facebookprivacy's Journal

Social Media Ethics at socialmediaethics.net

Social Media Ethics at socialmediaethics.net social media ethics - The easiest method to approach the study of social media ethics is to first comprehend the purposes of social media, specifically, social networks. What it is about Facebook, MySpace, etc. that attract people to join them? What type of relationship exists between your social network and the user? These are the important questions to ask when looking for the social value of social networking within a society.

social media ethics - First an search for the relationship between social networks and users. It would appear that there is a reciprocate relationship between social networks and their users that involves the consensual transfer of private information from the user towards the network; this information enables the existence of a social network. The network has the capacity to use that information to develop in size (number of users, features, etc.) by harnessing the power of the user’s social profiles and relationships. We all know that users would be the life of a social networking and in fact are what gives them their value, but do you know the users getting in return? The easiest method to answer this question is to look at what a social networking is doing: it is providing a venue by which people can connect with people they know and interact with, whether those real life interactions occur often or otherwise. So then the the next thing to examine is how social interactions on the social network are different than social interactions in real life.

What are the differences in social networking interactions and real life interactions?

Centralization of Social Interactions - instead of having to keep track of friend’s phone numbers, emails, etc., users possess a single site that gives them access to not only their friends (meaning their friends in real life, not the “Facebook friends”), but also their acquaintances, co-workers, people they're going to school with, people who are friend’s of their friends, etc. This is a system of connections that essentially includes every single person about the network through some quantity of degrees of separation.

The Virtualization of Reality - users are able to be active participants within their social life on a virtual channel as well as in real life. The virtualization is not an alternate reality that only exists in one spectrum, but is really is something created by the users, for the users. Due to this, social networks are able to create an infinite quantity of new and never stand still content that is geared to the user’s social interests and it is dictated by the interactions of everyone on the network. Imagine a website that has content with only your interests that's changed to fit what you want when you want it.

Decreased Authenticity of Social Interaction - people naturally act different in different forms of communication-phone conversations work differently than texting, live social interactions can alter around different categories of people, etc.; the same thing applies in social networking communications. The lack of body gestures, non-verbal cues, voice inflection, etc. and also the ability to delay responses in conversation makes all text-based social interaction subject to alteration by the participants. Sometimes this can lead to a skewed perception from the people’s identities, if they are based totally on online social interaction. Furthermore, though people can generally assume that people are who their profiles say they are, there is no way to fully know if they aren’t someone else on another person’s profile, or a person who has created a fake profile.

Preservation of Social Interactions - because all interactions are transmitted through data, they will exist virtually forever. This has some social benefits, because users can take part in social interactions that aren’t occurring instantly, but are in fact delayed response conversations. However, this could also have negative effects if the preserved content is something that can be detrimental to the user.

From the previous discussion it would appear that we can make the following conclusions. It would appear that social networks are useful for centralizing social interactions and expanding your social circle, they also have some negative aspects due to their differences from real social interactions.

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