Playing Nice in the New Media Playground

As a child of the digital age, to me, communication via New Media is as ubiquitous as my Diet Coke addiction and the use of "random" as a blanket adjective. In highschool it was text messaging and online chat rooms, evolving into user generated content sites like Facebook and Youtube with the inception of Web 2.0 in 2004 (Sternberg, 2010), and now, as I prepare to take the next step in life post-university, Facebook, Twitter, email, blog updates, entertainment media, and RSS news feeds are delivered straight from Cyberspace into my back pocket thanks to my beloved BlackBerry.

Which raises important questions about how we conduct ourselves ethically and morally in this virtually unlimited cyber playground, especially where intellectual property rights, piracy, privacy, computer crime, censorship and free speech are concerned (Hamelink, 2006). 

While "nettiquette" (Hamelink, 2006) frameworks have been put in place, the size and scope of the Internet make policing ethical or moral breaches a near impossible task (Sternberg, 2010).  As argued by Hamelink (2006) “The speed of digital communication does not create new forms of immorality…But it makes it possible to commit immoral acts so fast that one hardly notices.”

In other words, the moral and ethical dilemmas we face in the cyber playground aren’t all that different to those faced in the real world.  The Net does not imply a confrontation with new moral problems. The difference is the digital playground is a whole lot bigger, and provides the cloak and mask of pseudonym and anonymity, and subsequently, a better chance of getting away with morally and ethically questionable behaviour.

References

Hamelink, C. 2006. The Ethics of the Internet: Can we cope with Lies and Deceit on the Net? In Ideologies of the Internet, K. Sarikakis & Daya Thussu, pp. 115-130. New Jersey: Hampton Press.

Sternberg, J. 2010. "KCB301 Media Audiences, Week 3 Lecture Notes". The active audience: User-led co-creation and the re-negotiation of media power. Accessed March 28, 2011. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/.