Tagged: ethics RSS

  • thePuck 5:06 pm on May 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ethics, flaming, ontology, ,   

    Online Realities

    Back in the early days of IRC and Usenet, I used to confront people over racism, bigotry, and general nastiness. The inevitable rejoinder was that I was being a control freak and a Nazi, and that what they said or did didn’t count because it “wasn’t real”, it was “just the internet”. I have never understood this, as I feel the internet is just as “real” as any other abstractions (and more so than most). We established rules for basic social interaction because they allow those interactions to take place; once we abandon civilization, its fruits are useless to us. I always thought that this was evidence of poor moral character, that these were people who did not understand that there were reasons beyond “getting in trouble” to not act like a savage, and so once that threat was gone they saw no purpose in being civil. However, I have seen people with a deep understanding of ethics offline act like total asses online. Their defense, again, was that the internet was not real.

    So the question is: is online life subject to the same kind of cares and duties as offline life?

     

  • thePuck 3:11 am on April 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: #amazonfail, Chris Brogan, ethics, Gillmor Gang, Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, , , Oprah, , Robert Scoble, , , , swine flu,   

    Social Media Misinformation, Disinformation, and Just Plain Stupidity 

    Twitter 6x6 1/1/08
    Image by apenny via Flickr

    OMG we’re all gonna die of swine flu!

    No, actually, we’re not. In fact, very little will happen at all. So why is it being so blown out of proportion? Think about this…more people die every day from…well, everything, than swine flu. Name it. Even the common cold has a higher body count. More people have died of being blown up in space shuttles than Americans have died of swine flu. Just think about that. Space shuttles. How rare is that? Swine flu is even rarer. So why is everyone freaked out?

    I’ll tell you why…because humans are a panicky bunch. Oh, sure, we like to make myths and stories about ourselves being fearless warriors and unstoppable killing machines, but really we are primates who evolved to live in cooperative groups. We did not gain dominance through martial prowess but through our tendency to work in concert and run when outmatched. Those that didn’t run are no longer with us, genetically or actually. When we try to make humans into these mythic creatures, these warriors, it very often breaks them. Post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional disassociation, and periodic depression are common symptoms of broken humans, but of course there are matters of degree; some are not broken but merely bent, and these often make very good soldiers but very poor humans. While this is regrettable, until humans learn a different way to resolve disputes, it is also necessary. Some must give up their humanity so that others may keep their lives.

    But the rest of us are a fearful lot. We repeat unlikely things because they scare us rather than because we know them to be true. We spread fear and inspire chaos. And, even worse, we give license to ourselves and each other to act in idiotic and horrendous ways, all because we were afraid.

    So enough. Quit it. You are spreading panic and making everyone anxious for no reason. Quit tweeting and retweeting the latest stupid update on swine flu. Stop making Google Maps mashups. Stop posting the latest WHO and CDC figures. Stop. Even if there were a real danger, this chicken-little crap would not be helpful. Save it for the zombie holocaust…I am sure Tom from accounting will get a big giggle out of your last tweets of “OMG ZOMBIES WDFFBKW” as he chomps your brains.

    And on that note…celebrities aren’t celebrities here, so quit letting the media lead you by the nose.

    That’s right, I’m talking about Oprah and Ashton and whoever else wants to ply their dirty little trade here. They don’t get it, and most likely never will. Narcissists don’t do well in social media because they give nothing back. Look at the so-called celebrities’ profiles…look at the ratio. Look at how much they interact. Ashton at least seems to make an attempt…most of the “celebrities” seem to think that Twitter is just another place for them to play “look at me!”.

    The real celebrities of our ranks are those who interact, who have ideas, and who actually do things. Robert Scoble, Howard Rheingold, Tara Hunt, Leo Laporte, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis…we all know the names. The people (and many more, some of them I am lucky enough to know personally) are the real celebrities of social media. And I know some of you are groaning about me listing all these A-listers and crowing about “internet fame” like it’s “real” fame, but hear me out: I don’t know what “real” or “unreal” fame is. All fame seems to be an abstraction; we made up the concept and apply it as a social construct. And on the basis of this construct I say that “internet famous” (I am talking about the Jason Calacanis kind of web famous, not the Numa Numa guy kind, in case you are confused) is more “real”, or at least handed out for better reasons and according to values I am more in agreement with, than the fame dished out by Hollywood, TV, and the music industries. I like our kind of fame…it comes because a person is smart, cool, funny…not because an executive someone decided to promote them and turn them into a cash cow. I will take the Gillmor Gang over The View any day.

    And for my final trick, I will also rant about #amazonfail.

    What the hell is wrong with us? Do we so enjoy schadenfreude that we will leap to offense just on suspicion? I was just as guilty in this one…I jumped up on the issue when it first surfaced in the stream and posted, tweeted, and argued as I usually do about anything remotely related to gay rights. And we were wrong. While Amazon dealt with it horribly and I am still unsure as to whether it was a hack (as was claimed on livejournal) or an honest error on their side, we allowed our collective righteous indignation to flow out and attack with no real information.

    Why care?

    Well, I am a bit shocked at how easily we are all directed. We make a huge noise about how we have taken control of the conversation, but we are really just spinning in circles. If some of our pet theories are true and there is a collective intelligence going on in social media, then this intelligence has just woken up, is barely sentient, and reacts like an anxious teenager: eager to embrace every fad, governed and led around by emotional reactions, and unsure of its own place. If we are to take advantage of this new world, then our “smart mob” needs to get a lot smarter.

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    • Evan 11:40 am on May 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I don't think anyone should be surprised the the social web is no smarter than the masses it'd made up of. By the logic above, which I agree makes sense, Web 2.0 should be akin to us rushing through the trees shouting alerts calls to each other (tweets?) and picking knats out of our hair.

      Not that this is a problem. Clearly our Social mind is infantile and can be reduced to some our core emotions: fear, desire for sex, desire for communication, desire for recognition. But there is also this push to grow and mature.

      Even the borg need a queen.

  • thePuck 12:02 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: California, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ethics, Roman Catholic Church, , Utah   

    Utah Boycott: How shall we use our social media superpowers? 

    Our Story Up To Now…

    Once upon a time in the land of California, there was a little piece of legislation named Prop. 8. It met opposition, but in the end (and thanks to the support of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), it turned out to the be the little proposition that could. It passed, amidst much controversy, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, out of which arose great protests.

    The Boycott of an Entire State

    One of these protest is virtual. Various bloggers and people with social media influence have called for a boycott on the entire state of Utah, attempting to damage the state economy by attacking its tourism industry. For those who don’t know, Utah is the headquarters of the LDS church and tourism is a huge chunk of its economy, bringing in about $6 billion a year.

    Let’s make something clear: not everyone in the state of Utah is a Mormon, and not every Mormon is opposed to gay marriage. But everyone in the state of Utah will suffer if their economy tanks due to this boycott. People will lose jobs, children will go hungry, infrastructure will fail. Harm will be done.

    First, Do No Harm

    When people gain influence over others, they gain power. Social media allows individuals to amass an amazing amount of this power, swaying the actions and opinions of huge numbers of people in a very short time. The details of President Elect Obama’s use of social media in his presidential campaign is a wonderful example of just how truly remarkable the power of social media can be; in no other context can an individual unempowered by church or state gain such influence over others.

    So we have otherwise ordinary people with extraordinary powers: social media superheroes. But what is the proper use of these powers?

    YouTube Preview Image

    Revenge Is Not Doing Good

    I was originally going to do this as a poll, and talked to several people on Twitter and Rejaw. I decided not to go that route, because this really is much simpler than that.

    The LDS and Catholic churches that supported Prop. 8 and took away the rights of others did a horrible thing, breaking both the tenets of their own faiths and the laws of the land, in spirit if not in letter. This has hurt many people and made them angry, and that anger is more than valid: it is righteous.

    But to attack the entire state is not justice, it is punishment. It will not bring back anyone’s rights, it will only cause more harm and hurt more innocent people. The moment you move into the realm of revenge, you are no longer fighting the good fight or protecting rights and freedoms; you are just hurting others because you were hurt. This is wrong, and it is just as bad if not worse than those you are trying to punish.

    Final Word

    I am not a social media superhero. I am not an a-lister, b-lister, or even an n or m-lister. In fact, I am pretty sure we have to start getting into Greek letters to describe my status in the social media hierarchy. Thus I do not have the ability to use my influence to stop the boycott.

    Instead, I must plead with my betters who may read this, those with more power and influence than I:

    Please, do no harm. Do not pursue revenge. Do good. Help, don’t hurt. We need good people with power to do good things, desperately. We need heroes, not avengers. Please don’t support the boycott or any other retributive measure.

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    • Sterling Okura 12:48 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      @thePuck. Thank you for sharing these thoughts.

      I am a resident of Salt Lake City who voted for Obama and was saddened by the passing of Prop 8.

      Most residents of Salt Lake City and Park City are liberals. The rest of the state, especially Utah Valley (home of BYU) and the rural areas are very conservative.

      Park City, where the Sundance Independent Film Festival is held, is a very progressive town. It would be the area most affected by a drop in ski tourism. A boycott on tourism would actually be like shooting your allies.

      Yes, we want to do something to make a difference, but I agree with you that punishment is not the answer. It will only cause further polarization and a “me vs. you” mentality.

      For same-sex couple rights to be accepted in society, we need more integration, more understanding, and more acceptance of each other as people.

      Sterling Okuras last blog post..The #1 Problem With Small Business Websites

    • Andrew Mason 1:27 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I’m not sure that it’s fair to call not giving someone your money “harm.”

      If you decide not to buy machine guns from an illegal arms dealer, should you responsible for his children?

      The state of Utah has made a decision that consumers disagree with. Consumer patronage is a privilege you have to earn, it is no one’s right.

      A boycott is not revenge – it is simply consumers exercising their rights in a coordinated way. The only reason they need to coordinate is that these organizations are so large that a sense of futility stops us from doing it alone.

      - andrew at the point dot com

    • thePuck 1:58 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      @Sterling: thank you for your thoughts.

      @Andrew: By the same token, those that supported Prop. 8 did no one any harm. They just organized and were active politically. Rights are given through a political process, thus when the vote came down there were no “rights” for them to be impinging. Except that’s just not reality.

      Reality is organized activities like this cause harm, their activity to pass Prop. 8 caused harm and this boycott will cause harm. Maybe under some sort of legalistic thinking that’s not causing harm, but in the really real world, organizing a boycott on an entire state attacks their economy and infrastructure, causing suffering. This is harm, and the choice to cause harm. If you want to be legalistic and say “No, it’s just withholding money” you are willfully choosing to ignore the consequences of doing it, just as those who say “It’s not discrimination or bigotry, it’s defending God’s will” are willfully ignoring that, in this case, defending their god’s will leads to discrimination and bigotry. This is a basic concept of contingency…if I organize an agenda that will cause harm as an obvious and foreseen consequence, then I am the cause of that harm.

      A boycott is organized with exactly the goal of causing harm…harm to a bottom line, and thus to motivate change in the agency boycotted. Otherwise there is no point, and we don’t organize it, people just don’t buy things.

      Besides, it just doesn’t pass the “straight face” test. What other goal does the boycott have except punishment and revenge? It won’t give anyone any rights, won’t change the law in California, won’t help a single person do anything but feel a vindictive sense of joy. But the economic cost will be massive for residents of Utah, none of whom, you know, VOTED in the California election.

    • Andrew Mason 2:12 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      A boycott is a formal word for something we do every day – choosing not to patronize organizations and businesses who make decisions that don’t support your worldview.

      When you decide to buy groceries from a local store instead of WalMart, when you choose to buy a sweater because it uses organic cotton, you are making exactly the same kind of decision.

      I’m not raising technicalities here – a boycott is simply a coordinated way of doing something that we do anyway.

      If you choose to be a vegetarian, there are cow farmers to whom you are doing harm. If everyone became a vegetarian, some people would become poor. If everyone stopped littering, some people would go poor. If violent crime stopped, some people would go poor.

    • thePuck 2:29 pm on November 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      @Andrew I don’t see your point. Why does “we do it every day” and “these people do it all the time” rebut “this action causes harm, please don’t do it”? It is harm, it causes harm, it is meant to cause harm. I don’t care that others do it, I don’t care that people do it every day, and I don’t care that there is some strange ethical cut-out circuit about “It’s my money, I’ll do what I want.”

      I care that it does harm. It really does harm. It doesn’t matter that some abstract set of rules say somehow, magically, it doesn’t cause harm when we do it with special words or magic pieces of paper. People who did nothing wrong will suffer because a bunch of people are choosing to attack them financially because they are angry. Real reality, not a legislated reality made out of words where as long as you hurt people certain ways, then its ok. You know, reality. Where the hungry people are.

      And you are also willfully avoiding the fact that the arms dealer is actually the person dealing arms and the meat industry actually sells meat, thus choosing not to participate in those industries causes only those people harm who are actually connected to what is being opposed. The state of Utah, the Sundance Film Festival, their tourism industy, their state infrastructure, none of that had a single thing to do with Prop. 8.

    • Josh 2:33 am on November 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Thank you for writing this article. I’ve spoken my mind about it to anyone who will listen and especially living in Utah I don’t want to see a huge back lash for what a RELIGION did.

      The state did nothing, a religion did. A religion who went against it’s own doctrine and who broke a promise they made to their God (a promise they have been breaking for a while now, just not to this extent).

      If you’re not familiar with it the Mormon religion has a book called the Doctrine and Covenants, which is literally what it sounds like. It’s the doctrine that they should be preaching and living by and it’s a list of the covenants (sacred promises) they make to their God when they get baptized, and they broke it.

      D&C 134:9
      ” 9 We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.”

      There it is in black and white, written in millions of copies of their book. Their prophet who condoned using the church’s official web site to spew forth their political agenda has broken a promise to his God and so has any member who is using their faith as a scapegoat.

      Not only do we live in a country where there is supposed to be a clear division of church and state (that’s one of the big reasons our forefathers fled England) but for this particular religion their God has told them that it is not just to mingle civil government with influence.

      They have denied people their rights and they have mixed government with their religion, went against their own doctrine and have broken a sacred promise to their God. Flat out what they did is wrong as prescribed by the tenants of their own religion, and the 50+%of us in UT who are not mormon* and the even greater percentage of us who had nothing to do with this should not be punished for the sins of a religion.

      *I say 50+% because I’m taking into account people like me who had our names in the church’s logs but were not active in any sense. Which I am not even on the longs anymore since the night of the last big protest. Which I might add had over 3,000 people who were against the church show up and less than 40 who were for the church. Even the church’s “faithful” didn’t show up to defend the erroneous actions of their religion.

    • Keith 6:15 pm on November 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      @thePuck
      Ok, I will not go into whether I think the Prop8 is right or wrong, but I agree with you 100% that boycotting an entire state because a church that supported the proposition is headquartered there. Why not boycott the entire state of California? That is where the people actually live who voted it in? Seems pretty ridiculous huh?
      Seems to me the people of California spoke at the polls, and the Prop8 passed.
      Skinny line they are walking when it comes to Church and State, as most would probably share their support for this proposition based on religion or some form of it.
      I do believe that ALL legal Americans deserve the same treatment, but at the same time, I also believe marriage to be a religious act. So, basically, I am glad I didn’t have to vote on this one (my way of copping out;).
      All that being said, the boycott of a State will harm people who had nothing to do with it. So, in my opinion, WRONG ANSWER!
      Just my 2cents.

      Keiths last blog post..Temporary Post Used For Style Detection (266cfefc-d300-440a-ab60-29fb6cd775cf – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)

    • WootMama 3:06 pm on November 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      They can boycott, but that doesn’t mean they win. I just saw this one:

      Leatherby’s Boycott Melts–The Inside Scoop
      Supporters line out the door in support of Family Ice Cream Parlor, delivering a humiliating defeat to protesters

      Leatherby’s was targeted Sunday for protest by No on 8 supporters because owner Alan Leatherby, his business, and his relatives gave a total of $20,000 supporting the “Yes on 8″ campaign. Proposition 8 was a measure passed by California voters on Nov. 4 that put a ban on gay marriage in the state.

      The inside scoop from the front lines on the Leatherby’s boycott is that Leatherby’s loyal supporters pommeled the opposition. Standing in front of the store holding signs and giving away free ice cream, the dozen or so protesters were perplexed by the stream of constant customers.

      http://beetlebabee.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/leatherbys-boycott-melts/

      WootMamas last blog post..P8 a Major Change?–Supremes to Decide

    • Jacques 12:05 am on February 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Wow some real interesting and intelligent conversation going on here. Excellent.

      Jacquess last blog post..Tips for Writing Quality Content

    • Monado 12:05 pm on February 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      You can get a list of who donated how much to either side. Then you can make a list of businesses to boycott or patronize, as the case may be. There’s no need to boycott an entire state, is there? What I think we need is to get enough dedicated boycotters as possible. As the first commenter said, boycotting the tourist trade harms the liberal cities more than the conservative countryside.

      Monados last blog post..Department of overreaction

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