Ethics in a Cyber world

As the Internet has become more and more central to our lives, our online and offline identities have become less and less separate. Where the Internet was once a place where nobody knew we were dogs and we lived Second Lives as customizable avatars, today we mostly surf the Web as ourselves. Many of the most popular environments, such as Facebook, ask us to sign up using our real names, and even on services like Twitter, which allow for pseudonymy, people use their real names more often than not.
One area where a divide still exists between our online and offline selves, however, is in the realm of morality. While MediaSmarts’ study Young Canadians in a Wired World found that while young people are often actively kind and thoughtful towards people online – a finding supported by research from both the U.S.^[1] and the UK^[2] – hostile and aggressive behaviour is also common: almost nine in ten teens in the U.S. study said that they had “seen someone being mean or cruel to another person on a social network site,” while the UK research found that “almost a third of primary school age children and a quarter of secondary school age children said that mean comments or behaviour stops them from enjoying their time online.” Moreover, even those youth who choose to act in positive ways online often describe the Internet as a place where morals and ethics by default do not apply, in which people say and do things they never would in person. What this suggests is that while young people generally have good moral instincts, they need more guidance than they’re getting about how to view the online world as a space where morals and ethics apply.

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By Submitted by Matthew Johnson on 09 Oct 2014.


http://mediasmarts.ca/blog/ethics-online