Mar
11
We’ve all witnessed the darker side of use the web at the personal level, from the clouds of foul language surrounding forum conversations, to disturbingly blunt, or other times sparse, profiles on social networking sites, to the massive music and video free-for-alls. The marketing-in-disguise ‘Friend me’ messages that find us through Myspace and Facebook, or random plugs for businesses that pop-up mid forum thread, can be more or less offensive depending on how you define ethical when it comes to the web. In either case though, a valid question has been posed as to whether morals as we know them really do distort themselves when we engage online, either with personal or business motivations?
Pure Visibility co-founder Catherine Juon argues that this is not the case in an article on Social Media ethics posted on last Thursday’s Ann Arbor Business Review. She suggests that at least when it comes to business, our ethical codes are not compromised when we engage with social media.
Here’s a short list of some of the quandaries that arise when we use social media on behalf of our companies:
Difficulty to separate business use from personal, for example, when we ‘run into’ someone we know on twitter and a non-work related conversation begins.
Lifting of statistics, facts, or theories found online in preparing deliverables for work. For example a report may require the rationale for a design change, and in writing we stumble across an eloquent explanation in someone’s blog post on the topic. Do we cite the author?
Contradiction of a business value in the context of our personal, non-work use of social media. For example, we write a blog post that slams one of the businesses strategies.
Or, pretending to be someone we are not, such as posting or replying via social media on behalf of a busy CEO.
I would suggest that for many individuals, ethical boundaries become easier to cross in certain situations like those above. The easiest way to figure out if this is the case is to imagine a parallel situation that might occur offline, for example comparing one’s feeling of obligation to cite a blogger to the obligation to site the author of a book.
In some cases, this exercise might suggest that we are seeing may be different ethical challenges, rather than a new trend towards ethic-abandonment. A parallel situation to spam ‘Friend me’ messages from some business is the sort of cloaking that advertisers do when they send us marketing material in unmarked envelopes. Businesses have always gone to what some would consider inappropriate lengths to get their message out, and the web presents new ways of doing that.
I think the most interesting ethical boundary that gets crossed is also perhaps the one many cross most easily. For example, I personally feel at least some obligation not to engulf the web, and thus the people’s attention, with useless information. But how many Wikipedia entries of sketchy corporate-motivated worth exist on that site? How many business owners thought twice about posting them?
To state an example, most of us do not realize that ‘pure visibility’ actually refers to the basis of nineteenth century art-theorist Konrad Fiedler’s theory of a level of fundamental aesthetic forms similar in abstraction to the gestalt principles. After all, how would we find out? The ease of social media content creation (combined with the general ease of web content creation) have together completely buried beneath social networking profiles, news items, and blog posts the few references to this theory that do exist online.
Does anyone else care?