Web 2.0 Ethics

The Ethics of Web 2.0 Good Practices on the Social Web

Trebor ScholzDepartment of Media Studytrebor@thing.net

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

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Ethics A Few Historical Snapshots

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Immanuel Kant: becoming human involvesculture, morals, civilization

Morality (Kant)each action must be driven by the categorical imperative of the moral argument

Ethical life (Hegel)norms followed in everyday behavior

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Ethics was used to tame the appetites

repression of spontaneous behavior, passions and desiresaffect-control, overcoming “vices” like unpunctuality and laziness

http://tinyurl.com/39e59h

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Technologies often served in the process of drive-control the training of human faculties overcoming immaturity (Kant)

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Graeco-Roman Ideas:

Bravery, Justice

Resisting temptations, demands

Seeing one's own rights in relation to others

Mutual respect of each other- independence, magnanimity, level-headedness, common welfare as reference

the value of fatherland (patria)

beauty- relationship between virtue and beauty was seen

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Judeo-Christian Ideas:

Love thy neighbor

Willingness to help, solidarity(this is always at danger of being limited to a small circle of friends)

ChivalryIdea of reconciliation/forgivenessFamily as valueProtestant work ethics enforced capitalist modes of production and optimization

Work becomes a value in itself

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=76142920&size=o

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http://tinyurl.com/3xjy6s

Christian recommendation of abstinence from premarital sex

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Modern Age

Valorization of work increased

Other values include tolerance and self-awareness.

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What does it mean to be ethical today?Being affected by what affects the other.

Moral existence means to act independently of demands and temptations.

The ability to act without being pushed along- but rather act authentically based on reflection.

Morality gets rarely applauded.

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Customary behavior is dangerous.

In Nazi Germany, not frequenting stores runby Jews was a customary behavior.

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striving to be good presupposes an idea of what is humanely proper

virtues such as self-mastery, chastity, bravery are instrumental to enforce the authority

of the state or prevailing authority

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Human ideals are dangerous as they suppose the idea of the good person.

Striving for heightened humanism is often accompanied by a tendency for hubris (i.e., Nietzsche's Übermensch)

Nazis ideology formulated the idea of the subhuman.

http://tinyurl.com/2td7sa

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Moral arguments are culturally rooted.

http://tinyurl.com/2xgfvp14

virtuous- bashful young girl (tugendhaft)

http://tinyurl.com/2uhkz2

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social conventions are used to evaluate the moral value of one’s everyday actions...

http://tinyurl.com/2gavhd

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individual ethicsan ethics of the multitude

http://tinyurl.com/2l6e4a

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Sigmund Freud: psychological functions attributed to taboosbut Georges Bataille argued that suppressed desires lead to violence.

http://tinyurl.com/2hbqcl

What can desire raise up in us?

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Ethics is also part of allowing oneself to be affected by desires and temptations but

involvement must be selective.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1984926191&size=o19

Customary behavior: I do what people do. It is a custom to be polite.

http://tinyurl.com/32wnaj

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Hannah Arendt on Eichmann --did not think he did evil acts but was

convinced that he simply fulfilled his duty

Otto Adolf Eichmann (known as Adolf Eichmann; March 19, 1906 – June 1, 1962) was a high-

ranking Nazi who was charged with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of

mass deportation to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. After

the war, he traveled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the

International Red Cross[1][2] and lived there under a false identity. He was captured by Israeli

Mossad agents in Argentina and tried in Israeli court on fifteen criminal charges, including

crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was convicted and hanged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann

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Reichskristallnacht

http://tinyurl.com/2v3kfl22

Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland

http://tinyurl.com/375ykl23

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Context & Consequences

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Social Networking Sites

- protection of minors

- transparency of the rules

- privacy in relation to submitted data

- content ownership

- community lockup (i.e., how easy is it to move data?)

- respect for the social contract

What are ethical standards on both, the side of the users and the corporate platform providers?

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What is the role of sns in accessing the world? Morality gets rarely

applauded.

Morality as practicing to be part of a community, a loose group ...

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What does it mean to politicize your own life project?

Taking everyday life seriously from time to time. Today morality often requires one to depart from common life:

the ability to say 'no' is where it all starts.

Today a moral life and a straightforwardly successful one are not the same...

Today, morality means to be better, it begins with skepticism and it means to resist.

One possibility: to lead an exemplary life

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Context, Intentions, and Consequences

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Moral questions are most valuable when addressed in relationto real situations, and I suggest to only deal with them in

relation to specifics contexts.

The language around morals and ethics is often vague.

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Does talk about ethics mean that we can’t have any more fun?

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Labor

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Free Labor

By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the connections between the “digital economy” and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory.” The “social factory” describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complexmachine.”

Tiziana Terranova36

In early communities (The Well) labor was really free: not imposed, free cooperation, and pleasurable.

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There are ethical concerns on the side of users and others on the side of companies who provide

the platforms on which all of this happens.

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The Social Web Makes People Easier To Use

You make all the content-- they get all the revenue.

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Labor is almost like leisure

Life itself is put to work (Virno)

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Affective Economy

Emotional capital

Emotions created through social relations when a social object enters a corporate platform

On the Social Web pleasure produces wealth.

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monetary wealth

immaterial labor

affective labor

free labor does not equal exploitation (Terranova)

precarious labor

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WSJ: Lawrence Lessig discussesthe exploitation of Star Wars fans

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The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.

--Yochai Benkler

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Centralization

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The scale and degree of utilization of immaterial labor plays out most with highest traffic sites (rather than the mom and pop stores of the Web).

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top 10 40%

www.sina.com.cn, www.baidu.com, www.yahoo.com, www.msn.com, www.google.com, www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com, www.live.com, www.orkut.com, and www.qq.com

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http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/10/27/social-value/

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003662798

Jay Rosen:$15 billion for Facebook doesn’t sound so crazy when you

consider this: A Deutsche Bank analyst says that a newspaper reader in 2004 was worth $964 a year. Today, that’s $500.

Facebook’s 50 million active users translates to $300 per year at that valuation. And newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users

spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites, says DB.

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580 million1.6 billion

Production of value through utilization/exploitation. Example Myspace: $580 Mio to $15 Billion

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Case Studies

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http://tinyurl.com/yvtm2f

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http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/call_for_a_blog_1.html

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SNS: It is not useful to merely define new social regulations.

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Are users used? Most definitely. Do they mind it? Not yet.

People are being used and empowered at the same time. It is too early to say how effective new types of content licensing will be, or in fact are, in preventing (commercial) appropriation. Being used is one thing; not knowing that your attention is monetized is another.

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Cut & Paste Ethics:

Is it good practice to copy a text from a blog and post it on a mailing list?

Is it good practice to take a nude photo of a theorist (available online) and add it to his Wikipedia entry?

Is it good practice to forward your email to other people?

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musicbooksmoviesaddresshome townphone numberemailclubsjobseducational historybirth datesexual orientationinterestsdaily schedulesrelation to friendspictures

Data provided in Facebook profiles

What happens with our data?Which decisions about are made based on these data?

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Some of my friends have MySpace parties. Basically, a bunch of kids get together with their laptops and all sign on to MySpace and start surfing it together. The party takes off when they start surfing kids' profiles who aren't present. You can imagine what a gossip scene it is.

--Tara, 16 The MySpace Generation

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Tradeoff

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Pros Cons

Pleasure of creation

They gain friendships

Share their life experience

Archive their memories

They are getting jobs

Find dates and contribute to the

greater good

Social enjoyment

Maximum convenience

informal mentorship

Intrusion into the personal

Market research

Ads, unwanted content

Commodification of intimacy (dating sites)

Spam

Breach of social contract

Society of control

Amazon.com helps people to find books and music but may erode valuable processes by which people discover new authors or artists. Constraints and accidents of everyday life are the basis for enjoyable and meaningful activities, even if they are less efficient.

Tradeoff

Trebor Scholz 07

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Social Contract-- Level of Distrust

users and producers cast themselves as victims of change

Struggle Over Moral Authority

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Voluntary participation Involuntary participation

tweak MySpace design of

update Facebook (FB) status

FB Wall posts

create, upload, embed,

watch media (photos, videos)

update profiles

friending/ unfriending

install one of the 400 FB applications

blog

chat (IM, messaging on FB)

poke

read

upload, listen, buy music

Filling in profiles

Data mining (social control)

breach of social contract (Do people know that they are creating wealth?)

Society of control (Deleuze)

Content (advertising)Trebor Scholz 07

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Our identity is defined by our consumptive activity.

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A crucial phenomenon of the Web is that of captive community. Users contribute their content to social environments and are not able to take it with them if they wish to leave (e.g., when you have uploaded years of your home videos on YouTube and photos on Flickr).

User's friends are concentrated in only a few places, which is a key motivating factor for people to congregate there. Content, therefore, is also concentrated, which makes these sites more attractive. This captivity is not accidental but is rather central to startup business strategies.

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Resistance

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In September 2006 communal negotiating power was made apparent when 741,000 users joined the group against the introduction of the RSS feed on Facebook. The company withdrew the feature. In the past, such joint action of consumers was not as easy. Today's information flows make it simpler to organize such a "rebellion."

<http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-facebook-replies/>

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