platforms, the taboos, those wishing to be forgotten, those being seen and the experience of viewing itself?

Images, Ethics, Technology is ideal for advanced level students and researchers in media and communications, visual culture and cultural studies.

Sharrona Pearl is Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, was published by Harvard University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a book entitled Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other.