Syed Moshin Abbas
The use of 21st century media tools to develop excellence in cultural creative educational content and resources for the promotion of moral education.
The Prophetic dream would undoubtedly have included the establishment of a modern media rooted in Islamic morality and ethics - one which promoted love, kindness, honesty, chivalry, nobility, generosity etc. Indeed an ethical spiritually based media would arguably be naturally hard-wired to negate the vices that have consistently hampered humanity's holistic moral evolution.
This paper will explore how Islamic virtue ethics can better inform the global media about its responsibility to provide a more morally sound content output.
The moral education of mankind can now be done through online multimedia portals, video tutorials, YouTube uploads, Facebook live streams, Twitter tweets, Instagram pictures, graphic novels, e-flyers – the possibilities seem endless. But how well have Muslims harnessed these opportunities? Is sufficient investment going into the Muslim intellectual and creative capital in the West to produce the excellence in Islamic narrative content required by the emerging generations – Muslim or non-Muslim? This presentation will also explore some successes and failures of moral media education in Britain.
The Western media is no longer neatly contained in places like Fleet Street in London. We are all potential media outfits now – anyone with literacy skills and a computer has an ability to publish their thoughts to the world – even more imperative then that ethical media practice should be taught in schools and madrasa’s perhaps? The debate about media ethics is about questions of right and wrong, good and evil, so if we're talking about media ethics, we need to look not only to the behaviour we expect of others, but also to what we expect of ourselves - parenting and the moral media education at home are therefore arguably equally as important to consider as kids are in their rooms being ethically educated or miseducated on their mobile phones.
Lies, seduction, persuasion, flattery, and hypocrisy have always attended public life; alternative facts, propaganda and fake news have been part of the feedstock of humanity for centuries but in todays age an unprecedented information explosion has been unleashed. As with all human intellectual creative evolution the ethical or moral use of the information on offer will dictate whether this manifestation of our 'progress' will be a 'trick or treat'.
This paper will also explore whether the moral relativism of the West puts it at a fundamental disadvantage in confronting the plethora of ethical challenges presented by modern technology, as compared to the incisive clarity potentially offered by Prophetic morality. The bigger question though is perhaps whether Muslims and their institutions are ready to contribute to shaping humanity's moral future across the media, and if they are already doing it- how so?
So what is the truth of morality in the Western media and is ethical education even an objective for it? Everything is connected and the levers of power, including the biggest corporate media groups such as Rupert Murdochs Newscorp, Disney and even the BBC are arguably overtly or subtley controlled by a minority that can be termed the ‘Structural Elite’. It is not a conspiracy (although there are many conspiracies within the political economy and the media) but the evolution of a confluence of interests coalescing into a sophisticated hierarchical management which uses the mainstream western media in particular to educate, shape opinion, promote policy and often also to drive immoral cultural narratives.
We shall also analyse how the so-called Dark Net with its lack of moral regulation is eroding healthy social institutions such as the family and community with a deluge of pornography, violence, and paedophilia. The Dark Net phenomena we argue demonstrates a new level of hedonism which threatens to consume humanity on a global level.
Rapid advances in media-related use of artificial intelligence are also presenting huge challenges to society with moral debates and legislation often failing to keep pace with the corporations driving and funding them - profit of course being far more important than ethics for their investors. How can Islamic virtue ethics contribute to managing the AI media which is already seeing robots writing and producing news? A Muslim lead on the moral education of 21st century humanity is more vital than ever before – are we ready to deliver it?
