Remember former Mozilla CEO Eich? I recently read How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life and started reconsidering. Where do I stand on this issue? The thoughts turned from society and how we react as mob down to the individual and questions of guilt and ethics. Where’s Internet Ethics when we need it. 😄
How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
On Google+, Marcel Schnau said that he thinks it basically comes down to a lack of moderation. I left a comment saying that I’m not sure. My experience on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ has been very positive. Personally, USENET was where I learned how to wear Asbestos Underwear. I still think we’ll need a lot more reflection on these topics in order to get a grip on this Internet thing, as a society. *We lack Internet culture.*
At the same time, people are rightly concerned about the EU law concerning the Right to be forgotten. So clearly, as a society, we have not yet learned to know how to deal with past shame.
To give you another example: We all know how to deal more or less with thorny issues. Some people have problems concerning their looks and still we want to treat them like everybody else, for example. We know that it’s not OK to have our decisions influenced by the acne on somebody’s face. Do we know that it’s not OK to have our decisions influenced by the pictures of a party on Facebook? How long ago does it have to be? This doesn’t come naturally to use, because our parents taught us about acne but not about Facebook. Dealing with social media, perfect records, searchability, big data – it’s not part of our shared practices, it’s not part of our culture. Yet.
���
Did you know that RFC 1855 is about Netiquette? 😄
#Philosophy #Ethics #Politics
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
I think that if we ever find a solution to this, it will be related to using several, strictly separated personas, with additional provisions for making connecting them costly (possibly through social means, that is, for example, considered extremely rude).
A different account for your family to share your birthday photos with, a different one for your coworkers, other for professional contacts, and one for every hobby you indulge in. With very few shared contacts.
An anonymous user account automatically gives you the right to be forgotten – you just jettison it, together with all (most) of its connections and history. This lets you learn on your own mistakes and come back with a clean slate. Of course, it’s costly, as you lose all the social capital that you might have earned. On the other hand, this can be problematic for communities that give a large credit of trust to new members – those newbie-friendly ones, as they can be flooded by a single person who refuses to learn. Some kind of rate limiting or cool-down mechanism would require defeating the anonymity, so I don’t know a good solution here.
USENET actually worked pretty well, with everyone being semi-anonymous by default (you could be traced to an account you used to connect to the server, but it was possible, although somewhat costly, to change those).
– Radomir Dopieralski 2015-02-15 00:46 UTC
---
Anonymity is obviously the way to go. It blows my mind that people use their real names on the internet.
Social networks have made a business out of selling our info to advertisers. They made a play for our info and people bought into it. Now people are screwing themselves over by over sharing online and everyone suffers because of it. Like chimps with guns, joe average just don’t know how to handle it.
tl;dr Just say no to social networks. Problem solved.
– anonymous and proud 2015-02-15 01:03 UTC
---
I disagree. Kris Köhntopp wrote a great article on why we publish data online and what we gain thereby: Wieso wir uns veröffentlichen. It’s exactly about the social capital we gain.
If Joe average can’t handle it, well that’s a problem society has had whenever we were introduced to new phenomena requiring a change in behaviour: printing press, photography, AIDS, ...
To me, anonymity is like wearing a veil in order to handle the problem of ugly and beautiful faces. It’s a possibility, but I much prefer another solution.
– Alex Schroeder 2015-02-15 12:01 UTC
---
Stupidity is the problem. Indeed, think about all of the examples! Stupidity was involved in all of them.
Lets just focus on making our kids, our friends, our society, but most importantly **ourselves** smarter. Things will become so much better in a long run.
– AlexDaniel 2015-02-16 23:32 UTC