Download - Presentation Donald Heider - MEDEAnet webinar: Digital Ethics

Don Heider

ETHICS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

• Who is that?

• Amina Arraf, a Syrian-American lesbian, who was blogging from Damascus.

• It was reported at one point that she had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces.


• But the blogger was really Tom MacMaster, a graduate student at Edinburgh University.

• He says he started the blog to draw attention to conditions in the Middle East.


• Who is behind blogs?

• Are Facebook pages always representative of real people?

• What is a credible source in 2014?


• How many saw this?


• Free lance photographer Richard Lam took the shot.

• It went viral, but immediately in blogs and in news media a lot of people said the photo wasn’t real.

• It was too perfect – it had to be staged or digitally altered.

• Lam didn’t help things because he never got the names of the couple.



• The lovers were identified as Scott Jones and Alexandra Thomas

Digital Ethics

Progress vs. Ethics

Ethics in a Digital World

• What are ethics?– The process of putting greater weight on

some moral claims– Ethics is a deliberative practice, where we

consider .– Ethos = character


• Digital Ethics

• What do we do with this new technology?

• How does technology change our behavior?

• How do you behave on the web?

• What would be some guiding principals?

Ethics in a Digital World

• Digital ethics just help us to think about what principals should guide us in digital realms.

www.digitalethics.org
