Leon Miller







Aesthetics and power: From the perspective of communication ethics

People make conscious decisions of an aesthetic nature that are oriented toward quality, excellence and value. The intention is to transform one's life experience into a beautiful existence (Michel Foucault)

Communication is valued because it facilitates an increase in achieving desired outcomes for individuals, organisations and cultures. Technology plays a role in facilitating communication (this is especially true today with the impact of ICT). This paper argues that aesthetics and ethics are key to communicating in ways that increase the human ability to have more beneficial interactions. Ethics and aesthetics contribute to the inherent human desire to experience complementarity (meaning communicating to help humans to integrate better with each other and with the environment, technology designed to be ubiquitous and contiguous, plus communicating on the basis of the new global communication ethic).

Keywords: complementarity, panopticism, the Diderot Effect, ubiquitous computer technology, contiguity


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Note on the contributor

Leon Miller is an instructor of Business Ethics, Intercultural Communications and International Relations at Tallinn University of Technology. He has a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals on a range of issues including a new ethos for the global political economy, global transaction ethics, the philosophy of religion, and international relations. He can be contacted at leonmonroemiller@yahoo.com.