Social Media Ethics

Social Media Ethics

Introduction

There has been a drastic change and transformation of traditional media of communication into this new media that is digital, computerized and consists of information networks and technologies that enhance the overall experience of communication. Due to this increase in the usage of internet and social media many issue with regards to control and display of information has been raised. There has been an ongoing debate on the subject of concerns with regards to usage of social media and its positive or negative implications. McLuhan's theoretical research also suggests that it is actually the dominant medium of communication that tends to shape our understanding of the world and how one perceives it and thus it is extremely important to understand the technology with regards to its impact on the environment and its social settings. There are many negative and positive implications of social media and thus it has becomes extremely important for the related associations and social media websites to come up with any way of dealing with various ethical issues that are faced by the users and social media website in the process of socializing and communication with each other (Mahmoud & Ward, 2009).

Discussion

Millions of people today are making use of social networking websites, video sharing websites, wikis, blogs and other discussion forums in order to take advantage of its unlimited benefits. These people are busy in developing online local and global communities so that they can talk about their common interests, activities and spread news and information. Every social networking website is used of the purpose of communication and has certain implications of the society, culture and politics and this is main reason so many researchers have become interested in this area for conducting investigative studies in the field of social identity, privacy, distance learning, social capital, misusing of cyberspace. Many incidents and event of misconduct has been witnessed in this area such as political deception, suicide, breach of privacy, increased rate of cyber crime and the list is never ending. All the above mentioned and other cyber crimes calls for the development of sound and comprehensive social media ethics and guidelines for the common man as well the website owners. The traditional and professional ethics have now transformed into mixed media ethic as the increased number of professional journalists and citizen journalists are struggling to come up with effective social media ethics. Ethics have been referred to as important and key fundamentals for effective performance of new media. Freedom of use and ethics must be complementing for usage of social networking.

Privacy is an important issue when using social media and it is about time that we acknowledge the fact that nothing remains private on social networks. Therefore it is important to remain thoughtful and cautious when giving away any type of information that is from outside the social media website and has been given by some other individual or source. As in social network when we try to report what other said, we ...