Am I smarter this week?

Ethics are hard to discuss when the social media is barely out of its infancy. We are still getting used to be globally connected, interacting with other cultures whose sense of ethics vastly differs from ours. Calum alluded to this when he suggested in hs comment o Adam’s blog that what’s right and the norm in the UK would be against the very fibre of being in another culture.

The vast majority of internet denizens forget that businesses, whether they are present online or physcally, are not people. Morality and ethics are secondary concerns to most profit-seeking businesses. Like I mentioned in my post, Facebook are exploiting the data of their users to generate revenue or facilitate government spying. The market isn’t convinced what Facebook’s revenue model is and share price has plummeted since the IPO, so ethical use of user data has taken a backseat as revenue needs to be generated. So, I hope that anyone reading my post realises this and reflects on the fact that ethics are a secondary concern to global social media conglomerate and people need to be wary of the faustian pact we have made with Facebook.

What have I learnt? I read Calum’s blog and realised that in a large scale decentralized protest movement on the internet can degenrate very quickly if participants do not behave ethically. Rape and death threat’s bought down the GamerGate movement and true message was lost, if everyone had behaved sensibly the subject wouldn’t have shifted to harassment of women.

I did gain an insight into cyber bullying of both teachers and students from Anna’s vlog and Nam’s post. My mother is a teacher and before this week I had never considered that disgruntled parents may have a bone to grind with teachers. Mum has managed to keep personal and professional online identity separate until now so I’m sure she’ll be insulated from abuse.