Searching for Ethics in Social Media

Abstract

This set of book reviews features three titles that explore an important segment of today’s media landscape—social media. Reviews by Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, Yuwei Lin, and Jenn Burleson Mackay demonstrate that social media are creating a wealth of new and interesting questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, many of these questions can be traced back to enduring issues in media ethics, such as truth, privacy, and transparency, to name just a few. While the tools of social media are new (and continually evolving), media ethicists should not find themselves in need of a completely new skill set to deal with them; we may just need more practice.