Ethics Topics: Text Messaging

If any technology has changed our lives, it's text messaging. Last time I checked, the average number of texts sent on any given day exceeded 4 billion. That number can only grow from here. Texting is also now one of our most debated topics. States are adopting text messaging bans for drivers. Schools, including Jones County Junior College, are banning cell phones and text messaging from the classroom.

Yet as fast as bans are set, people find ways around them. Teenagers, the most active text messengers by far, are responsible for the immense popularity of a ring tone that cannot be heard by an older ear.

Almost any public event up to and presumably including religious services now includes people fiddling with phones during the event.

This brings us to some questions. Is text messaging at certain times and in certain situations merely rude, or is it unethical? If it is dangerous, does that make it unethical? If it diminishes the experience that others get from the event, does that make it unethical?

Is text messaging during class or during school events a matter of ethics, or is it simply a fact of changing times?

What are some ethical dilemmas you see brought about by a constantly texting society?

Ethics Topics: Online Relationships

Perhaps one of the most profound changes technology has wrought on society is the ability to form and maintain human relationships online. Dating sites are only one example. People connect and reconnect with friends, family, professional contacts, and romantic interests through social networking sites like Facebook, through gaming sites like WoW, and through virtual worlds like Second Life.

It's also brought broken relationships with people citing online infidelity as cause for divorce like the now infamous British woman who accused her husband of a Second Life affair.

With these new types of relationships, we have new challenges to traditional relationship ethics. If a woman goes out for drinks in real life with a former romantic partner without telling her current romantic partner about it, we probably each have an immediate opinion about the ethics of the situation even without knowing all of the details. What if that same woman friends the former partner on a social network instead? What if it's a network on which she actually has hundreds of contacts? Is she obligated to full disclosure?

These new ways of conducting relationships bring not only new arenas in which to decide right and wrong but also new challenges to deciding degrees of right and wrong. At which point does Facebook chatting behind your partner's back become the equivalent of meeting a person face-to-face behind your partner's back?

There are many possible answers to this question and others.

• Is it wrong to pretend to be someone else on a social networking site? If so, how wrong?
• Is it wrong to make your qualities sound a little better than strictly true on an online dating site? If so, how wrong?
• Is it wrong to have multiple flirtatious chat relationships going on at once in which there is mental intimacy but not physical intimacy and in which none of the various partners are aware of the others? If so, how wrong?

No doubt you'll have your own ideas for ethics questions to explore. We are only just discovering what people might do with and to their relationships in social networking environs. Opportunities for original ethical studies abound.

Ethics Topics: Social Networking

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking sites bring up lots of ethical questions. Here are a few to consider:

Time Theft: Is it wrong to check Facebook from work? Is that actually stealing time from employers? Or does feeling connected to friends help to facilitate focus and productivity?

Privacy: Where do you cross the line on violating the privacy of a friend when posting information about that friend online? You wouldn't spill a potentially life-altering secret told in confidence, but would you post a picture without permission? Would you repeat something learned on that friend's Facebook wall to someone outside the Facebook list that friend chose to share it with? Would you tell something embarrassing about the friend in a semi-anonymous manner (without using the name but in a way others might guess)?

Intellectual Property: Are you posting items on your social networks without acknowledging how you found them? Are you stealing clever status updates from others? Are you retweeting without including the original tweeter's identity in the post?

An ethical study of social networking would ask that we consider our answers to questions like this in light of whether we believe the behaviors to be right or wrong. It also asks of us that we examine how we arrive at our conclusions of right and wrong. By what basis do we determine our ethics, especially in situations that may be new to us and new enough to society at large that we don't have a strong tradition to tell us how others have judged right and wrong?

These are just a few of the ways you might begin research a paper on social networking and ethics. You'll probably want to brainstorm more ideas before you begin.

Defining Ethics

David B. Resnik explains ethics like this:

When most people think of ethics (or morals), they think of rules for distinguishing between right and wrong, such as the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), a code of professional conduct like the Hippocratic Oath ("First of all, do no harm"), a religious creed like the Ten Commandments ("Thou Shalt not kill..."), or a wise aphorisms like the sayings of Confucius. This is the most common way of defining "ethics": ethics are norms for conduct that distinguish between or acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Ethics can also be thought of as the personal code of conduct we each adopt through which we govern our own behavior. We might shape our own ethics based on religious beliefs and/or social norms, but we do make personal ethical choices each day as we decide how to conduct our jobs, how to treat the people around us, and which activities to engage in or abstain from based on a sense of right and wrong.

Sometimes ethical choices are very clear. We can all agree that hurting other people is wrong. If someone stood up during a meeting and suddenly punched another person in the room for no reason, there would be easy and general consensus that the behavior was wrong.

If someone sent a text message while another person was speaking during a meeting, we would move into murkier ground. Some might consider the behavior rude or ill-advised but wouldn't go so far as to say it was unethical. Others might believe it was clearly wrong, and still others wouldn't see a problem with it at all, or would perhaps want to know more details about the urgency of the text message before deciding.

Maybe the text messaging scenario would be judged differently by people of different ages or people of different cultures. Maybe it would be judged differently by people who stay connected to their livelihoods through text messaging and those who don't.

Regardless, what we can know is that rapidly changing technology brings about new ethical questions almost faster than we can process them. In this class, we're going to examine some of those questions as we research and consider varying ways to approach them.

Welcome

Welcome to Writing About Ethics in the Digital Age, a site created for Dr. Sharon Gerald's ENG 1123 classes at Jones County Junior College.