As the NCA Legislative Council adamantly states in their Credo for Ethical Communication on November 1999, “ethical communication enhances human worth and dignity by fostering truthfulness, fairness, responsibility, personal integrity, and respect for self and others” (NCA, 1999). Like gamma radiation improves Dr. Bruce Banner’s strength to unfathomable heights, so too does ethical communication improve the strengths of an ordinary human being. As a young man on the verge of leaving undergraduate life, it makes me painfully angry that communication ethics is something that isn’t introduced into public school curricula earlier in a student’s educational adventure. The principles introduced in the NCA aside, my view of communication ethics revolves around that of honesty, respect, and courage, three principles I believe have universal applications. All three works in tandem and often come into conflict with one another but never to the detriment of the ethical communicator. You need to be honest about your feelings and beliefs when communicating, but never do so without denying your peers the respect that you would want reciprocated, and, in the face of opposition, have enough courage to say, “You know what, I was absolutely wrong,” or “no, I was absolutely right.” I understand that my rendition of communication ethics may be a bit confusing, but unlike the Incredible Hulk, the application of ethics is incredibly complex
In order to better understand communication ethics, it’s important for us to recognize the inherent complexity of the principles introduced by the NCA. For comic book fans, the underlying ethics in communication is very much the Speed Force of our department; seemingly simple, frustratingly complex. At face value, the individual principles listed in the credo all seem pretty straightforward but once applied in tandem, they become deceptively complicated to actually achieve. Take the NCA’s focus on common sense values that many can agree as being fundamental aspects of ethical communication, honesty and respect, common sense principles that need no further explanation. These two ideas mask other, equally important principles in the NCA credo. One thing that often gets overlooked when it comes to communicating is the endorsement of “diversity of perspective, and tolerance of dissent… fundamental to a civil society” (NCA, 1999). With honesty and respect as its focus, the NCA's principles often give way to a bit of groupthink, this inability to engage in compelling discourse for fear of breaking group cohesiveness that unfortunately leads to the detriment of the other principles. It’s easy to forget that oftentimes individuals have different levels of honesty and respect, having all of the communication ethics in mind can help us become better communicators by shaping how we speak and respond to others in a way that can further enhance the knowledge of all parties.
As I’ve remarked beforehand, I believe that communication ethics can have universal applications. Applying the NCA’s entire credo to other areas of our lives can have the same positive effect of improving communication albeit the ways in which it manifests in other contexts will be somewhat… different. Take what happened a year and a half ago, on a sunny March afternoon. I found myself standing in front of a nondescript Lowe’s Hardware Store and ended tying a bunch of teabags on an entire aisle of Roundup pesticide jugs.
Let me explain.
It was something I decided to do for my GWAR class, Rhetoric of Ecology, after we were tasked with doing a “Culture Jam” on a major corporation. Defined by University of Washington professor Dr. Christine Harold as a kind-of scholarly prank or a “stylistic exaggeration” that augments “dominant modes of communication that interrupts… conventional patterns” (Harold, 2004), culture jamming was my attempt at bringing to light the issue of pesticides unknowingly being present in our food without having to publish a lengthy, in-depth essay on the topic for the masses to consume (although I still had to write one for the class). I decided to use this particular assignment to explore ethics in communication not only because it was one of the most out-there thing I did for our department but also because I felt like it would spark effective conversation on the limits and boundaries of communication ethics in general.
While I had done my due diligence and researched the issue heavily; finding various articles on the presence of Glyphosate, a chemical herbicide, in multiple popular tea brands, and writing a lengthy essay on Roundup and Monsanto’s lack of actions towards fixing the issue, none of the information I found was actually presented on the culture jam (Figure 1) itself.
Was my jam right or wrong, then?
You know what, I’m actually having second thoughts about my “communicative ethicality” on this particular assignment. While the essay I wrote followed the goals of the NCA Credo’s ethical communication standards well, advocating for a cause using peer-reviewed scholarship and evidence that had the potential to enhance the community by teaching readers about issues that could harm their health, the only individual that would actually read that assignment would be my professor. While I feel like what I did was a “courageous expression of personal convictions (NCA, 1999) in that I could have received a stern talking to by a hardworking Lowes employee, I feel like the culture jam itself was lacking in another ethical standard, specifically the “promotion of communication resources and opportunities [that] contribute to… society” (NCA, 1999). At that point in time, I felt like my jam would bewilder potential passing Lowes customers and coerce them into researching what Lipton tea has to do with Roundup pesticide, but I felt like my approach had a bit too much faith in the general population’s willingness to research. As a classroom assignment, my culture jam essay follows the NCA Credo but outside of the class, it was lacking. Although, I wouldn’t necessarily consider my culture jam unethical, it was definitely a bit misguided and not as well-thought out as it should have been.
If anything, this assignment, meaning this Integration of Ethics paper, showed me that there’s still room to grow for me as an effective ethical communicator. As someone who wants to take the lessons I’ve learned in our department to advance values and ideals that I feel would benefit society as a whole (e.g. teaching folks about ethical communication), it’s important for me to be able to directly present those ideals to the general public. If I were to do this exact culture jam again, I think it would be infinitely more ethical (as well as effective) if there were detailed notes or a link that would lead onlookers to the extensive paper that I wrote.