#UOSM2008 – Topic 4 Summary

This week topics of ethical issues raised by social media with regards to educational and business use has been extremely interesting.

For me the most exciting part was trying to distinguish between these two lines. Business often want to educate their customers in a business environment too try and encourage users to buy their products. In some cases they need to educate the user in order to increase the chance of a purchase of a product or service.

For the first time in this module I struggled to think of an ethical issue of social media within education. Thank you for the comments which kindly gave me some guidance of the sort of examples required.

As always, different members of the module each took a different approach on the title. The general feel that I got from reading others blog posts. Is that it is becoming increasingly apparent that some sort of guidelines/laws need to be put in place for both business and educational communities with regards to social media. By having these it will hopefully reduce the number of ethically unacceptable incidences. For example it is not acceptable, as discussed in depth, for a head of PR to tweet racist comments, but nor is it acceptable to tweet savage unnecessary abuse in response. As discussed in a previous blog post just because you’re on twitter doesn’t mean you can say what you want.

On the other hand many people discussed whether a one size fits all policy will work or not, the chances are that it will not, mainly due to the variety of users/points of views on social networks.

In my opinion there is always going to be a divide on what is considered a joke and what is abuse. This is more or less dependent on who is involved, any negative feedback I receive is always taken with a pinch of salt, and I never take it personally. But other people/organisations have global reputations to maintain and so taking abusive comments on the chin isn’t always an option.