I don’t have any ready topic for my thesis and I hope our seminar will help me to develop it. Anyway I’m thinking to conduct my research in the field of applied ethics, particularly I would like to focus on ethical aspects of mass media, such as journalism, broadcasting, and the most interesting for me – advertising, public relations and new social media. Now I’m on stage of finding philosophically adequate way to study this problematics.

Doing a research in the field of applied ethics implies, on the one hand, looking at the issue from the perspective of general moral standards and values. In the case of ethics of mass media these means questioning about freedom, responsibility, truth and honesty, privacy etc. On the other hand, it requires an attempt of studying these general moral standards as an ethical basis of particular institutions and structures in society.

I see as an important goal of my project an attempt to look at ethics of mass media through social, political, economic and aesthetic perspectives and to find what are universal values in communication as a field of human activity and to analyze their outcomes in specific situations.

My interest is inspired by Clifford Christians’s research in the field of communication ethics, as well as on Manuel Castells and Niklas Luhmann philosophy of communication, and partly by post-structuralist philosophical tradition.