WE LIVE IN A CULTURE SO SATURATED BY THE MEDIA THAT IT SEEMS FAIR to ask sometimes: what is real any more? So much of what we know about our-selves, our communities and our world is shaped by our complex relationship with the media. This results in a kind of paradox. Never before have we had so much access to what is going on around us – the speed and pervasiveness of modern communications are astonishing – and yet many feel even more cut off and unsure of what is, in fact, happening to them. The world seems more interconnected than ever before, and yet ethnic, cultural, social and economic divisions appear to be deepening, not diminishing. ‘Reality TV’ is more surreal and faked than BBC costume dramas. What is going on?

In this chapter I want to ask how these developments relate to two questions. First, does our postmodern mediasphere mean that because ‘reality’ seems increasingly inaccessible and diversity so great that just about anything goes? My answer to this is an emphatic no. But this raises another question. How should we argue about ethical questions in the public sphere today, given the kinds of dramatic changes that are occurring? Here my answer is more equivocal and indirect. We need to understand why we care about the public sphere in the first place, before moving on to evaluate the effects of various changes – like the increasing pervasiveness of a celebrity-obsessed, commercially-driven media – on our ethical beliefs.