Johannesen Ch. 1

In Johannesen’s first chapter, he discussed ethical responsibility in human communication. He connects ethics to communication by saying that the ethical dimensions of communication cannot be discredited. These techniques and ethical standards may be debatable, but they still exist.

In communication there is a sender and a receiver. Senders must find a golden mean to adapt to their receiver or audience. Is adapting to an audience an ethical implication? How do we avoid this? In communication classes, I have always been taught to review my audience, take in their demographics and their cultural differences, then adjust my message to be more suitable. Johannesen suggests that in doing this it is possible to lose the message entirely, or to not adapt to our audience makes the message unrelatable.

He connects the ideas of freedom, responsibility, intention, sincerity, morality, integrity, and character with communication ethics. He explains how each of these plays a factor in how we judge the ethicality of a communicator and his or her message. Does our judgment change because the questionable ethical content of the message was unintentional? Or is she or he free from the ethical standards because the message was said with sincerity?

I found several things interesting in this chapter. I liked how Johannesen mentioned that with the freedom of speech you could not decrease responsibility. Instead, responsibility and freedom work together, and communicators should respect their freedom and take responsibility as the “consequence” of that freedom. I think this is a low price. I also found Karen Lebacqz’s statement intriguing, “Our choices about what to do are also choices about whom to be.” Our actions explain our character, if our actions are insincere or unintentional this can disrupt our image.

I noticed this chapter did not mention the cultural ethical differences. He discusses the different meanings of western and eastern ideas of sincerity, but not the other values. How would an insincere message or the right of free speech differ in various cultures?