Facebook

I have been writing essays for three years now and have gotten a perfect grade each time. Just saying.

Facebook

Casey Jordan

Baker College

This paper provides insights into the moral values embodied by a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook. We adopt the position that technology as well as humans has a moral character in order to disclose ethical concerns that are not transparent to users of the site. In broad terms, social networking involves social relations amongst people, who have, and indeed desire, some type of relationship or affiliation. Thus, SNS may be conceptualized as sociotechnical arrangements incorporating technologies that support such activities. Prior arrangements such as chat rooms, mobile phones and landline based telephones have held, and continue to hold, the potential to facilitate social networking. Thus we acknowledge that contemporary social networking sites, and the study of them, are historically situated. There may be new challenges raised, but there is also continuity. One facet of continuity, and the one we engage with here, is the issue of ethics and how moral challenges are brought about in ICT mediated spaces. (Light, B., & MaGrath, K., 2010)

With respect to social networking, a scan of the popular press reveals some key ethical issues many will be familiar with the trope of employer surveillance through SNS and the usage for marketing purposes of data that has been marked as private. Further well, trodden themes in social networking research, such as identity, use/non-use, motives for use, privacy, surveillance, friending, commodification, and user exploitation, all surface issues with ethical dimensions. In terms of identity work, for example, one study considers the way that social networking arrangements can facilitate marginalization, while another study discusses the seeming lack of sincerity and authenticity in Arto....