Social Media Ethics and the Rhetorical Tradition

[...]of such diverse digital rhetorical artifacts that are produced, distributed, and consumed within and across equally diverse digital discourse communities, we are less focused on the question of whether to study today's social media networks as rhetorical composing but more attuned to applying an array of rhetorical and ethical frameworks, methods, and methodologies, within both academic and public contexts. The book first articulates an operational definition of virtue ethics by juxtaposing Aristotelian concepts from Nicomachean Ethics with three specific frameworks: utilitarianism, the evaluation of behavior based on its greater good for a vast majority, with its roots in the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill; deontology, the assessment of actions based on their adherence to existing ethical or moral principles, a la Immanuel Kant; and ism, a more attention to cultural and ideological as opposed to universal conditions that drive the definition and evaluation of ethical behavior in both digital and non-digital contexts, relying on philosophers from Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault to rhetoricians such as James Berlin and James Porter. [...]Colton and Holmes organize their resulting discussion around a series of diverse technological genres and modalities to document how virtue ethics offers rhetoric and composition scholars a better understanding of the digital habits of everyday users. Here, the authors deploy Jacques Ranciere's theory of active equality as a "hexis of social justice" to challenge closed captioning as both an ethical and, in some contexts, unethical practice. [...]the authors challenge mere captioning for captioning's sake, with more focus on how the use of such captioning is part of the meaning- and knowledge-making process of digital rhetorical composing.