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The Ethics of Web 2.0 Good Practices on the Social Web
Trebor ScholzDepartment of Media [email protected]
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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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://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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