But one 4Chan user found 4chan to be too authoritarian and restrictive and set out to create a new “free-speech-friendly” image-sharing bulletin board, which he called 8chan.
It's interesting that 4chan was created to be less restrictive, and then 8chan created to be less restrictive than 4chan. It asks the question of to what extent will it or can it go, and how other laws come into play as well.
One of the early ways of social communication across the internet was with Email, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s. These allowed people to send messages to each other, and look up if any new messages had been sent to them.
It's interesting to learn how early Email was created, and how much it has or hasn't developed since then. It's been about 50 years since then which is very surprising.
Can you think of an example of pernicious ignorance in social media interaction? What’s something that we might often prefer to overlook when deciding what is important?
An example I thought of is how when people share inspirational content about their success and frame it as something that is solely based on mindset. They ignore other factors such as race, class, and location, to name a few.
Metadata is information about some data. So we often think about a dataset as consisting of the main pieces of data (whatever those are in a specific situation), and whatever other information we have about that data (metadata).
I've always heard the term metadata but never really knew what it meant. Very interesting to see how it is categorized and the amount of information metadata contains.
Bots present a similar disconnect between intentions and actions. Bot programs are written by one or more people, potentially all with different intentions, and they are run by others people, or sometimes scheduled by people to be run by computers. This means we can analyze the ethics of the action of the bot, as well as the intentions of the various people involved, though those all might be disconnected.
I think this is very interesting as it makes it harder to put responsibility on a single person or thing. A bot could be good or bad regardless of its original intent. This means that the outcome and human accountability should be thought about separately.
Bots might have significant limits on how helpful they are, such as tech support bots you might have had frustrating experiences with on various websites.
This shows how bots may not always be effective, especially in more specific contexts such as tech support. I have had frustrating experiences with bots like these, and it shows the limits of the current programming of the bots.
There is no clear single definition for what counts as social media. John Hartley points out that you could consider almost all of culture as “social media.”
I found it interesting that he says that you could consider almost all of culture as "social media." Hartley explains that any media that communicates could be considered as social, which is a perspective I hadn't thought about before.
There are many more ethics frameworks that we haven’t mentioned here. You can look up some more here.
One ethics framework that I learned about in COM 200 is pragmatism. It is a framework that views moral reasoning as experimental and dependent on context. It judges ideas by how well they will help people solve real problems and adapt over time compared to fixed rules or abstract principles.