Task 3 - Essay Proposal

Intended Title:

'New Media Advertising Techniques and the Ethical Debate Surrounding These'

I am intending to study, at the broadest level, how advertising techniques have changed/developed since the introduction of the internet.

Extending out of this, I will be examining how advertising/marketing agencies have had to adapt and develop new strategies.

I will be investigating certain instances where new media advertising has worked well, or quite the opposite. 

I will also be examining ethics in the field of new media advertising; being quite a new area/topic, I feel it could be interesting to look into recent theories and ideas about this, and give my own interpretation. 

Expanding on this, I aim to investigate the roles of ethical codes of conduct within this field, to determine whether it is possible to define these codes or whether they are simply too general to be applied in real-life situations.

Concluding this, I will apply my research into the ethical debate to case studies drawn from new media advertising campaigns to attempt to come up with some logical answers. 

Literature Search:

A. David Gordon, John Michael Kittross, John C. Merrill, William Babcock, Michael Dorsher, (2011), Controversies In Media Ethics, London and New York, Routledge.

Charles Ess, (2009), Digital Media Ethics, Cambridge, Polity Press

Lucienne Roberts, (2006), Good: An Introduction To Ethics in Graphic Design, Switzerland, AVA Publishing

Paul Hodkinson (2011), Media, Culture and Society: an Introduction, London, SAGE Publications.

V. Alia, (2004), Media Ethics and Social Change, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant & Keiran Kelly, (2009), New Media - A Critical Introduction, Abingdon, Routledge

Cultsock.org

I feel that these sources will provide me with a grounding in some important theories built around New Media, which should apply to advertising techniques and the ethics surrounding these. This will hopefully enable to construct a solid essay backed with a good level of research.

Cultsock.org is a website I used to use in school for Communication Studies, a subject I took almost by accident. In this, I studied basic communication theory and looked at some media models, many of which were detailed on this website. As it turns out, a lot of the theories I learnt about appear to apply to many situations not only in New Media, but also in Graphic Design, which I'm quite happy about.