The Journalism Practice of the NTU News E-Forum during the 318 Sunflower Movement: An Interpretation Based on Michel Foucault’s Ethical Subject theory

In his late works on subject, Michel Foucault maintains that an individual may constitute himself as an ethical subject by regulating his own behaviors with self-discipline and “technologies of the self.” Foucault’s ethical subject has four aspects, which includes ethical substance, the mode of subjectivation, practice of self and teleology. This thesis focuses on the case of the “NTU News E-Forum,” exploring how the forum reporters constitute themselves as an ethical subject. The “NTU News E-Forum” is a New Media platform during the 318 Sunflower Movement (the movement of anti-black box operation for the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement). The reporters use new technologies to do news reporting, and fulfill journalistic professional ideology with high self-discipline and mutual supervision. Through the interviews, the researcher finds that the reporters of the NTU News E-Forum are set onto the ethical subject constitution process because of the anxiety of being idle the time away on the event spots and the biased reports of the mainstream media. While facing news events, the reporters manage to fulfill the journalistic professional ideology, which also makes them identify themselves as a real journalist. The researcher also finds that among the NTU News E-Forum’s reporters, “community” plays a very important role on the process of subjectification. How the community members proofread and discuss the perspectives of each other’s reports and the readers’ feedbacks have influenced how they constitute themselves as an ethical subject. In Foucault’s account on the subject of ethics, community’s influence on individuals is not mentioned. This finding may significantly broaden Foucault’s conception of ethical subject.