2011

‘Twitter terrorists’ and legislating misinformation on social networks

It started as an apparent attempt to help.

On Aug. 25, just before noon, a message went out on Twitter that five children had been kidnapped from an elementary school by an armed group in Boca del Rio, a municipality not far from Veracruz, a port city along Mexico’s eastern coast that has seen an increase in drug-related violence over the last year.

The information was retweeted and posted on other social networking sites. Panicked parents who heard the news rushed to the school to pick up their children.

But the attack on the school was never confirmed. The Twitter user who sent the message, a math teacher named Gilberto Martinez Vera, and a local journalist named Maria de Jesus Bravo, who reportedly made similar statements on her Facebook account, were arrested that same day. Their charges? Terrorism and sabotage, which in Mexico carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

Free speech and human rights advocates were outraged and began protesting, asking for the release of the pair who became known as the “Twitter terrorists.” The governor of Veracruz, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, was faced with a dilemma that he broadcast on Twitter: “I’m a Twitterer at heart, I’m in favor of freedom of expression, but also of defending our right to live in peace.” People started to wonder if in times of crisis, the goals to protect one’s citizenry and support news-sharing on social networks were diametrically opposed.

In Mexico, the number of drug-related deaths has surpassed 40,000 since President Felipe Calderon launched an offense against the country’s drug cartels when he took office in late 2006. As the drug cartels battle one another for power, they seek to control the mainstream media, which often limits coverage of drug-related violence or forgoes it altogether. With that void, many ordinary Mexicans rely on crowd-sourced news from social networks and anonymous blogs to get information they can’t find in their local newspaper.

With Mexico becoming increasingly dangerous, its citizens have become increasingly connected online. According to a recent New York Times article, there are four million Twitter users in Mexico and 95 percent of the more than 30 million people with regular Internet access have Facebook accounts. There are plenty of ordinary citizens who can and do provide online warnings about drug-related violence in real-time.

The problem comes when (seemingly) well-intentioned watchdogs provide misinformation and cause panic, as in the Veracruz case.

The Veracruz governor quickly realized terrorism and sabotage charges were too harsh for the “Twitter terrorists,” but he was still left with demands to control rumors of violence on social networks. So he introduced a law that would criminalize making false statements “by any means” about explosive devices or firearm attacks that disturb public order with a lesser sentence: one to four years in prison and a fine.

Veracruz convened a special legislative session to debate the law, which passed on Sept. 20 in a 33-14 vote. Legislators who opposed it expressed fears that it represented a return to authoritarianism and could limit the use of social networks.

Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights also challenged the new law, saying it was too vague, limited freedom of expression and was unconstitutional. The nation’s Supreme Court is considering the group’s appeal.

Both the teacher and journalist who were arrested in Veracruz were freed the day after the new law passed and the charges against them dropped. And though the new law could still apply to their case, the state’s interior secretary said they would not be prosecuted under it.

Even though the pair was freed, the new law — the first of its kind in Mexico — and the controversy it sparked has ignited a dialogue across the country that can’t be reversed. According to the New York Times, at least one other state, Tamaulipas, is considering a similar law, and public officials nationwide are speaking out against new technologies that help spread rumors.

If the Supreme Court upholds Veracruz’s law and other states pass similar ones, it begs the question: How will states enforce laws that prosecute wrongdoers who are hard to find with intent that’s difficult to prove?

The case of the “Twitter terrorists” is a good example of how difficult it is to say definitively who started a rumor.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a PhD candidate at MIT’s Media Lab, pointed out that at first Veracruz threatened to take action against 16 Twitter users. The Mexican media say a car caught fire near the school that day, which seemed to prove there had been a grenade attack, and helped the rumor spread.

It’s possible, Monroy-Hernandez says, that the rumor was actually started on the streets and it later spread on social networking sites.

“The government tried to portray who started it, but in reality they are not sure how much happened or what was true,” he said in an interview. “It points out the challenges of this law where enforcing it is ridiculous.”

Whether or not you can prove what happened on the ground was the direct result of something posted on a social networking site has been the source of much debate recently, in particular by those trying to measure the effect social media had during the Arab Spring. Some researchers say social media helped facilitate dialogue, but didn’t actually spark the protests. Others say “a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground,” and argue Twitter posts led to protests.

If researchers with access to hundreds of thousands of tweets can’t come to a conclusion about the Arab Spring, it’s no wonder that investigators in a Mexican city had difficulty determining whether a single Twitter user was to blame for the panic at the school.

Beyond locating the source of a rumor and determining whether a rumor is to blame for public disorder, there is another part of the new Veracruz law that is problematic: proving the intent of a rumor-starter.

In his New York Times op-ed Monroy-Hernandez notes: “It is unclear what the motives and roles of those 16 people charged with spreading the rumor were. Did they ‘shout fire’ because they thought they saw flames or did they completely invent it?”

The governor of Veracruz said his law was meant to be used against those with bad intentions, but human rights advocates worry it could be used against the government’s political opponents or well-meaning citizens who pass along information without verifying it.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is an assistant professor of government at the University of Texas at Brownsville and has been studying the use of social media in Tamaulipas, a Mexican state that shares a border with Texas to the north and Veracruz to the south. She says governments can’t say citizens have a responsibility to verify information before passing it along on social networking sites in times of crisis.

“Social media sometimes doesn’t involve a lot of thinking,” she said. “It’s so fast, the way people respond. If you talk about death and life and shootings, how are people going to say, ‘Let me think about this and be responsible’? You’re going to retweet it.”

Monroy-Hernandez says building a case against someone who intended to cause public disorder would be very difficult; the government would have to prove there was a systematic approach, perhaps by opening multiple social media accounts and building a credible online reputation that would allow the information to spread quickly.

“It’s really hard to know what somebody’s intentions are, even in cases of murder,” he points out. “You really have to build a case that people were preparing. I doubt cartels or citizens will be that organized.”

Correa-Cabrera notes that the rule of law in Mexico is notoriously weak and it’s not uncommon for mass murders to occur without anyone being charged. If murders are going unprosecuted, she says, what are the chances any case under this law will proceed?

But that doesn’t assuage the worry of those who say the spread of misinformation in Mexico has gotten out of control.

Monroy-Hernandez says maybe the solution isn’t the “knee-jerk reaction” to create legislation, but to “create a system of information sources that are trusted, where the government also has a voice.”

A mere four minutes after the school attack rumor allegedly started on Twitter, the governor of Veracruz, who has more than 57,000 followers, sent out his own tweet dismissing the attack. But by then “it was either too late or the governor was not considered a reliable news source,” writes Monroy-Hernandez.

So why did the rumor spread so quickly? And why couldn’t the governor stop it?

In his tweet, the math teacher used a hashtag, #verfollow, that is used to spread news in Veracruz. The message was retweeted by a popular account used to track violence in the city and the already widespread fear of drug-related violence in the area lent credibility to the situation’s plausibility.

Researchers say determining how social media users decide which sources to trust is difficult. In recent years, a few anonymous websites that report on the drug war, like Blog del narco and Borderland Beat have accrued huge followings.

Monroy-Hernandez is conducting research now that looks at how certain anonymous social media accounts have gained more followers than the mainstream media or government, emerging as authorities on topics of violence.

He’s looking for patterns that might be helpful to governments that want to become trusted sources, likely by consistently spreading truthful, helpful information in real-time. Once they gain that authority, he said, they could then combat false rumors and remove them from the flow of information quickly.

But if Mexican governments continue to crack down on social media users, it could have the opposite effect, forcing citizens to post less frequently about violence or to resort to using anonymous accounts, instead of networks that encourage users to use their real identity, fostering more mistrust.

And where there’s mistrust, rumors get out of hand quickly — no law will stop that.

@MayorEmanuel

It is one of mainstream journalism’s fundamentals: The journalist is a witness, and should not allow himself or herself to be become part of the story. If that principle applies to journalists, should it also apply to a teacher of journalists?

The question arises because of the disclosure earlier this month that the author of “@Mayor Emanuel,” the irreverent, expletive-laden Twitter account that caused more buzz than most of the candidates in Chicago’s recent mayoral campaign, was Dan Sinker, an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago.

Sinker outed himself to The Atlantic and later collected—on behalf of Young Chicago Authors, which sponsors a variety of endeavors to encourage creative writing by the city’s young people—a $5,000 donation that candidate Rahm Emanuel had pledged to the charity of the anonymous author’s choice if he would identify himself.

Sinker appeared with Emanuel on a radio show and was everywhere in the Chicago media for a few days. The mayor-elect was gracious—as he had reason to be—and the tone of most of the news reports was lighthearted, even laudatory. “How clever!” seemed to be the dominant sentiment about Sinker and @MayorEmanuel.

How clever, indeed. But should a professor of journalism—a teacher of journalists—have been engaged in such an endeavor?

After all, these were not musings in a private journal that Sinker produced. They were not jokes shared among a few friends. They were, to put the most charitable construction on them, satirical commentary on Chicago and its politics, employing the media-generated caricature of a foul-mouthed Rahm Emanuel as the literary vehicle and the digital power of Twitter and the Internet as the publishing one.

To put a less charitable construction on them, the postings on @MayorEmanuel were a gross distortion with the potential to mislead the voting public in important ways about the character of the leading candidate in the race and to skew the outcome in unpredictable and unintended ways.

In fairness, it must be said that the latter of these was more a possible reality than a real possibility. The fact is that anybody sophisticated enough to find his or her way to @MayorEmanuel probably was sophisticated enough to recognize that it couldn’t have been a product of the real Emanuel’s campaign. Yes, the candidate’s real name was used; there was no attempt to fictionalize it as, say, “Rohm Immanuel.” But the photo of the real Emanuel in a mocking pose and the tagline—“Your next motherfucking mayor. Get used to it, assholes”—should have been a dead giveaway to all except the completely brain-dead. On the other hand, if I have learned anything in my six-plus decades of life, it is that there is nothing so obvious that someone cannot misunderstand it.

But even if we accept the most charitable construction, the question remains: Should a teacher of journalists have been engaged in an activity that, by its very nature, was public and thus carried the possibility of affecting the campaign and its outcome?

The question provoked a lively e-mail debate among members of Loyola’s School of Communication faculty in the week after Sinker’s role was revealed. Members of the journalism faculty seemed most disapproving. Faculty from other disciplines—public relations and advertising, communication studies—were more inclined to see justifications for what Sinker did, without necessarily approving it. No one, I think it fair to say, applauded it.

“It goes against everything we’re trying to teach young journalists about attribution, fact-checking and transparency,” said Professor John Slania, head of the journalism program.

Professor Beth Konrad endorsed Slania’s thoughts and elaborated. “Most journalism schools employ former or working journalists as part of their faculty. Most journalism professors are still engaged in the craft in some way by either freelancing or researching.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics cautions against “conflict of interest—whether real or perceived,” Konrad said. “As the past president of SPJ, if I had done the same gig as Sinker, my credibility to this institution, to SPJ and to my students would be greatly compromised.”

Professor Bastiaan Vanacker saw the issue differently. Sinker, he said, was “a journalism professor who was not producing journalism, but something more akin to a parody/satire that made fun of a political candidate. I’d see him more as engaged in anonymous pamphleteering, an activity the Supreme Court has labeled as ‘an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent.’”

It is worth noting that Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, in their still-valuable little primer “The Elements of Journalism,” also draw a distinction between being a journalist and doing journalism. What matters is not whether a person is or calls himself a journalist, they say, but whether what he or she does is journalism. @MayorEmanuel most assuredly was not.

Professor David Kamerer noted that, besides @MayorEmanuel, Dan Sinker created a website that is “innovative, useful, and above all, it is journalism. In some ways it’s a model of what journalists will be doing in the future.” (I would concur heartily and urge everyone to look closely at it.)

“So,” Kamerer went on, “he [Sinker] had one foot in (scorecard) and one foot out (@MayorEmanuel), structurally not a good position for a journalist. Plus, he IS a journalism professor.”

Kamerer noted that the Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics forbids members to “corrupt the channels of communication.” Might that be what Sinker did with @MayorEmanuel?

In a telephone interview, Sinker said he is “not a traditional journalist” and does not subscribe to the notion that a journalist is always and in everything he or she does subject to strict standards of traditional journalistic ethics.

“I firmly believe that when I’m a journalist, I am a very good journalist,” he said. “But I am a lot more things than that. I kind of refuse to accept that we all have to be statues. When we go out to eat, we don’t go out to eat as journalists. When we go to the movies, we don’t go as journalists.”

Asked whether he had, with @MayorEmanuel, injected himself into the mayoral campaign and become part of the story, Sinker said that was not his intent and he was mystified at the passion and intensity of the media fascination with the Twitter feed. “I don’t know why it got so big,” he said.

He said it was possible that some readers’ understanding and appreciation of Chicago history and politics may have been deepened by @Mayor Emanuel, which gradually developed a storyline and contained references that could have sent readers online for background.

But, Sinker said, he was far prouder and more deeply invested in the Chicago mayoral scorecard, which he developed “as a direct response” to the election in last year’s statewide races of Scott Lee Cohen. Cohen, owner of an empire of pawnshops, won the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor and then disclosed that he had been charged in 2005 with domestic abuse for allegedly holding a knife to the throat of his girlfriend. The charges later were dropped and Cohen was persuaded to give up his spot on the Democratic ticket. But their failure to uncover this episode before the 2010 primary became a source of embarrassment to the state’s news media.

That episode, Sinker said, pointed up a “vast need for better political reporting,” and his mayoral scorecard was an effort to address that need. “That’s actually the work I’m more proud of and it was more intentional” than @MayorEmanuel, he said.

My own feelings on this issue are mixed. On one hand, I share Slania’s and Konrad’s concern that actions by a teacher of journalism that undermine the disciplines we attempt to teach young journalists are unwise and unhelpful. But unethical? I’m not so sure.

Vanacker makes an extremely important and cogent point, I think, when he says, “Academics’ contribution to public discourse is of a different nature than journalists’ and [is] governed by different ethical guidelines.”

And at some level, I think, it is not unreasonable to expect college students, who can split hairs like the best jailhouse lawyers when their own interests are at stake, to begin contending with some of the ambiguity with which they’ll be dealing throughout their adult lives.

But exactly what kind of ambiguity and how much? To this day, for example, I find columnist George Will’s having helped Ronald Reagan prepare for his presidential debates an intolerable breach of journalistic ethics—and Will was considered and considered himself to be a journalist, not a teacher of journalists. Yet Will continues to be read by millions, including me.

Sinker’s department chair at Columbia College, Nancy Day, said she sees no ethical breach in his behavior. And she likened what he did to the work of Hunter Thompson back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thompson, of course, presents his own set of problems, with his deeply self-involved “gonzo journalism.” But the mention of his name in the same breath with Sinker’s and @MayorEmanuel leads me to the most vexing of my mixed feelings: We journalists and journalism teachers desperately need to find ways of reporting on things like Chicago’s mayoral race that will engage people, will make them want to learn about the candidates and the issues. Sinker is absolutely right about the “vast need” for better political reporting.

As unsettling as I find what Sinker did and as juvenile as most of the content of @Mayor Emanuel seems to have been, the darned thing got some people interested in the mayoral campaign. Sometimes, wisdom can come even from the most egregious sources.

Advocating Ethical Design

Visual lies are deadly, according to David Berman, a Canadian graphic designer and author of Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change The World.

“A naked woman draped over a car -- that’s a visual lie,” says Berman. “I’ve created a sentence that says ‘buy my car, and you’ll have more sex.’ You can’t say that (in an ad), but you can present it as a visual sentence, and the law doesn’t mind that very much.”

Both in his book, and throughout his career, Berman aims to expose the ethical pitfalls endemic to the graphic design industry. A number of designers will refuse if asked to create a design using untruthful language, Berman stated. However, using visual elements linked together to form an impression in the mind may result in a distortion of the truth just the same.

Calling the eye “the largest diameter bandwidth pipe into the human brain,” Berman believes people are much more influenced by things that look real as opposed to symbology. “We also live in a society that codified law into words, not pictures. It’s easy to get around a law with the vagueness that pictures connote.”

These “visual lies” now populating untold numbers of websites denigrate not only women, but also the entire planet, according to Berman. The seductive appeals are made possible by talented graphic designers, who contribute to environmental denigration by encouraging overconsumption of dwindling resources, Berman said.

“Designers tend to underestimate how much power they have. They’re culpable,” he said. He estimates that within a decade, the majority of humanity will be able to publish information on the web. And that’s why “almost everyone needs to know something” about ethical web design, said Berman.

“There are the ads you accidentally hit [while browsing a website.] There are many layers of persuasion and coercion,” Berman said. “What a designer has responsibility for in [designing a website] gets broader. When you are dealing with pure print design, once the job is done, the designer’s involvement is over. The technology was cut-and-dried. If I know how ink goes on paper, I can do a better design,” he said.

“With metadata, so much is hidden. It softens the line where design ends and programming begins,” Berman said. “You can have a very deceptive strategy with 28 different things you can do to try and trick Google. How do you trick someone to see a poster?”

Another example of deceptive coding on websites involves the file names that are used for graphics. “Some people do it honestly, and some deceptively,” he said. “What a designer has responsibility for, as a web designer, gets broader. With symbols and codes, the ethics can be in convention.

“Spam, in all its forms, is the best example of manipulation on an international scale,” said Berman. “Ninety percent of e-mail, globally, is deceptive. There are all sorts of calls to action, banner ads to distract you from what you really came to do. There is no precedent for the amount of effort expended to trick people.”

Seductive advertisements using exploitative imagery have long populated public spaces in North America through signage. Now that signage has greater impact through deployment of digital signs. Unlike signage, web design is interactive. However, interactive web interface is now possible with traditional signage through Quick Response (QR) codes that can be scanned by cell phones through a wireless connection. The persuasive power of the web is absorbing traditional signs within its orbit of influence, through incorporating QR codes.

“The challenge with the web is the interactivity, because we can publish so much so inexpensively,” said Berman.

Berman believes design is so powerful that “it can be a matter of life and death.” As such, it should be regulated in respect to its social and environmental impact. “This proliferation of visual lies” is just as deadly as faulty construction, said Berman. “Anyone can design a website, but not anyone can design a shed or a structure. If it is over three stories tall, there isn’t a jurisdiction in North America that would allow you to build something that large without a permit.”

Berman advocates for “a rejoining of cause and relationship” by researching and documenting the impact visual design has upon human behavior. As an example of the large-scale impact that unanticipated effects of poor design can have, Berman cites the U.S. presidential election in 2000, in which the outcome hinged on the defective graphic design of the ballots in Florida.

Designers have power over how human beings are depicted, said Berman. Certain hairstyles, skin color and leg length have been defined as normal. “It’s the subtler things that marginalize a population. It’s about how human beings are portrayed, and how certain national resources are consumed.”

Berman observes that graphic designers’ choices are also shaping public perceptions over body image. He points to a now familiar image: a young woman in front of a laptop computer propped up on her elbows, and lying on her stomach -- an image used in many advertising campaigns. “It’s a classic shot used to sell computers. Do you ever see a guy in this pose? It would look crazy. They use this shot, because the angle gets in her whole body.”

Berman insists ethical design matters because designers have such a huge impact on society. “We're familiar with the powerful branding campaigns of the cola makers -- the cigarette makers -- the alcohol makers -- the cosmeticians -- I'm sorry -- the cosmetics manufacturers. They're all working hard to convince people that they need and need and need in order to belong. We're familiar with the issues of young women and body image issues because of the false picture we've given in our society of what women should look like.” Therefore, he urges designers to “take the time to understand how the mechanics of persuasion works.”

Berman said any designer can choose to look at ethics in designing websites. “I don’t want to be known as someone people would say, ‘Could he ever trick people well! What a branding strategist! What a brilliant guy!’” he stated. “I don’t want to have people say that about me. I want to be known for choosing to make a better world.”

“There’s a lot to be worried about -- a lot of fragility. There is urgency, but there has never been more hope. Using the same technology, we can do ourselves in, or we can choose to make things possibly better,” he added. “We can choose which ideas we’re going to share with people … are we going to share our style addiction, our trivia, or how to drink caffeinated sugar water? We have the power as designers to share that.

“First you need to know how to do good design, then you need to do good.”

British Tabloids

British Tabloids

“Rogue” members of an org. almost never are really rogues. Their rogue modus operandi almost always reflects the organization’s modus operandi, or ethos.

I jotted that note to myself back in early June, after reading a Vanity Fair story about the British newspaper phone hacking scandal while on a flight home to Chicago from Paris. The story quoted Andy Coulson, former editor of the recently shuttered News of the World, describing the first case in the scandal—reporter Clive Goodman’s and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire’s 2006 convictions for hacking voice-mail messages of the royal household—as the work of a “rogue reporter.”

Goodman, it turns out, was anything but a rogue. His actions—for which he served a brief term in prison—appear to have been all too typical of the way things were done at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World and, quite possibly, at other Murdoch papers as well. Goodman, it seems, was just following his paper’s standard operating procedure when he hacked into the phones of members of the royal family.

No reporter, I always tell my ethics classes, ever publishes a story on his or her own. Publication is always a cooperative activity—it involves decisions by reporters, editors and an entire quality-control apparatus. When there is a screwup, it is the organization that screws up. And even in cases of true “rogue reporters,” like Jayson Blair or Judith Miller at The New York Times, the organization is ultimately responsible, because the quality control process obviously broke down and failed to catch their falsehoods, exaggerations and departures from standards.

At the most basic level, there’s nothing really new about what the News of the World was doing: acquiring personal information and communications and publishing it for profit. And it has been done electronically since the telegraph and the party-line.

But the existence now of the cellphone, text-messaging and other digital devices allowed the paper to do this on an industrial scale and with an intrusiveness that was nothing short of…well, scandalous.
In terms of tastelessness, the bottom seemed to have been reached in Britain in 1992, when details of a phone conversation between Prince Charles and the then-Camilla Parker Bowles were published. That was the conversation in which Charles spoke indelicately of tampons and matters usually not discussed in public.

But the News of the World took the practice of prying into private lives to previously unimagined depths with its hacking into the phone of a teenage abduction victim who later turned out to have been murdered. Not only did the paper hack Milly Dowler’s cellphone, but its hacker allegedly went so far as to erase some voice-mail messages in a full queue to make room for new ones, giving her family false hope she was still alive and possibly compromising the police investigation of her disappearance.

It was the disclosure of the Dowler hacking that apparently loosed the floodgates of public outrage in Britain. Thanks in no small part to Murdoch-style journalism, the British public has become pretty much inured to press intrusions into the lives of royals and celebrities. But the revelation that the News of the World was vamping on the tragedies of murdered schoolgirls and victims of London’s 2005 subway bombing—well, that was too much.

In her Vanity Fair article, reporter Sarah Ellison summed up the scandal thus:

The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another.

Not only have all of these entities now run afoul of one another, they have collided in spectacular fashion. Two top officials of Scotland Yard have resigned. The News of the World has been shut down. Two top executives of Murdoch’s empire—Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton—have been forced to quit. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who once employed Coulson as his communication chief, is trying to get ahead of the scandal and save his own job. A former News of the World reporter, Sean Hoare, who was a source for Ellison’s story as well as for several New York Times pieces on the scandal, was found dead under unexplained circumstance in his home outside London Monday. And there is talk of a revolt against Murdoch’s stewardship of his own creation, News Corporation, by independent board members. This scandal may yet consume a British government and Murdoch, too.

This disaster is the product not of one or even several rogue reporters. This is the product of a rogue organization.

BUSINESS Communications AND TRANSPARENCY

Openness and sharing may be the hallmarks of social media and online communities, but transparency and disclosure can be a tricky area for companies to navigate when building their online profiles and presenting information to clients and customers in the digital world.

Ethical gray areas still exist when it comes to transparency, and a mistake in judgment can have negative ramifications for companies in any industry. Experts say the key to avoiding fines, tarnishes to a brand and all around online-community-building-chaos lies in developing proper internal policies, communication and education surrounding digital engagement.

Michael Brito, vice president of social media at Edelman Digital, cites a lack of internal policies to regulate and support social media engagement as a major contributor to transparency and disclosure issues for companies. “All these companies were on a quest to have a social media presence, and they jumped into it right away. Employees are just kind of out there,” he said. “I think the root cause of transparency and disclosure problems isn’t so much that companies are being purposely deceitful, it’s that they never developed internal governance models to educate and empower people to engage the right way.”

Without proper safeguards in place, issues can quickly arise.

For example, rogue employees may be publishing information about a company or promoting its products without reporting back to the company internally about what they are posting and without disclosing their employment at the company. Others may be posting comments in response to news articles, OpEds, blog posts or in other online forums without being briefed on the organization’s messaging and without identifying their association.

“When no one’s talking internally and when one-off employees are doing their own thing, it can be disastrous for a company,” said Brito.

He also cites potential problem areas with employees on Twitter, using an example of an employee with a large following who tweets about a personal interest area, but not about the company. “Let’s say she then mentions the company for some reason. At what point does she need to identify that she works there?” Brito asked hypothetically.

Companies also can run into problems by not properly disclosing affiliate links and relationships with bloggers, according to Patrick Thoburn, a member of the ethics advisory panel at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and co-founder of Matchstick, a Toronto word of mouth marketing company.

“Marketers have encountered big issues with disclosing terms of engagement with bloggers,” he said. If a blogger is taken on a company trip, for example, it needs to be disclosed. “In some ways even higher standards apply in online media,” he said, noting that the Federal Trade Commission has become more active in regulating the digital marketing world.

Brito also cites hired bloggers as a big problem area. “Per FTC guidelines, bloggers need to disclose that relationship if they are writing about a product. If they don’t already, companies need to know that.”

Online contests can create transparency issues too, according to Thoburn. A consumer might enter a contest and start tweeting about the company. Initially, the contestant and the company don’t have a material connection. But should he win, they might, and proper disclosure would have been required from the beginning.

Another online publishing dilemma for companies: who writes the content of tweets and other postings for CEOs or high-ranking executives? Well-known CEO tweeters likes Tony Hsieh of Zappos write their own tweets, but less engaged CEOs may be tempted to use ghostwriters. However, doing so rates low on the transparency scale and doesn’t provide much business value. “Most people are savvy enough to know whether it’s the actual voice of the person and not just a rewritten press release,” Brito said. “You shouldn’t be tweeting if you don’t have time to do it yourself.”

Sima Dahl, social media strategist and president of Chicago-based marketing consulting firm Parlay Communications, agrees. “Executives need to write their own tweets,” she said. “If you’re an individual online, you need to be that person and you need to do so under your own voice. If you’re not comfortable, don’t try to fake it.”

Transparency and disclosure issues can pop up without warning, and companies need to be prepared to evaluate some scenarios on a case-by-case basis. But thinking about dilemmas that may arise, instituting an open culture and setting guidelines before unleashing employees to engage can go a long way toward mitigating issues.

“Internal social media policies are very effective at educating employees and achieving compliance,” Thoburn said.

Brito said companies are realizing that controls like governance models, firewalls and training are needed to avoid negative issues. Even younger generations that are very proficient in social media can be culprits of disclosure lapses. "It’s not top of mind for them,” Brito said. “For example, for the new hire who’s excited to start tweeting about the company, organizations really need to have employee engagement and ethics training in place.”

Dahl says it’s important to harness the energy of those employees, and to set them up to succeed. “You want to have employees talking about how great your company is,” she said. “Whether it’s how to launch a successful blog, create their first Twitter handles or how to compose healthy tweets, provide the proper education and advice up front and then let your employees go. You’ve hired smart people, so instill a sense of trust, and then be swift in disciplining someone who breaks that trust.”

But developing and implementing those guidelines can be a challenging task, and it requires support from leadership and departments throughout the organization. Dahl notes that it’s easy for companies to get hamstrung: “A lot of times companies get scared. It’s the sort of thing where if you stop to consider all the ethical and legal implications, you won’t move forward.”

That’s why she advises companies to collaborate across departments. “Include people throughout the organization,” she advised. “You might find people who are already engaged and want to be engaged in departments outside of marketing. Show them how to talk about things and engage them to lift your brand.”

Brito said companies that communicate effectively in the online sphere often gather a committee of representatives from legal, marketing, human resources, communications, IT and various business units to create social media centers of excellence that are responsible for creating guidelines and training. “In order for it to be comprehensive, everyone internally needs to be part of the process,” he said.

Organizations like WOMMA that keep track of ethical issues and FTC guidelines also can be helpful in developing standards and guidelines. WOMMA educates members on ethical issues and provides a member code of ethics that can serve as a reference point for developing internal ethics policies.

For example, standards of conduct required by WOMMA’s code of ethics include making meaningful disclosures of relationships or identities with consumers in relation to marketing initiatives that could influence a consumer’s purchasing decisions; meaningful and prominent disclosure of all forms of consideration or compensation received from a member, marketer or sponsor of a product or service; disclosure of material aspects of commercial relationships with a marketer; compliance with the FTC’s Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising; and genuine honesty in communication.

Without standards in place, companies leave themselves open to reputational, legal and brand implications. “Remember that people and competitors are watching what you’re publishing online,” Thoburn said. “A lack of ethical behavior can be a competitive disadvantage, and competitors will be happy to point out ethical shortcomings.”

Daliah Saper, principal with Saper Law Offices in Chicago, said companies that make mistakes with transparency can leave themselves open to FTC fines and can be targeted by competitors for deceptive trade practices.

As Brito notes, they also lose credibility. “Companies that defy the trust of an online community will definitely have a hard time regaining their reputation.” But he also says companies are beginning to understand that. “Companies today are getting it. They don’t want to deceive people,” he said.

And Saper suggests relatively easy ways to avoid liability. “Monitor your bloggers and employees, and be dedicated to being very transparent.”

With transparency such an inherent part of today’s online communities, experts say companies need to make it part of their daily decisions. As Thoburn explains, “There’s a strong spirit of transparency in the roots of the blogosphere. Social media is very much imbued by principals of transparency, and companies need to take the time to maintain it and do things right.”

Digital Ethics and Kids

As digital communication continues to evolve as a way of life, it is nearly impossible to avoid the digital era from our homes, schools and workplaces.

As such, individuals in society need to realize the increasing significance of digital ethics and the role it plays in our daily lives.  People of all ages will be exposed to modern day technology at some point.

Children’s ethical systems are forged in the home with personal ethics developed from the family’s moral beliefs.  During childhood, moral knowledge is inherited into a framework by our culture, religious beliefs, economic status, social life, gender and those who we are surrounded by most often.

At the age when children begin school, they are placed with others with different moral beliefs and different family backgrounds.  These children continue to face an ever-challenging question of their own beliefs throughout their childhood years.

Children who are raised in families who have no moral or ethical knowledge run the risk of not practicing good ethical behavior. Some of these children will not make ethical decisions during their use of digital media nor will they realize they are doing right or wrong.

With the digital era becoming a prominent fixture in our daily lives, it is pertinent that children of today’s age have knowledge of digital ethics.  If children are not learning digital ethics at home, we, as a society, can’t expect them to know right from wrong in this regard.

For a student who uses media appropriately and respects the privacy and property of themselves and all others, whether they know the party on the other end or not, is practicing good digital ethical behavior.  They prove to do so by their actions.

However, a student who does not practice digital ethics at the beginning of a school year  may not have been surrounded by good moral behavior, or it could be the lack of an ethical system in the home.

“Ideally, parents should be the ones who model best behaviors for their children,” said Michael Cavanagh, Assistant professor who teaches journalism at University of Illinois at Springfield.

“Unfortunately, if parents are not savvy with digital media, it is hard for children, who think they know more, to listen to parents who have never downloaded a CD from Bit Torrent,” Cavanagh said.

As in days past, we face the challenge of trademark and copyright infringement, especially when it comes to the Internet and Web.  According to the copyright law of the United States, any original literary, musical, dramatic, artistic, architectural and audiovisual work that is fixed in some tangible medium or expression is protected and belongs to the author.

Many people are naïve to trademark and copyright laws, such as the case with Napster where people, especially college students, were downloading music for free.

“Most of my students admit to helping themselves to ‘free’ music downloads,” Cavanagh said.

Some people believe, because words, images, video, etc. are on the Internet or Web for everyone to see, that anyone is entitled to it and that is not true.  Copyright laws give authors exclusive rights to their works.

“Trademark and copyright is not something that is often taught in schools, nor is it well-understood by the public at large,” Cavanagh said.

Instead of schools enforcing the laws of trademark and copyright, they simply restrict children’s usage of the Internet and Web. While these students may not have complete access to it during school hours, they are left free to choose how they use digital media, often with their peers being most influential.

Trademark and copyright aren’t the only issues children face, plagiarism is another challenge.

“Copy-and-paste plagiarism is rampant at U.S. colleges and universities,” said Cavanagh, “Anti-plagiarism service Turnitin found 110 million instances of plagiarism in 40 million student papers in the last 10 months.”

Teaching proper research and writing methods during elementary years may help students avoid plagiarism as they grow into productive and honest students with continuing good behavior as citizens.

Spencerport Central School District’s Technology teacher, Dan Cleveland, teaches roughly 250 middle school students throughout the school year.

“In a way, adolescents are not necessarily mature enough to have the privilege to access all aspects of what the Internet has to offer,” Cleveland said.

Cleveland believes having adequate knowledge and comprehension of technological resources such as computers, the Internet, etc., is what it means to be literate in the 21st Century.  It leaves us to wonder, is the educational system on task with the 21st Century or does it lag behind?

“I believe we are working hard to all be at the same level to be teaching for the “21st century learners,” said Cleveland, “I feel it is difficult for all to be on board and following the same goal.

He continues, “As a technology teacher, growth in the 21st century is our ultimate goal, whereas in other subject areas, it may not be as important.”

In his district, as well as most other school districts, students are not allowed access to social networking sites and have limited access to the Internet and Web.  However, restriction only prevents usage, it doesn’t teach them right or wrong.

For Cleveland’s Technology classes alone he states that roughly 25-30 percent of his students have been properly educated in digital ethics prior to the school year and that number drastically increases by the end of the school year.

While this is only one teacher of one school district, it is apparent how important it is to teach children how to be digitally ethical.

If parents aren’t digitally savvy, it may be necessary to introduce not only ethics at large, but to implement digital ethics and its importance for students to become good digital citizens, into school systems.

Cleveland feels digital ethics should be introduced to children as early as first or second grade.

“The earlier we can create this safe-mind set for students, the better off they will be,” Cleveland said.

Lindsay Thompson, the mother of  a two-year-old and preschool age student, has similar thoughts to Cleveland.

“Good digital practices should be taught both at home and in school,” said Thompson, “Kids should learn the correct way to use the Internet at home and the school system should reinforce the good behavior.”

Not all homes are digitally savvy for various reasons.  With this lack of knowledge, it will be a continuous cycle, leaving future generations with unethical digital practices.  If ethics is practiced in the home, but digital ethics is not, general ethical behavior may still play a role on whether a student thinks twice by their actions in the digital world.

“I think the idea of digital ethics is a little beyond four and five-year-olds,” said Thompson, “But the principles can be applied to things they understand, such as being honest and having respect for others can be taught at a very young age.”

Even though most schools enforce good ethical behavior with signing a code of conduct by the student and parent, not all students and parents are fully aware what digital ethics means.

Instead of exposing students to the full capacity of what the Internet and Web have to offer, they are shielded from it and not taught all the right and wrong, good and bad.  The districts are taking upon the parents to teach it to their children.  However, if the parents don’t know, how will the children and who will do the teaching?

“It’s up to the older kids to teach it to the parents, in return, the parents will learn it too, until all the ages catch up with the present digital age,” said Mark Ellis, a high school senior from the Hilton School District.

“Kids download pictures and music all the time off the Internet for free, and so do their parents, because they think they can,” Ellis said.

If the adults are stealing music, breaking copyright and trademark laws, plagiarizing, sending inappropriate emails and texts, then we can’t blame the children for using the same behaviors.

“I know I’m not supposed to steal from a person, a business or from the Internet because my family taught me right from wrong, not the school district,” said Ellis.  “The school districts definitely need to teach it and talk about it more often in order to know the importance of what is right or wrong in the digital world, or else students may never learn.”

Times change and people continue to adapt to the new, but since the digital world is changing at a rapid rate, some people are left without the knowledge they need to practice good digital ethics, therefore passing on unethical behavior to their children. For those who do practice, they need to model that behavior, beginning at a young age and what better place to do so than in the school system.

Piracy by Adrian Johns

The contemporary discourse surrounding the issues of copyright law, file-sharing, and intellectual property might lead you to believe that piracy is a relatively recent endeavor, one which was ushered in by the digital age, the Internet and Web, the proliferation of digital devices, and the ease with which digital files can be copied, distributed, and shared among users. However, Adrian Johns’ book Piracy (published by The University of Chicago Press) reveals that piracy, as currently defined, has a long, colorful, history beginning in the mid-1600s. In ancient times craftsmen formed guilds to uphold the standards, customs, and duties of the craft. Similar to a contemporary professional licensing board, each guild governed its members and its craft by issuing rules regarding proper conduct, professional courtesy, and the requisite knowledge and skills of each craft. The guild protected its craft and its members’ interests in the preservation of standards.

Piracy is a book of the very human stories about the intersection of creative endeavor, ownership, commerce, and questions concerning who is able to legally profit from original works. Original works in the book run the gamut from print materials, music, audio and video recordings to pharmaceuticals among other commercial products. In his meticulously researched book, Johns produces a scholarly, comprehensive examination of the history of piracy and the protection of ownership from the Middle Ages to the present. In each era, piracy must be defined as such by contemporaries of the time to be classified as piracy in the book. According to Johns, the definition of piracy has been transformed at various points in time. Over the millennia, struggles over ownership and piracy have consistently resulted in the redefinition of each concept giving birth to new laws. One contemporary example is the TEACH Act which redefined the terms and conditions on which accredited, nonprofit educational institutions throughout the U.S. may use copyright-protected materials in distance education. The newly defined terms include the acceptable use of copyright-protected materials posted on course websites and by other digital means without permission from the copyright owner and without payment of royalties.

This change in law is one reflection of the penetration of digital devices into our society and school curriculum. Many contemporary students are digital natives for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices is the norm. According to a recent article in The New York Times, parents of toddlers use iPhones to entertain (and quiet) their children. The toddlers are so enthralled with the devices they are reluctant to surrender them back to their parents, thus they are becoming accustomed to manipulating and using digital devices at a very young age. Students’ digital fluency and the ease with which they are able to create, copy, manipulate, and post content to the Web with these devices so quickly enables them to act hastily – often without a thought for the potential ramifications – and highlights the societal need to develop conventions for proper, ethical conduct surrounding the use of these devices.

These abilities also raise questions such as, who are the guardians of proper conduct and who upholds ethical values in the 21st century? Who decides the norms? Whose duty is it to educate citizens concerning the values of civil liberties, free speech, privacy, and autonomy? Now that technology is such an integral part of everyday life and education, and duplication of digital files can be accomplished so easily and quickly, who educates students concerning copyright laws, ownership, intellectual property, fair use, and public domain? Who helps them understand both their rights and their responsibilities concerning copyright and technology?

As Johns states in his book, struggles over ownership and piracy have resulted in new concepts and ultimately, new laws. In his concluding chapter, he calls for a conversation concerning the redefinition of current intellectual property laws. We can look to history as a guide to help answer these questions. Ultimately, as professionals, it is up to us to open the conversation and to educate students on these issues.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo8273977.html

The message is the medium

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island,” the main protagonist, Daniel, is confronted with a future that is defined by nuclear holocaust and decay in which the only means of communication is a Facebook-esque device. Face-to-face contact is off-limits for the regenerated clones of humans that inhabit this dystopian nightmare.

As with many authors, sociologists and anthropologists who have addressed the issue of human interaction through media, Houllebecq’s portrayal of these media interfaces veers toward the negative as machine replaces oral tradition. New media in Daniel’s world are confining and dull, leaving little scope for action, even if they do allow for the exchange of messages.

Houellebecq’s vision is not dissimilar to the views of communication theorists such as Marshall McLuhan who assert that as media evolve, they simultaneously devour humankind and drive our new ways of thinking and communicating as our agency is diminished. This theory coexists with audience theory based on extensive ethnographic research focusing on radio and television, in particular, that routinely comes to similar conclusions of passivity and a lack of scope in activity among users of media.

If these mostly negative perceptions of the extent to which the user can actively utilize media form the basis of our understanding of these processes, how do new media change our ability to act? And how do we act as a result?

Perhaps the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa can provide answers. Where information flows in countries such as Libya and Egypt were previously defined by regime-controlled television stations, censored newspapers and highly regulated airwaves, the Internet is now driving new possibilities for dissemination, action and choice.

In Egypt in particular, news media attributed the success of the uprising and the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule to Facebook and Twitter. Reports noted that Wifi users close to the epicenter of protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unlocked their signals allowing 3G wireless devices greater access to the Internet to help coordinate demonstrations. It was no surprise that the main movements were generated in the cities, where the Internet is more prevalent than in outlying areas.

As one Egyptian living in America noted on Facebook: “People have been twitting [sic] every step of the way and I have been reading and watching as if I’m walking side by side. Totally and absolutely amazing.”

Yet comments such as these highlight the limits of the roles played by these new media tools and perhaps the extent to which claims of new media revolutions are in fact overblown. While Twitter and Facebook allow news of recent events to escape these countries for the consumption of the international news media and its audience, to what extent was this same content recirculated within the countries in which it originated? This represents the test of whether these new media forms did indeed drive, and come to form, the glue binding active participation.

After realising the effect that blogging and social media sites were having in galvanizing demonstrations, the authorities in Egypt promptly shut down the five main Internet service providers and hampered the normal operation of mobile phone networks.

The counter-response was borne of further evolution of new media, and the result was the possibility of new ways in which users could connect and remain active. Twitter developed a service in which people could phone in their microblogs using speak2tweet.

In Tunisia, another country that saw the overthrow of a longstanding autocrat in President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, television news stations used information lifted directly from Facebook to report what was happening.

While speak2tweet allows the producer of each message to blog without use of the Internet, to hear that same message the audience must follow a link on the Twitter website, meaning an Internet connection is still the key to completion of this chain of communication. During the Egyptian blackout, no such connection existed.

There is evidence to suggest that much of the content coming out of protests in North Africa and the Middle East was consumed in much greater quantities in the West where the digital appetite is much greater than in the countries in which these flows were created, mostly due to higher population coverage and faster Internet speeds.

Sysomos, a company that tracks trends in new media, found that only 14,642 Twitter users identified their location as either Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen during the period in which protests were taking place in all three countries. And while crisis-related tweets soared from 122,319 between Jan. 16-29 to more than 1.3 million during the subsequent week as demonstrations intensified in these countries, there is little evidence to suggest that the majority were consumed within these same nations.

Arabic Democrati, a Twitter user describing him or herself as a Libyan revolutionary from Tripoli (“We report what we see in Triploi. We don’t want autocracy, tyranny and despotism”), ranks as the second-highest ranking tweeter under the tag ‘Libya’ with just over 2,400 followers. U.S. presenter-cum-megastar Ryan Seacrest, by contrast, boasts more than 4.1 million followers. For all the media attention that has idolized the likes of Twitter and Facebook and their roles in these recent uprisings, traffic in the countries concerned is simply not that high suggesting actual influence of these sites on what has happened appears exaggerated.

The International Telecommunications Union reported last year that just under 25 percent of people living in Arab states were connected to the Internet, and that figure plummets to less than 10 percent of people living in Africa. In Egypt, penetration was at 21.2 percent in February, with just 5 percent Facebook penetration as of the end of August last year. And in Libya, use of the social-networking site is about half that figure.

As a qualification, it is important to note that a few Facebook users sending and receiving information and images can turn into dozens of people through association when word-of-mouth is factored in, but clearly the Internet and its associated media tools are not yet creating the blanket awakening across Africa and the Middle East that we are sometimes led to believe.

However, these diverse new forms of media do have the scope to increase the possibility for participation where the likes of television and radio have largely failed in the past. The humble VHS recorder, now considered something of a relic beside the likes of Tivo and YouTube, was once considered an example of a media device that afforded the audience the possibility to create choice and get involved in determining personal media consumption. The act of picking and choosing what to record, the fast-forward button and the possibility to skip advertisements was not long ago the pinnacle of activity where the user was concerned.

New, mostly Internet-based media mean those days are long gone. And the passive dystopian future we once imagined as a result of these new forms of media—and by design ourselves—has turned out to be a much more complex, active present.

Recent events in North Africa and the Middle East have shown us that new media can be humanising and act as an agent bringing people together and offering choice even if it can also sometimes lock us in our rooms alone. What the likes of McLuhan failed to realise is that humans, as agents of choice, will always be the ultimate masters of the medium. Even if the medium does also have the power to fundamentally change our world, this can increasingly be on our own terms. The message has always been the medium of communication, new media simply allow us to get this message out further, wider and faster.

Software Vulnerabilities

In 2008, three MIT students became infamous for hacking into the Boston transit system. Using software they wrote, they discovered a method to get free rides by adding credits to the subway passes. They had planned to announce their findings at DEF CON, an annual hacking conference held in Las Vegas, but a federal judge, at the request of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, barred them from giving the talk. Had they presented at the conference, the transit system would have incurred “significant damage,” the MBTA alleged. On the flipside, the injunction was unconstitutional, the students’ lawyer argued, a violation of First Amendment rights.

In these instances, it is unclear which party is correct. On one hand, the transit system could have lost revenue from people taking advantage of the freebie passes. On the other, scholars should be able to discuss their research without threat of litigation. It is difficult for vendors and researchers to agree on a way to responsibly disclose security vulnerabilities.

When someone discovers a flaw in software, he or she can choose one of several paths. The simplest of these paths is to do nothing, a less than ideal option, as it leaves the software in a state of vulnerability, waiting to be found or exploited by the next person. Another path is to notify the vendor, which is a good way to fix the flaw but also can unexpectedly lead to accusations of intrusion and lawsuits. Perhaps the riskiest path is to publicly divulge the findings through the media, a personal blog, or at DEF CON, like the MIT trio. Because every instance is unique, it is sometimes debatable what is the right thing to do, even if the intentions are good.

The CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University recommends a delayed approach, in which security researchers and experts wait 45 days before disclosing their findings. But this deadline can be challenging to meet, even for large organizations. Imagine a company like Microsoft, with its tens of millions of customers using different versions of Windows. Any time Microsoft makes a security update, it has to verify that the update works on countless machine configurations and settings. Nevertheless, a delayed approach is perhaps the best compromise, as stated by their Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy: “This serves everyone's best interests by ensuring that customers receive comprehensive, high-quality updates for security vulnerabilities, but are not exposed to malicious users while the update is being developed.”

Last October, The New Yorker, an 86-year-old publication, had to make two security updates to its website. The first was a change in its password policy. When users sign up for an account, the website used to set their passwords to the same value as their email addresses, making it simple to sign into another account. The update required them to reset many of their subscribers’ passwords and email out new ones. Not surprisingly, confusion ensued among those who tried logging in, and some even questioned the authenticity of the email, prompting the magazine to send a follow-up.

“Please be assured that it is in fact from The New Yorker,” they wrote, “and that we are taking steps to strengthen the security of the digital edition.”

A week later, there was another security blunder. A method was discovered that allowed users to read articles on the magazine’s website without paying. Many newspapers and magazines put up a paywall, essentially a login page, to generate revenue from online subscriptions. The sole purpose of a paywall is to let certain users in and keep others out, like a bouncer at a club. Unfortunately, The New Yorker’s did not work as expected.

Both security flaws were discovered not by a malicious hacker or security researchers, but instead by myself, a reader of The New Yorker. At the time, I was a student, writing for an online magazine that I created with a few of my journalism cronies. We were eager to publish the story in our magazine but also were cognizant of notifying Condé Nast, The New Yorker’s parent company, before we did anything. After several days of unresponsiveness, we decided to forge ahead by writing a draft and showing it to our professor, the magazine’s advisor. The article, he said, should not be like a brick that readers can use to throw through a storefront window, but rather be truthful without reading like an instruction manual.

He recommended that we remove certain details and had the school’s lawyers vet it over. After several rounds of edits and revisions, we published the story on the front page of our tiny magazine. In the first 12 hours, our website attracted some 3,900 visitors, which was more than all our previous traffic combined. We caught the attention of larger publications like the Wall Street Journal’s technology blog and the New York Observer. Advertising Age described our story as the “best piece of media writing no one at traditional publishing companies will read.” That proved to be false after we received a phone call. Apparently, someone at The New Yorker had read our story.

To characterize The New Yorker’s reaction as annoyed would have been an understatement. We had poked holes in their system and demonstrated that no one is infallible on the Internet, even if they are the darling of the magazine world. The part they found most irritating, however, was the reader’s inference that they were oblivious to our warnings, to which they deny ever having received. Then again, when you’re a magazine with a million subscribers, it’s not unusual to lose track of a few emails and calls every now and then.

We believed that we had made an effort in good faith following the policy of responsible disclosure. We gave them advanced warning. We excluded details that would allow others to exploit the vulnerability. We wanted to highlight the glaring problem of security. Given that the entire print industry seems to be migrating toward a paywall model, shouldn’t someone make sure that the technology actually works? David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, even said in an interview, “I was going to be damned if I was going to train 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, that this is like water that comes out of the sink.”

Fortunately for us, they did not unleash their lawyers. Instead, their digital team opted to exchange emails and phone numbers, and after a few days, they plugged the paywall hole, making their content more secure.

As for the Boston transit authority, they eventually dismissed their lawsuit. “This is a great opportunity for both the MBTA and the MIT students,” they said in a prepared statement. “As we continue to research ways to improve the fare system for our customers, we appreciate the cooperative spirit demonstrated by the MIT students.”

Piracy by Adrian Johns

Piracy by Adrian Johns University of Chicago Press | 2010

The contemporary discourse surrounding the issues of copyright law, file-sharing, and intellectual property might lead you to believe that piracy is a relatively recent endeavor, one which was ushered in by the digital age, the Internet and Web, the proliferation of digital devices, and the ease with which digital files can be copied, distributed, and shared among users. However, Adrian Johns’ book Piracy (published by The University of Chicago Press) reveals that piracy, as currently defined, has a long, colorful, history beginning in the mid-1600s. In ancient times craftsmen formed guilds to uphold the standards, customs, and duties of the craft. Similar to a contemporary professional licensing board, each guild governed its members and its craft by issuing rules regarding proper conduct, professional courtesy, and the requisite knowledge and skills of each craft. The guild protected its craft and its members’ interests in the preservation of standards.

Piracy is a book of the very human stories about the intersection of creative endeavor, ownership, commerce, and questions concerning who is able to legally profit from original works. Original works in the book run the gamut from print materials, music, audio and video recordings to pharmaceuticals among other commercial products. In his meticulously researched book, Johns produces a scholarly, comprehensive examination of the history of piracy and the protection of ownership from the Middle Ages to the present. In each era, piracy must be defined as such by contemporaries of the time to be classified as piracy in the book. According to Johns, the definition of piracy has been transformed at various points in time. Over the millennia, struggles over ownership and piracy have consistently resulted in the redefinition of each concept giving birth to new laws. One contemporary example is the TEACH Act which redefined the terms and conditions on which accredited, nonprofit educational institutions throughout the U.S. may use copyright-protected materials in distance education. The newly defined terms include the acceptable use of copyright-protected materials posted on course websites and by other digital means without permission from the copyright owner and without payment of royalties.

This change in law is one reflection of the penetration of digital devices into our society and school curriculum. Many contemporary students are digital natives for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices is the norm. According to a recent article in The New York Times, parents of toddlers use iPhones to entertain (and quiet) their children. The toddlers are so enthralled with the devices they are reluctant to surrender them back to their parents, thus they are becoming accustomed to manipulating and using digital devices at a very young age. Students’ digital fluency and the ease with which they are able to create, copy, manipulate, and post content to the Web with these devices so quickly enables them to act hastily – often without a thought for the potential ramifications – and highlights the societal need to develop conventions for proper, ethical conduct surrounding the use of these devices.

These abilities also raise questions such as, who are the guardians of proper conduct and who upholds ethical values in the 21st century? Who decides the norms? Whose duty is it to educate citizens concerning the values of civil liberties, free speech, privacy, and autonomy? Now that technology is such an integral part of everyday life and education, and duplication of digital files can be accomplished so easily and quickly, who educates students concerning copyright laws, ownership, intellectual property, fair use, and public domain? Who helps them understand both their rights and their responsibilities concerning copyright and technology?

As Johns states in his book, struggles over ownership and piracy have resulted in new concepts and ultimately, new laws. In his concluding chapter, he calls for a conversation concerning the redefinition of current intellectual property laws. We can look to history as a guide to help answer these questions. Ultimately, as professionals, it is up to us to open the conversation and to educate students on these issues.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo8273977.html

Social Networking Sites Taking Action

Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Congress last year that “There’s concern that Facebook and other social networks manipulate privacy policies and settings to confuse users, extract more personal information from them, and transfer the information to application developers and websites.”

Since then, the privacy issues of social networks have continued to cause controversy, surfacing time and again as the subject of international media coverage, as well as of numerous surveys, such as Consumer Reports’ recent study on “Facebook’s dark side” from June 2011.  That very report stated that “using Facebook presents children and their friends and families with safety, security and privacy risks.” Just this past week, a further privacy concern arose regarding “alleged cookie snooping:” that is, Facebook can track users - even after they have logged out.

While some users condemn Facebook for what they deem an unethical breach of privacy, the more conscientious users are trying to figure out how they can eliminate such cookies (and as a consequence, being tracked by the social network). In fact, entire websites, such as ReclaimPrivacy.org have emerged to “provide an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings.” After running the scanner, Facebook users will see a series of privacy scans that inspect their privacy settings and warn them about settings that might be unexpectedly public.

Yet Facebook, and specifically its Help Center, claim that “this is industry standard data” which the company collects for benign reasons: it “helps us optimize your experience depending on which browser you are using or whether or not you are logged into Facebook.” To a recent article in the Huffington Post on the Facebook’s alleged “cookie snooping,” the social network’s official reply was:

“Facebook does not track users across the Web. Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalize content (e.g. show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. keeping underage kids from trying to sign up with a different age). No information we receive when you see a social plugin is used to target ads, we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.

Specific to logged-out cookies, they are used for safety and protection, including identifying spammers and phishers, detecting when somebody unauthorized is trying to access your account, helping you get back into your account if you get hacked, disabling registration for underage people who try to re-register with a different birth date, powering account security features such as second factor login approvals and notification, and identifying shared computers to discourage the use of ‘Keep me logged in.’”

Especially after having to fight “epidemic” levels of bullying, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites are becoming increasingly obliged to take action and assume an ethical responsibility. However, this is usually second in line, after they have served their primary purpose: economic profit. “It's important to understand, first, that every major social network today (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+/Google) is a for-profit company. So their primary purpose is to provide a return on their investors' cash,” explains Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and now Executive Editor of Grist.

“In an ideal world, sure, social networking companies would understand that they have ethical responsibilities. But they are for-profit companies and it's naive to assume that they will behave in any way other than to maximize profits within the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern their actions. Today, in some cases, these companies and their leaders perceive value in taking some actions that we might think are ethically driven (concern over users’ privacy, for instance), but this generally only happens when those actions align with their quest for profits,” Rosenberg adds.

“It’s true that Facebook has taken action against the graver dangers of sharing,” affirms Emily Bazelon in a recent New York Times article titled “Why Facebook is After Your Kids.” Since January 2011, the Facebook is a partner in the police’s Amber Alert system for missing children. Fox News explains that “Facebook users who ‘fan’ their state’s newly-created Amber Alert page will receive alerts in their news feed regarding missing children.” Chris Sonderby, Lead Security and Investigations Counsel at Facebook, was quoted in the same article saying that “everyone at Facebook feels a responsibility to help protect children and, as a former federal prosecutor and a father of two, I am particularly proud that we are now part of the Amber Alert program. We are hopeful that today's announcement offers these dedicated officials another useful tool to find and safely recover abducted children.”

In fact, the idea to combine social networking and the search for missing children isn’t entirely novel; Jennifer Valentino-DeVries from the Wall Street Journal reminds us that “MySpace had an Amber Alert app years ago.” Facebook itself has a Safety Center, whose slogan reads: “we believe safety is a conversation and a shared responsibility among all of us. That's why we provide the information, tools and resources you'll find here.” The Official Facebook Safety Page provides up-to-date information on safety issues, and a sub-page titled “Experts,” which links to external privacy organizations and agencies, from Sweden to Canada. In addition, “[Facebook] is using a new technology to find and remove child pornography [and] in September [2011], Facebook started testing a special e-mail address with a small group of principals and guidance counselors that gives schools an inside track for urgent reports on bullying and fighting,” explains Bazelon.

In creating its A Thin Line campaign, MTV has similarly recognized a need for assuming ethical responsibility on the Web. The campaign “was developed to empower you to identify, respond to, and stop the spread of digital abuse in your life and amongst your peers.” As the name states, it is “built on the understanding that there's a "thin line" between what may begin as a harmless joke and something that could end up having a serious impact on you or someone else.” The music company is aware that no generation has ever had to deal with this, and thus wants to partner with young people in this effort, so that they can ultimately “draw [their] own digital line.” The goal is to educate oneself, inspire others to make a difference and be a part of the solution. Katie Davis, Project Manager at Harvard Project Zero and a member of A Thin Line’s Advisory Board, explains: “I think by their very existence campaigns like MTV’s A Thin Line are assuming an ethical responsibility to promote youth's positive online engagement. It's hard to know yet whether they are effective, since they are still so new.”

Anne Collier, Editor of NetFamilyNews.org and Co-Director of ConnectSafely.org, is convinced that every company has ethical obligations to its customers or users, and that media companies are no exception. “But as the nature of media is changing, as production is increasingly shared and distributed, so is responsibility,” she says. According to Collier, all social media companies have the following ethical responsibilities in common:

*        “To protect users' data and devices from fraud, theft, and other abuse

*        Based on how their service is used, to provide the necessary range of tools for the protection of user privacy and safety through both peer and customer-service notification (and a reasonable response time)

*        To educate users on how to protect themselves and each other from harm to their physical and psychological wellbeing and that of their intellectual and physical property.”

“We should crowd-source this list, because I'm sure others will have some valuable points to add,” she notes.

According to Collier, the responsibility doesn’t change that much from one social media service to the next. “Perhaps a little, based on how and for what purpose each is designed – though how a social site is used depends a lot on the users (again, by definition, we're talking about user-driven media),” she explains. “Twitter allows you to tweet privately to a closed circle of ‘followers,’ but that's not typically how it's used; it's for the most part very public. But it has many different uses, from marketing one's business to creating a personal learning network to following the news to celebrity watch. Because it's so utilitarian and used mostly publicly, I think, it has received less scrutiny from consumer privacy groups than Facebook.”

All in all, it’s reassuring to see that companies are attempting to assume ethical responsibility and take action for the greater good. However, the social network can only go so far. Ultimately, the user, too, must assume responsibility for his or her actions. Using common sense and maintaining oneself informed is key. If Facebook already puts so many safety resources at your fingertips, use them before you start another privacy debate, or worse, become a victim of “cybercrime.” The United States Department of Justice is here to help you out with an entire page on Cyberethics. No matter whether you’re merely a user or indeed the owner of a social network, it’s up to you to make good use of modern society’s new set of digital guidelines. As Collier says, “with – or better in – media where users are no longer passive, they must be empowered as part of the solution.” Or as MTV’s colloquial language puts it, you have to defend your very own digital domain.

The Ethics of LinkedIn Invitations

If an employer is seriously considering hiring you, its human resources department (HR) will probably conduct an Internet search and explore your social media posts to learn more about you. Now, HR trolls social media to find potential job candidates without having to post or advertise an opening.

Jobvite, Inc. conducted a survey of more than 600 human resources and recruiting professionals in spring 2010 to learn how many of them use social media to recruit. As of then, 92% did recruit using social media tools. Among those who do, 86% said they used LinkedIn. According to Gary Coleman, an Employment Specialist at Portland Community College, 92% of companies are now using LinkedIn to recruit.

The message is clear: unless you are contentedly in the last job of your career, you need to be on LinkedIn, the social media site for professionals. LinkedIn is based on the “six degrees of separation” premise and the belief that we are interdependent. The eight year-old company is the host of the largest online professional network. Its mission is “to connect the world’s professionals to enable them to be more productive and successful.” LinkedIn explains that its tools “help you, your connections, and millions of other professionals meet, exchange ideas, learn, make deals, find opportunities or employees, work, and make decisions in a network of trusted relationships and groups.”

You can have a passive presence on LinkedIn, but most people need to use it actively and build and maintain connections to benefit.  To establish a passive presence, you don’t need to do more than join and create a basic profile, which can be a parsed version of your résumé. LinkedIn offers many layers and levels (premium services have charges) of involvement. In that regard it is similar to a professional organization devoted to a single profession. The most minimal layer of active involvement is to consider invitations to connect. You don’t need to pay any fees to maintain an active involvement. For instance, you can invite others to connect to you, request recommendations and provide recommendations for others, and join groups related to your profession or interests and participate in group discussions.

Many people believe that the number of LinkedIn connections a person has is a factor in employability. The most aggressive ones are called LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers). LIONs send invitations to everyone in their address book and to acquaintances. Some send invitations to strangers whose profiles suggest potential synergy. LinkedIn explicitly discourages this behavior, saying, “We recommend that you only send invitations to people you know well.” Yet the company does little to prevent it.

LinkedIn also sends a mixed message by prompting users to upload their Outlook contacts and send invitations to all of them. Uncertain newbies and extreme extroverts will do that. Other people will be more selective. Many will send invitations to family and friends who may be close, but can’t directly address their professional qualifications. That strategy may seem inappropriate, but those are the people you really want to help. In the pre-digital era, those people comprised your core network, and they still do.

If you search online for advice about LinkedIn ethics, you’ll find many articles that recommend that you remind the recipient of your relationship when you send an invitation. That advice violates LinkedIn’s intention, as anyone you need to remind is somebody you probably don’t know well enough to invite. For example, your coworker who sat in an adjacent cubicle for three years should already know who you are. The same applies to your college advisor or members of a committee you chaired.

Acquaintances that send invitations often create an ethical dilemma for the recipient. Accepting invitations from people you know and can comfortably recommend or rejecting invitations from strangers is easy. The problem is deciding whether to ignore or reject invitations from people you barely know, but are likely to see again. They could be neighbors, members of your religious community, members of an enthusiast organization, or people you’ve met in a job-search group.

You can use no screening process and accept everyone who asks. That may seem risk-free and will increase your number of connections. The risk occurs when your acquaintance connection wants an introduction to one of your valuable connections.

LinkedIn gives you four options when you receive an invitation: accept, reject, ignore or say that you don’t know the person. The last choice puts the sender at risk. LinkedIn will terminate the memberships of people its software identifies as serial spammers. If you click the “ignore” button, the sender isn’t notified. That could be a useful stalling tactic, but the sender may send you another invitation.

You have two additional options. One is to ignore the request by not responding. The other is to send a message to the sender. Liz duToit, a management consultant and LinkedIn coach, recommended that I do that when I received a message from a local person I could not recall. On her suggestion, I sent a message saying, “Please remind me how I know you.” I received no response and deleted the message without taking any action.

duToit is a serial networker. She won’t blindly accept an invitation from an unknown sender, but will instead first invite the prospective connection to meet with her for coffee. One of the benefits of LinkedIn, according to duToit, is as a tool for face-to-face networking. Syndicated career columnist and counselor Penelope Trunk takes the opposite approach. Trunk says, “Don't say yes to an invitation from a person you don't really know.” She believes that users “will get more benefits from LinkedIn if you have a network of 30 people you know well than 300 people you don't really know.”

Brent Peterson, career consultant and founder of Interview Angel Inc., claims, “My goal in every LinkedIn relationship is to be able to recommend your services to other professionals who trust my opinion.” He has more than 500 connections. Imagine how much time Peterson spends making and nurturing connections, dealing with referral requests and managing his network.

Neal Schaffer wrote two books about LinkedIn. At Amazon.com, his book “Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn” has received 5-star ratings from 65 of the first 75 customer reviewers. That makes a strong case for his expertise. Schaffer is a LION, but inconsistently claims, “We all need to follow the rules of etiquette as outlined in the End User Agreement.” He ignored a request to comment for this article, which may indicate that he is conflicted about the ethics of LinkedIn invitations.

LinkedIn is more consistent about accepting invitations than it is about sending them. The company asserts, “We strongly recommend that you only accept invitations to connect from people you know.”

I’ve received LinkedIn invitations from several people I don’t know or barely know. In most of those instances, I felt obligated to accept. In each case, I accepted for social reasons. I did not want to embarrass the other person or myself, nor deal with an awkward or uncomfortable situation when I saw that person again. Those are weak reasons for making business connections. On the other hand, the obsession with social media by businesses has blurred the formerly distinct lines between business and social worlds. Perhaps business is no longer the opposite of social.

I’m president of a geographically large chapter of a national nonprofit organization. Because we are spread across several states, I’ve never met many of the chapter’s 285 members in person. After brief e-mail correspondence with a new member, he sent me a LinkedIn invitation. I had looked at his blog, but knew nothing else about this member. I checked his LinkedIn profile, which had little information, and saw that he was also new to LinkedIn.

I have an obligation to serve the chapter membership. I want this person to attend meetings and participate in chapter activities. I need to welcome and encourage him when he attends his first meeting. With that rationale, I accepted the invitation. I felt guilty that my screening process wouldn’t filter out the next Unabomber or Green River Killer, while rationalizing that someone I know well could just as easily have dark secrets.

The new member attended our November meeting and I was very impressed with him. From his participation and our brief conversation, l could tell that he was intelligent and articulate. Now, he is an acquaintance who may become a friend, but I still barely know him.

In one of my early professional positions, I was hired for the wrong reasons. I was the opposite of my predecessor in most ways. My boss disliked and disrespected my predecessor. Yet, she admitted to me that she had given the woman a glowing reference with the aim of getting rid of her. It worked.

When I was a teenager, my father hired a young man from India to work in a professional position in his office. The young man was a guest at our house for Thanksgiving dinner that year. I liked the guy as much as I delighted in the irony of sharing Thanksgiving with a real Indian. He did not progress well in his job, and when work slowed, my father had to let him go.

I asked my father if he would give the young man a good recommendation. “I can’t,” he replied, “My professional reputation is at stake.”

I believe this approach should apply to LinkedIn. If, like me, you find it too difficult or awkward to deny certain professional connections, you can politely decline to provide a referral.

If you send me a message saying, “John, I loved your article on The Center for Digital Ethics and Policy site, and I’d like you to join my professional network,” I will not accept your invitation unless we have a pre-existing relationship. I might be willing to start a relationship.

The Ethics of Book Pirating

The ethical and legal issues surrounding the illegal downloading of music and film have been exhaustively played out in the media, court and public opinion.  And yet, people continue to pirate media. An often overlooked area of media piracy—at least in comparison to that of music, film and television—is the pirating of books.  The rise of “ebooks” – digital versions of publications that can be read on computers or special electronic devices - has made book piracy much more viable. However, scanned PDFs have been a problem for some time.  Author Stephanie Meyer abandoned her ‘Twilight’ saga novel Midnight Sun due to leaked online drafts. Despite differences between books and other media, ethical debate over book pirating often simply runs in accordance with the principles laid down in the existing, lively ethical discussion over music, film and television piracy.

Debates about media piracy generally focus on the following contested areas:

1)       The rights of the creator to control the distribution of their work;

2)       The practical effects of the infringement, both in terms of the potential harms to producers and to consumers;

3)       The conflict between changing consumer demands and established distribution practices.

The arguments around ownership and rights to work are well established. However, consumers, even those who are sympathetic to those principles, continue to pirate. This sociological reality points to an interesting intersection of people’s abstract ethical views and their day to day behavior. It would be fair to say that I, myself have my own opinions on the morality of pirating books which are to a significant degree based upon the rights of creators. However, I think that rather than simply bang a drum about the inherent validity of intellectual property rights, we must seek to understand why it is that certain individuals find these arguments to be unpersuasive, or outweighed by other moral and practical considerations.

Without this understanding, I do not feel that we can come to accurate conclusions about the ethical status of book piracy and any policy considerations that result from this status. Book piracy has certain significant differences to piracy of other forms of media in both of these areas. The interplay between views on the practicalities and principles of book pirating played out on the blog of author Celine Kiernan and both she and a commenter, Eoin Purcell, editor of Irish Publishing News, were contacted for their views.

One significant factor that separates book pirating from other forms of copyright infringement is that while other pirated media is recognized as primarily functioning as entertainment, reading is considered to be an educational activity, even when the material consumed is not explicitly educational itself. Reading for pleasure is a socially virtuous pastime, encouraged by governments, parents and educational institutions. Does this greater social value put upon reading, as opposed to other forms of media, in some ways change how people perceive the ethical implications of their actions? Although laws are codified with general ethical maxims in mind, when it comes to the ethical choices that people make, moral considerations do not exist in a vacuum, but are instead infiltrated by cultural values that are placed on various activities. When you consider the degree to which reading is encouraged, particularly in direct contrast to the consumption of film and television, it is plausible that people internalize these messages in such a way that they place less weight on the immorality of depriving the author of compensation

This perception could well be bolstered by the many opportunities for readers (at least in Western countries) to legally acquire books through methods that are free at point of access and, unlike radio or television broadcasts, at the time of the reader’s choosing. These avenues – libraries and borrowing from friends – permeate modern western society, such that the idea of reading being a free pastime is embedded in our social consciousness. Indeed, one might ask, given that there is the option to borrow a book from a library, why the option of illegally downloading the same book makes any difference.

One difference is, of course, the consent of the author and publisher. Authors and publishers consent to the use of their works in the library system, often in exchange for remuneration based on the popularity of the title. Celine Kiernan also points out that libraries perform a valuable service for both authors and publishers. “... library loans are a concrete way of proving the popularity of a title - in other words they add to the author's reputation (unlike piracy figures where it is generally assumed that pirates download and share in bulk and don't really care what it is they are distributing).”

“Libraries are also a wonderful support system for authors, often giving so much back in terms of arranged readings, coordinating school visits, facilitating book clubs etc. etc. They are a genuine source of word of mouth recommendation and a wonderful resource. I am a huge supporter of the library system.”

Kiernan’s focus on ‘genuine’ word of mouth recommendations carries through to her assessment of lending of books to friends, which she supports due to the fact that “A friend will only give you a book that they have seriously liked.”

Kiernan persuasively shows how the library system is generally beneficial for both the reader and the author such that there is a clear difference in effect between a free text via an illegal download and a free text via a visit to the library.

However the primary purpose of libraries is not to benefit authors and publishers, but rather to allow for the education of the public as a form of social good. In that case, the ethical distinction between library use and illegal downloading is less clear cut and comes down to whether or not you believe the effect on the author is more important than your own convenience. Functionally, libraries work to allow for the public dissemination of knowledge and maximization of the social good of reading, while mitigating the effect on authors. If one continues to disregard the consent of the author, one must therefore look at the qualitative differences between library borrowing and book piracy.

As with other discussions about piracy, much time has been given to the potential benefits of book pirating, both in terms of increased publicity and word of mouth and potential increased sales. When Celine Kiernan discussed the pirating of her works on her blog, Eoin Purcell‘s comment summed up this view, asking “what if any evidence is there that these pirated copies are costing you sales?” He rightly points out that there is no formula to determine how many sales are lost to illegal downloads. Speaking to Purcell over email, he clarifies that he does personally believe that pirating of books harms authors, although he places an emphasis on the harms suffered by more popular authors, stating “The adage (I think from Tim O'Reilly) that 'piracy is progressive taxation' is a good one.” This is in contrast to Kiernan’s view that less mainstream authors can often be most affected, as “the smaller you are, the more vulnerable you are to fluctuations in profit margin. This means that the more challenging work, the quirkier work, the less mainstream work is in much more danger of sinking due to lack of sales, as are the small press publishers who give that kind of work a chance.”

Purcell agrees that while the moral considerations of piracy are relevant, the practical effects of the issue are perhaps more important when it comes to formulating policy.

While I think piracy is immoral, I think the costs of fighting it are higher than the returns from fighting it. Further, I suspect that there are considerable uncounted benefits from piracy that while not forgiving the piracy do go some way to ameliorate the impact on authors and publishers.

On a practical level, book piracy does not have some of the potential extrinsic benefits of other forms of piracy. Unlike music piracy, authors do not tend to sell out 50,000 seat stadia for readings of their works, and so cannot rely on fans who have enjoyed their works for free supporting them through the purchase of tickets for live events. Similarly, the increasing appeal and functionality of e-readers means that there is no equivalent to a Hi-Definition DVD offering extra features that are difficult to find online. The only avenue for converting illegal downloads into income is the purchase of a legitimate e-book or the purchase of a print copy. Purchase of a print copy due to a desire to own a physical book is a plausible occurrence, but ebook sales are continuing to rise, meaning that the number of those who are prepared to do so will only diminish.

However, this is not purely a practical issue. With the generally high-level of quality of pirated ebooks, the purchase of a legitimate electronic copy of ‘A Poison Throne’ when the reader already possesses an illegal copy requires an exclusively moral decision. After all, there is no practical reason to pay money to replace something that is identical and so the decision to purchase that ebook or further books from the same author must be based on a feeling that the author “deserves” to be compensated. If it is the case that illegal downloads can convert into sales then this highlights a disconnect between the moral considerations that consumers have and the idea that a creator simply deserves compensation regardless of the value the consumer places upon their work.

Celine points to some examples that would seem to back up this view,

When Cat Valente recently made The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making available free […] online, it sent sales of the actual physical book shooting into the New York Times top ten best sellers list. When my friend Charles Cecil did something similar with free downloads of Broken Sword, sales of legitimate downloads spiked for a good two week period.

However, Celine goes on to make a valid point,

I argue that the two things (the public attitude to something that has been given to for free, as opposed to that which has been pirated) are too disparate to speak for each other. There is a kind of personal contact implicit in the 'freely given' work that seems to strengthen the bond between the author and the reader. It seems, for want of a better word, to humanize the author to the reader, to promote a kind of understanding, and so encourages the desire to reward the creator for the work that they've put into the project.

Throughout my interaction with Kiernan, she emphasized her view that book pirating is both a cause and result of an alienation of the reader from the author.  She describes how,

[Piracy] seems to push the creator even further into the background to the point where, if they step forward at all they are treated with distrust and hostility... you are 'that grasping money grubber who wants me to pay for something when I don’t have to.' In discussions on piracy, authors and publishers are often very quickly reduced to a faceless 'they'.

This points us towards an interesting development in media, where the ‘right’ to compensation is based on the perceived quality of the material, rather than the use. The problem with this view is of course the enforcement mechanism, as well as a feedback mechanism on authors popularity that does not take into account illegal downloads.

Following the discussion on Celine Kiernan’s blog, Niall Alexander analyzed the potential effects of the piracy of books on sales ranks. One interesting titbit was the fact that sales of 1,475 books in a week propelled an author to number 9 in the UK Times bestseller list. A single server hosting illegal downloads of Kiernan’s novel A Poison Throne recorded 764 downloads of the novel since it was uploaded. It seems to follow that if even only a fraction of illegal downloads negatively affect sales, then rankings and the publisher support and publicity that go with them can be profoundly affected and vice-versa. In the absence of hard data, it would be a hasty moral action to base decisions on this factor.

This raises the question of whether or not consumers should be required to alter their behavior if it negatively impacts on authors, or whether it is the responsibility of authors and publishers to adapt to changing consumer demands.

If you are a believer in the absolute nature of the intrinsic right of creators to control their own works, then the responsibility and moral failing clearly falls on the consumer. However, a more practical view of the situation, considering the complex ways in which consumers behave relative to moral beliefs and practical wants, seems to point to the need for publishers to adapt their marketing and distribution networks in order to ameliorate the effects of an ongoing practice which many see as a victimless crime.

Too Much Information: The Blurring of Private and Public Life Online

I remember the day I first logged on to the Internet. It was the early 1990s. I had a desktop Windows PC, and one of those never-ending America Online [now AOL] promo discs that we all received in the mail. Sitting at an old wooden typewriter desk, I was about to upload and pay for the service and send my first email. There I was, no longer isolated in my apartment, but now connected to the world.  The excitement, the thrill of that moment, to suddenly feel expansive, global, a part of something so much larger than myself.  Fascinated, I spent hours on the Internet discovering websites, people, music, and photos.  It was an intoxicating, bordering on addictive pastime.

I felt a sense of pride, too. I had embraced, this new technology, and was sending emails and receiving instant messages on the "information superhighway." I felt hip and current, "surfing the web."  I couldn’t have imagined that some 20 years later, my initial excitement about connectedness and a new kind of creativity would slowly devolve into a growing apprehension and disenchantment for a medium that has become an increasingly intrusive, pervasive and invasive presence in our everyday routines and private lives.

The Internet, that adventurous new road of discovery and possibility, became just another mall, another TV, another Cineplex.  The previously pleasantly helpful search engines (remember Dogpile?) became a new breed of corporate advertising agency mining us, the users, for market research consumer data and clogging the "superhighway" with nonstop billboards.

Who could have anticipated the effects of the shift to Web 2.0 and its open-source nature? Now we Internet users were not just connected, we were interactive. Then we went from people being connected and interactive, to the capability of devices being interconnected:  computers to cameras to TV and radio to cell phones to game consoles. With the advent of smartphones, the ubiquitousness of the Internet is now full blown. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that "35% of American adults own a smartphone" and that "one quarter of smartphone owners use their phone for most of their online browsing."   Already an astonishing number, this trend will only increase as the cost of smartphones and services drop and more people adopt mobile phones over the fading technology of “land lines.” According to another recent Pew report, a whopping 65 percent of people online belong to some kind of social networking site.

We couldn't be more interconnected and accessible, which has become both the blessing and the curse of the digital age. While we are busy exposing ourselves to others through the nonstop production of text, photography and video content somewhere on the Internet every second, what used to be private and personal to most people has suddenly become public, without a thought, it seems. Behaviors that in a pre-digital, pre-Internet world we would have considered rude, unethical or even criminal are now tolerated and considered acceptable online.  For example, it has become  socially acceptable to write profane or rude comments under a blog post with an anonymous name. Most people would not tolerate this kind of behavior in real time  What has happened to a healthy sense of boundaries and personal space? Even the word "privacy" is beginning to sound like an anachronism and old-fashioned.

One interesting and questionable phenomenon to me is the behavior of parents towards their children and how they talk about them on social media. There are some privacy controls on Facebook and Twitter (eroding by the minute with Facebook's new design),   I often see parents posting about what Jennifer or Jake did or said on a particular day and even photos of their children on various social media platforms.  Why post these things on a public platform, displaying your child's private life to complete strangers, even if it's limited to a privacy setting of  a few hundred "friends" and "followers"?   These are the same parents who are fiercely protective of their children from Web predators, but seem to have no problem chronicling their child's every move online.  Surely, the child has a right to privacy.  Their life story is personal, and, offline, how many people would actually receive this information in one's real life? Your spouse, maybe a few friends, a close relative, in total, perhaps a half dozen people. It feels wrong, like too much information, and I'm embarrassed for the child, who hasn't a clue that their silly, cute or disgusting antics have been discussed online. Is this in the best interest of the child?

Another  questionable practice is the clandestine photographic and video content uploaded to the Internet by people that you may know or anonymous posters. I attend a fair amount of public events and am forever ducking out of photos that I presume may be posted on an organization's website or Facebook page, either from professional photographers or others with cell phones.  But what about the people who don't know that a cell phone or video camera is aimed at them?

A prime example of this type of anonymous posting is a blog on the Tumblr platform called People on the Bus. An anonymous blogger takes candid photos of people on buses and various other forms of public transportation, posts them on the blog and writes an anecdotal story or comment under each picture. While some subjects are aware of the author’s actions, some are not (for example, when they're sleeping). Taking and posting people's photos without their permission is a questionable practice at the least.  Yet the blogger has no qualms about his or her mission, despite the fact that the subjects have expressed their displeasure to the photographer/blogger's face. The blogger even brags about this bravado. In one story the blogger proclaims: "While taking this picture the guy became upset and started yelling at me for taking his picture."  And yet, the blogger continues to photograph the "people on the bus", upload their pictures, and write about them.

On a much larger and more public scale, a website has been created that  uses as its content material  a diverse and unconventional assortment of people who happen to be shopping at Wal-Mart stores across the country. Welcome to PeopleofWalmart.com. Although the "About" page of People of Walmart states that the website was started by three friends, they only give their initials, giving them anonymity In fact, the website has become an industry, with a book and a Facebook page that has about 750,000 followers. While the producers claim to be creating "satire" for "entertainment purposes," in fact, the "satire" and "entertainment" aspect seems to be the fact that these particular people are either obese, inappropriately clothed or dressed in unusual costumes.   These particular Wal-Mart shoppers  may or may not be aware that they are being photographed or filmed. Besides the authors' rather juvenile premise and bullying attitude, the purpose of the website feels not satirical but mean-spirited, while perpetrating a massive invasion of privacy. Why is this behavior acceptable on the Internet, but not in one's life?  PeopleofWalmart.com is only one of many web pages connected to a ring of similar sites that range from "That's My Boss" to "Your Kid's Art Sucks" (isn't that something private, displayed on your refrigerator?) to "Random Creepy Guy" and so on.

While I am the first one to acknowledge that the Web 2.0 has created a welcome resource of international news, information, entertainment and even education for millions worldwide, it has also been the cause of much social upheaval and dramatic cultural and communication shifts.  The Internet has made the world smaller, but often this comes at the expense of our humanity. It's as if we have traded global bits for a complete lack of privacy, and real personal expression for the voice of the crowd and virtual anonymity.  The Web does not beckon us to communicate like a novelist, in author Doris Lessing's words, who writes "as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice."

So, what's going on in global cyberspace? How have people lost respect for personal boundaries and a healthy sense of privacy? Has the world just gone mean and completely amoral?  Have we somehow been taken over by our machines in a science fiction scenario, in which we have succumbed to a cybernetic Stockholm syndrome: a race of hapless captives tethered to our electronic devises, who start acting like these soulless machines.  I didn't do it; my smartphone was there, and I took the picture and shared it because I can.  No moral dilemma.

But here's the thing, to quote the title of a book by computer scientist, inventor and composer Jaron Lanier: "you are not a gadget."   You are a person who must use a gadget responsibly and ethically.

In You Are Not A Gadget, a Manifesto, published in 2010, Mr. Lanier, who is known as the "father" of virtual reality, spells out his criticisms of Web 2.0 and Silicon Valley's often not very humanistic mindset, which has affected not only how we communicate but how we see ourselves as human beings. While he's still an optimistic visionary, Lanier's view is that the very infrastructure of Web 2.0's "open culture", whose freedom turns out to be "more for machines that for people", has had a deleterious effect on human communication. Taking issue with what he feels is Silicon Valley's less than people-centered methodology towards computer programming, he asserts, "The antihuman approach to computation is one of the most baseless ideas in human history. A computer isn't even there unless a person experiences it. "

The first chapter of the book, entitled "What is a Person"? says it all. "Anonymous" is not a person. I agree with his assessment that "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction....A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person can become."

Consequently, we have lost not only a sense of privacy, but also a sense of reality. People are not anonymous; we don't walk the streets wearing masks. We don't give our personal information to strangers. Children's antics are not the subject matter of a news item.

What if we had an online rule of thumb. For example, if you wouldn't say it out loud, then don't say it online. If you wouldn't do it if you didn't have a cell phone in your hand, refrain from doing it if you do have a cell phone in your hand. You might tell a few close friends about what little Jennifer said or did today, but would you stand in the middle of Times Square with a bullhorn and tell the millions of people from around the world passing by 24/7 the same information? Then maybe don't do it online.

How can we start to respect privacy again in a world of digital exhibitionism?  Can we reclaim the value of  "a small personal voice" from the anonymous crowd?  There might be a solution yet to be developed out there in Silicon Valley, in the cybernetic software, by scientists who do believe in humanistic computation. Then again, maybe the responsibility and the answer lie somewhere deep in us.

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Fan Blogs

For years, Mike Hubbell, an engineer more comfortable with chemical equations than sentence composition, devoted fall Saturdays to his alma mater’s football team.

He shared that passion with most Penn State University graduates. He paid for the expanded cable package to watch every game from his home in Texas. And when a resurgent 2005 season led the Nittany Lions to their first conference championship in more than a decade, Hubbell read all the latest developments on the websites of newspapers across the state.

Still, he had a sense something was missing. He wanted a way to feel connected to the Penn State community, even while living thousands of miles from its campus in State College, Pa.

He tried Internet message boards, but with people free to post their own topics – however inane or inflammatory – the discussion often descended into vitriol. He wanted something better.

He discovered a site called MGoBlog, a gathering point for fans following University of Michigan athletics. It allowed fans to freely exchange ideas, with some rational parameters, and the author of the blog guiding the discussion. This was back when many considered blog a new fangled thing. But the Michigan fans seemed to love it.

“I thought, ‘What the hell? Why don’t I start a blog?’” Hubbell recalled. “People flock to a Michigan blog. Why not a Penn State blog?”

When a Google search turned up only a few long-abandoned links, he realized he found a void in the market place for him to create his new blog. He named it Black Shoe Diaries – an homage to the simple, no-frills dark cleats worn by the Penn State players and their famous coach, Joe Paterno.

He spent an entire Saturday writing his first post, fretted over its grammar and spelling and threw into the Internet abyss, not knowing who would ever read it.

During the 2006 season, he slowly built his page views up to 500 per day. Though his writing improved and became more effortless, he never fancied himself a professional. The effort was mostly for fun. Even at its peak, the blog paid “enough to cover groceries.”

But he believed in one key value, no different from the more traditional scribes that came before him. Balance.

“I always tried to present both sides of the argument. I didn’t try to point out only what I thought was right,” he said. “I just kind of through the topic out there and said, ‘What does the community think?’”

But that even-handed approach should not be confused with unbiased coverage.

“The key difference between me and someone in the mainstream media?” explains Adam Bittner, a Penn State student journalist, who has served as a contributor at Black Shoe Diaries. “I’m not afraid to say, I want Penn State to win the football game.”

While Black Shoe Diaries might be among the granddaddies of PSU football blogs, it’s far from the only. Penn State fan blogs of all different tones and vantage points, updated with various degrees of consistency.

And that’s just blogs about Penn State. For most teams in major sports at the college or pro level, fan blogs have a strong foothold – straddling the line between committed fandom and traditional journalism.

As a Penn State sophomore in 2003, I decided I wanted to become a journalist. I wanted to be a sports reporter because – why else? – I loved sports.

But I received a surprise once I started my new career. While an enthusiasm for sports is essential to great sports writing, loving the team you cover is not.

In fact, objective sports journalism forbid it. No cheering in the press box. That’s the nonnegotiable rule of sports writing.

I felt no strong allegiance to any pro teams. I grew up on Penn State, my one and only “team.” After spending my freshman year hanging newspaper clippings about the team all over my dorm room, it felt weird leaving that fan passion behind.

But others in the profession have dealt with more difficult conflicts, so I learned to look at sports as a human drama. I learned that watching a team struggle on the edge of achieving success or sinking into failure offers plenty of intrigue. I regarded my front-row seat watching those storylines unfold a greater privilege than screaming from the upperdeck.

Some now argue that today’s aspiring journalists – whether they be students looking for a career or engineers wanting a hobby – don’t have to make the same choice I did. Fan blogs and websites permeating college football – and other sports – have created a new hybrid category, a way of chronicling the team that resembles journalism but is told from a fan perspective.

Some tension exists between the traditional members of press row and this new wave of writers with a rooting interest. And it burst into the limelight earlier this year.

Shane Ryan, a Duke University alumnus and unabashed fan of its basketball team, ran a popular blog called Seth Curry Saves Duke. While covering a tournament game involving his alma mater, Ryan got into a tiff with a radio broadcaster. Ryan wrote a lengthy post about the incident, excoriating the sports writing establishment and questioning whether the notion of objectivity even made sense in this new age.

Although Ryan “did not expect what I wrote to be so widely-read,” the post sparked a passionate debate in the sports journalism community.

In an apology post, Ryan responded with regret for some of his harshness toward the profession: “I’ve just sacrificed my future for two hours of feverish writing.”

On the contrary, though, Ryan has since parlayed the notoriety – and his entertaining writing style – into a new blog and a regular writing gig with Grantland, a well-regarded new sports writing website, alongside more renowned writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman.

So the appetite for this content is abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already. And it’s here to stay. On the other hand, it’s not hard to find people who see that fact as troubling in some ways. Mike Poorman, a senior lecturer in PSU’s College of Communication, said he admires the way the blogs blend insightful commentary with a vibrant voice in their writing. But worries that the information they disseminate – rather quickly and efficiently – has little to no backing in fundamental reporting.

“I wouldn’t say they don’t have ethics,” said Poorman, who teaches a course called “Joe Paterno, Communications & the Media,” which studies how PSU football is covered. “But they are a bit looser with their ethics, and they wear it as a red badge of courage.”

The bloggers, of course, say they serve a different mission – as a repository for any and all information about Penn State sports. Be it fact, message rumor or a listing of links to traditional newspaper stories. Black Shoe Diaries, in particular, strives to be a one-stop shop for everything being said or written about the team. Taken together, it tells the story of a season and a team.

“I’ve been surprised over the last couple of years the growth of non-traditional people on the beat,” said Poorman, who himself covers the team for a website, StateCollege.com. “That’s been co-inciding with fewer traditional media people covering the team, especially at away games.”

It’s also worth noting: The presence of bloggers on press row would have been unthinkable five years ago. But Bittner and Hubbell both said Penn State has been relatively accommodating of new media, and one reporter confided in Hubbell that every Lions beat writer reads his blog, “whether they admit it or not.”

“We can’t do what we do without real reporters,” Bittner said. “You need them, and you need what we present to have a well-rounded conversation about Penn State football.”

And as you probably presumed, this mania for more information extends beyond Penn State’s fan base. Fans of the Alabama Crimson Tide, PSU’s week 2 opponent, can follow their team on any of four premium sites (Crimson Confidential, Alabama 247 Sports, Alabama Rivals, and Alabama Scout) and a multitude of fan blogs (Roll Bama Roll and Crimson Tide Zone).

For Penn State, the influx Internet interlopes strikes an interesting contrast, given the team is best known for Paterno, the 84-year-old coach prone to crack a joke about his technological illiteracy.

But even the life of the old coach isn’t unaffected, and not just because some blogs bear his likeness. Hubbell’s venture with Black Shoe Diaries got its big break in 2007 for an event neither Paterno nor any Penn State fan remembers fondly. A group of football players got into a brawl at an apartment party off campus. Some newspapers, including the student paper, did some hard-nosed reporting on the ground to break the story, but the early details leaked out on online forums.

Hubbell compiled and sorted all the wide-ranging information and innuendo, put it in one place and his hits went through the roof. The incident took on a life of its own, with ESPN later doing a segment on it, causing quite a headache for Paterno. And Hubbell learned everyone wanted to hear the bad and the ugly, not just the good.

“People were starving for information,” he said. “I didn’t try to be coy about how, ‘My inside sources said, blah, blah, blah.’ I just gathered the information together on one site and let you talk about it.”

The Rise of the Content Mill

The Internet has not only altered the method of delivery for a variety of media—including text-based, audio and video—but it has also redefined the publishing industry’s business model. Traditional content creators, such as established print magazines and newspapers, have historically had difficulty competing in this new digital realm. This is evidenced by a number of dismal statistics. For example, according to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper print ad sales fell by a record 29.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Meanwhile, online ad sales for newspapers saw a historic 13.4 percent drop for the same period. Magazines failed to avoid a similar fate, with 367 magazines shutting down in 2009 according to MediaFinder.com. Although the rate of magazine closures has slowed since—74 magazines folded in the first half of 2011—the industry appears to be far from healthy.

But despite the current state of the publishing industry, there is money to be made in content creation as evidenced by the development of a new type of media entity: the content mill.

Content mills, also known as content farms, have been in existence in one form or another since the late '90s, but suffered a setback in growth due to the dot-com bubble of 2001. There is no consensus on a definition for the term "content mill," but in general, these types of sites share certain common characteristics, as described in part by Jennifer Williamson of CatalystBlogger. These characteristics include:

1. Low hiring standards for freelancers
2. Low pay for freelancers
3. Large stables of freelancers
4. Lack of an editorial process/insufficient quality control
5. Extraordinarily high volumes of articles

Examples of sites that have been labeled as content mills include Associated Content, Suite101, All Voices and, most notably, Demand Media, which recently launched an initial public offering on Jan. 26, 2011.

Unlike traditional content creators, which strive to attract unique visitors to their digital properties by developing high-quality content targeted to a niche audience, content mills attract unique visitors by publishing an extraordinarily high volume of articles across a wide variety of topics and employing search-engine-optimization (SEO) techniques to boost their placement on search-engine results, such as Google and Bing. These content-mill pages may sport digital ad space that the mill can sell for revenue, and/or they may host Google ads related to the content on the page, which pay the content mill per click.

In light of these facts, the content mill revenue model generally works thusly. The content mill hires a high volume of writers and/or editors of questionable skill level and pays them drastically low wages—often anywhere from $3.50 to $15 per article. The mill then generates thousands of article titles based on keyword and keyphrase search statistics. Writers then select article titles to write from this voluminous database. They write these articles using a template within the mill's content management system (CMS). The writer relies on secondary sources to research the article topic, often with a heavy reliance on online resources. The writer then submits the finalized article for a fairly rudimentary editorial review (note that some content mills lack even this level of oversight). If approved, the content is published to the Internet. Because the content has been optimized for search engines, it is often fairly high up in result placement, increasing the likelihood that an Internet user will click on it. This then increases the value of the content mill's ad space while also increasing the likelihood and frequency that Internet users may click on Google ads.

Consider Demand Media. According to an article in Wired published in October 2009, Demand Media was publishing an estimated 1 million items per month. Furthermore, according to the Boston Globe in an article published in August 2011, the company's websites receive more than 45 percent of its traffic from search engines. Google ads represent more than one-third of Demand Media's revenue. The company's total revenue for the first half of 2011 equaled $158.97 million, a 39 percent increase from the first half of 2010, according to Folio Magazine. These numbers stand in stark contrast to the statistics of traditional media outlets, where revenues are on a seemingly endless decline and titles fold by the dozen each year.

Although the content mill business model may currently appear to be financially promising, the paradigm has come under significant ethical scrutiny.

One of the most frequent critiques of these sites is the quality of the content they deliver to readers. Because writers and editors for these sites often have questionable credentials or little expertise in the areas about which they are writing, the resulting published content is questionable in factualness and professionalism. In fact, there is an entire site devoted to spotting absurd and factually incorrect articles written through Demand Media called "Worst of eHow." (eHow is one of the titles Demand Media publishes.) In an article published by MediaShift in July 2010, a Demand Studios writer goes on record stating, "I was completely aware that I was writing crap. I was like, 'I hope to God people don't read my advice on how to make gin at home because they'll probably poison themselves.'" She went on to say, "Never trust anything you read on eHow.com."

This raises the question what ethical duty, if any, do content mills have when it comes to ensuring the content they create and publish is well researched and accurate. It would seem that if the site purports itself to be an expert resource, then this duty definitely exists. For example, eHow.com's tagline is "Trusted Advice for the Curious Life." This claim of "trusted advice" seems to contradict the comments of the above Demand Studios contributor. If the trusted advice could potentially lead to poisoning or blindness, then the information would seem far from reliable. And if one article among millions is questionable in accuracy, it is certainly a reasonable assumption that thousands of other articles are inaccurate as well, especially when taking into account the fairly lax editorial process.

Traditional content creators, such as newspapers and magazines, often operate under a strict ethical code that is essential to the journalistic profession. After all, the cachet of a particular publication is directly proportional to its credibility. Without credibility, the content creator ceases to hold much use for the reading public, However, utility and revenue are not necessarily directly proportional when dealing with a business concept driven by volume and visibility. This leads one to believe that in terms of priority sites like eHow.com place article quantity well above article quality.

The other major criticism lobbied at content mills is the treatment of their freelance talent. Depending on the geographical market, type of publication and scope of project, a freelance writer will usually charge anywhere between $30 to more than $100 an hour for his or her services. However, content-mill sites often at best pay their writers $15 per 500-word article. Granted that a well-researched 500-word article takes a minimum of two hours to research and write, the writer in essence is making about $7.50 per hour. Keep in mind that the content mill does not provide benefits, and the writer is technically an independent contractor, which means all wages paid are pre-tax. This brings up the subject of whether content mills have an ethical responsibility to provide its freelancers with wages that more accurately reflect those of the average freelance writer.

First, one can argue that the issues of writer pay and article quality are intertwined. It is reasonable to assume that low writer wages are likely one of the main contributors to low-quality content. Consider that to increase their hourly rate, writers may attempt to submit poorly researched, hastily written content. With a lax editorial oversight, some of these articles are bound to get published, which increases the writer's hourly wage but decreases the quality of the content mill's editorial output. Additionally, many credentialed freelancers would never work for such little pay, which gives weight to the assumption that many of those contributing content to these sites likely have little to no professional experience.

Second, it could be argued that paying writers an inequitable wage harms the entire writing profession. Content mills attempt to commoditize the art of writing. If writing does become viewed as a commodity executed by relatively unskilled or inexperienced individuals, then those with a relatively high degree of skill or experience may be viewed as overqualified. Furthermore, if the trend in writers' wages expands beyond the scope of content mills and affects the general writing profession, then becoming a professional writer will no longer be a financially sustaining option for many.

The world of digital content is in a constant state of flux. Increasingly, newspapers and magazines are erecting pay walls around their digital content, providing a possible new revenue lifeline. The belief is that readers actually do care about content quality and are willing to pay a premium for trustworthy, informative and entertaining material. Meanwhile, Google recently dealt a heavy blow to the content mill paradigm with changes to its search-engine algorithm that deprioritizes content mill material in search-engine results. The effects of Google's actions on the content mill industry remain to be seen, though Demand Media predicts it will negatively impact revenue by six percent throughout 2011.

In the end, it is likely that the invisible hand of the market will dictate the winner and the loser in the battle between content mills and other content creators. If the reading public votes for vetted, quality content by frequenting traditional news and information websites, content mills may have to shift tactics in order to survive. Likewise, if freelancers refuse to lend their talents to these sites, there may cease to be a talent pool to support the mass amount of content these mills need to generate for financial viability. Of course, there is always the possibility that content mills may change tactics out of a newfound sense of ethical responsibility to both readers and writers.

Online Polls

While I am certainly addicted to digital news and information, I also love to watch the national evening news the old fashioned way -- on television. I prefer NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, even though the idea of a news organization having direct financial ties to a major defense contractor is pretty ridiculous (General Electric owns 49% of NBC Universal).

The other night, while watching NBC Nightly News, a story really jumped out at me. After a feature on the horrendous News Corporation phone hacking scandal, Williams segued into a segment on the national debt that included a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Excuse me? Isn’t the Wall Street Journal owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation? And didn’t the publisher of the Wall Street Journal just resign because of the phone hacking scandal? Williams never brought up those inconvenient facts.

That extreme example of modern newsroom incestuousness made me laugh, and in my mind it made the results of that poll if not tainted, at least strangely suspect. That incident got me thinking about the world of online polls, one of the true staples of digital information culture. Can you trust them? Are you supposed to trust them? What good are they?

The first place I turned to investigate the phenomenon was the site for Gallup Polls. I was absolutely shocked at what I found – there were no online polls! That’s right, the premiere polling organization does not use the Internet to conduct its polls, and there is no way for a regular citizen to make his voice known at Gallup.com. Not only that, according to a 2010 news release from the company, they are considering going back to shoe leather in this high-tech age:

Another important change was becoming obvious by the mid- to late 2000s: the increasing use of cell phones by Americans. As a result, by 2008, Gallup had shifted its interviewing to include traditional landline and cell phone sampling. Today, with increasing shifts in communication that may eventually move some Americans beyond any type of phone toward texting and written communication, there has been increased attention on the part of survey professionals to the possible benefits of a move back to “old-fashioned” residential, address-based sampling.

For now, however, the vast majority of Gallup surveys intended to represent the national population are based on interviews conducted by landline and cell telephones. This method builds off of the central assumption that most Americans still either live in a residence with a telephone or own a personal cell phone. So, reaching people on their telephones is the starting place for current national surveys.

That logical rationale actually made me feel really good about Gallup polls. At a time when they could easily begin to rely on faster, simpler, cheaper digital technology, the company is focusing on how best to maintain the accuracy of their information. Bravo.

Next, I surfed over to the other polling giant, Harris. It was a much different experience. Harrispollonline.com is essentially a simple page that encourages people to sign up and participate in their online polls. And if you do sign up, there’s a world of wonderful treats in store for you! According to the site, “To show our thanks for your support and participation, you'll be enrolled in our appreciation program, Harris Poll Online Rewards, where you can redeem points for rewards that include a variety of merchandise and gift certificates. You can also participate in our sweepstakes for cash prizes!”

Hmmm. Wouldn’t incenting people to take polls skew the results? If you are being given something in return for taking a poll, wouldn’t you want to please the pollster, and wouldn’t you be more willing to participate in a poll you had no strong opinions about in order to score some juicy cash prizes?

But what about polls on the big news sites? One of the major features on the front page of CNN is “Quick vote.” Recently, the question of the moment was, Do you expect Congress to raise the debt ceiling by August 2? I voted that I did, and after I clicked my response the results popped up. More than 57,000 votes had been cast, but at the bottom of the results was this strange phrase: “This is not a scientific poll.” OK. But what does that even mean? To me it means that “The Most Trusted Name in News” is publishing data that it doesn’t even trust.

Over at nytimes.com, there are no editorial online opinion polls on the home page. But the site does have an entire section called Poll Watch. That section, however, does not conduct online polls, it merely reports and analyses recent polls in the news. It also features the results of polls the paper conducts with CBS News, however those polls are “nationwide telephone polls” a la Harris, not digital surveys. The New York Times’ lack of interest in online opinion polling isn’t surprising, because it would be hard to imagine the paper publishing a phrase like “This is not a scientific poll” accompanying its reporting.

But while the Times may not embrace online polling as an institution, they do permit their advertisers to conduct these polls, sometimes in shocking ways. I recently saw a large promotion on the home page of the Times asking users to give their opinion on how much the richest 2% of Americans should pay in taxes. It was NOT labeled as an advertisement, and when I clicked on the ad it took me to defeatthedebt.com. I voted, was thanked for my vote, but there was no information on the site about the poll’s methodology.

I looked into that site and discovered that it is an arm of the Employment Policies Institute. According to SourceWatch, “The Employment Policies Institute (EPI) is one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries.” Does the Times endorse the results of those polls? I am sure they don’t, but I’m not so sure Times users understand that.

On the Times Poll Watch page, they include a Polls Navigator, which they describe as “A list of polling resources from around the Web selected by editors of The New York Times.” One of the links in the list goes to the well-respected Pew Research Center. On that site, they actually delve into the debate surrounding the usefulness of online polls. In their Ask the Expert column, someone submitted the following question: How statistically accurate is an online poll in which participants sign on to contribute their opinions? Scott Keeter, the Director of Survey Research at the Pew Research Center, responded thusly:

The accuracy of a poll depends on how it was conducted. Most of Pew Research's polling is done by telephone. By contrast, most online polls that use participants who volunteer to take part do not have a proven record of accuracy. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that not everyone in the U.S. uses the Internet, and those who do not are demographically different from the rest of the public. Another reason is that people who volunteer for polls may be different from other people in ways that could make the poll unrepresentative. At worst, online polls can be seriously biased if people who hold a particular point of view are more motivated to participate than those with a different point of view.

Keeter goes on to say that, “there is nothing inherently wrong with conducting surveys online,” and that Pew actually conducts some of its own polls online. The issue is not necessarily how the poll is conducted – online, in person, on the phone – but how the sample audience taking the poll is chosen. If the sample chooses itself, as with the polls on most mainstream news and entertainment sites, then the results are basically nothing more than a stab in the digital dark.

Travel + Technology

In recent years, the travel industry has witnessed a series of technological innovations. Long gone are the days of trekking to the local travel agency to find plane tickets. With online booking, such intermediaries have become superfluous. Not to mention the discounts that add up by booking a hotel online. Prior to departing, travelers can visit locations virtually through the World Wide Web. Once there, a Smartphone app can guide travelers around using the latest GPS updates. And before the plane even lands, friends and family can know about the trip through posts on Facebook, photos on Flickr, or a combination of both on a personal travel blog.

Clearly, the travel industry isn’t the same as it was ten or twenty years ago. And while information abounds on the ethical implications of tourism in general, very little has been written about the specific effects and ramifications of technology. The Global Code of Ethics by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) was initiated in 1997 and granted in 2001, but doesn’t even mention the word “technology.” And yet given the importance of technology in the latest touristic developments, it probably should. On the surface, most of the technological services in the travel industry can be deemed useful; they speed up booking processes, procure discounts and guide us through an unknown destination where we might otherwise have gotten lost. But what are the ethical implications behind this seemingly beneficial façade? How do the technological advances affect local communities? What happens when a hotel or restaurant gets a bad review on TripAdvisor or Yelp? Are there ways that touristic establishments can “game” the system to get higher ratings?

The questions abound. It makes sense to start from the consumer standpoint: that of the tourist. While it is impossible to make sweeping generalizing statements about the behavior of tourists, it is reasonable to say that most travelers find themselves affected by the recent developments in technology. Only a few years ago, my family always went to a travel agent in person to inquire about flights. Now, with online booking, I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house to purchase my tickets. Not only are the prices usually cheaper online, but I can also compare prices or use an online service such as farecompare.com. Thanks to the Internet, information is available to us directly at our fingertips.

Yet precisely because of how easy it is to post information online, one also has to use travel info found online with a caution. Gregory Hubbs serves as editor-in-chief of Transitions Abroad, a publication that provides first-hand reports about experiences abroad.  He says that “it may be hard to know the validity” of the information posted on social networking sites that post information about travel destinations, study abroad programs and other educational travel initiatives. “For example, I would never, ever take recommendations for a place to eat from a stranger. I would either find it on my own by wandering through the towns, or, in Europe, consulting the great Guide Michelin, which rarely leads us astray. Too few people know what good food is, in my opinion,” he added.

And yet many others continue to share information about their trips via technology. María de los Angeles, a freelance writer and editor specializing in travel to South Florida, explains

“I use online social networking heavily during my trips -- I post photos, comments, Foursquare check-ins and tips, live streaming video, etc; All this allows my followers to travel virtually with me. I see no issue with this, as it's all expected to be fun, spontaneous coverage that actually supports the destination. However, when I post on my blog, I abide by strict fact checking.”

Despite her extensive use of social media, she does “shut it all down” when she travels for personal enjoyment. “I have a friend who just went on a honeymoon and she was only allowed 15 minutes of Facebook time each day,” she said.

To me, the fact that such restrictions even need to be put in place results a bit disturbing. Allan Lynch, a freelance writer who dedicates himself to corporate and Canadian travel, agrees:

“I read a study a few years ago that said most Americans like to check their office email while on holiday, just to clean it up and not get behind. It seems that Americans are so hyper-concerned about keeping up with work, that they almost go through withdrawal whilst on holiday. I think that's a little sad. You're cheating yourself and/or your family or friends. Most people don't get any extra compensation for this and it seems to be part of the erosion of personal time. Most people leave their homes today outfitted with so much technology that they're never not on-call.”

Lynch proposes a question: “What happened to living life? There’s a wonderful serendipity to getting lost and discovering things for ourselves. People seem afraid of that. I think we need to let go and unleash the inner Marco Polo within us.” Hubbs concurs: “Amen for getting offline.”

Interestingly, the latter comment originates from an online forum thread initiated by Travel Fish, an online backpacking guide to Southeast Asia. It seems ironic that an online travel guide would tell you not to use it. But through this proclamation, Stuart Macdonald, the creator of Travel Fish, alludes to an essential point in the tourism ethics debate: When you get offline, you connect with the environment around you—specifically, with the locals. This leads us to the question: How are local communities affected by the plethora of technology advances?

Alex Moran of Independent Travel China (www.independenttravelchina.com) explains that,

“I used to lead tours of wealthy westerners and travel professionals into dirt poor, very remote, ethnic Laos villages. To see my guests in their fancy clean clothes and jewelry, while holding their camcorders in front of them while walking amongst the dirty, semi naked natives, was akin to watching a landing party from the original Star Trek TV shows with their Tricorders held up in front of them. It was quite a sight, but it never created any issues with the villagers (though I'd always ask permission first). It's always best to ask any person or group before taking their picture. Not so much for cultural or religious reasons, but mainly because if you don't, many times the subjects will insist on being paid--and that can set a bad precedent.”

I experienced a similar scenario when I volunteered at several primary schools in Moshi, Tanzania. The children whose classrooms I was painting had just finished wrapping together plastic bags they had collected for weeks on end. Finally, they had found some string to tie them all together, and what resulted was their new toy: a hand-made soccer ball. When we (white) volunteers came in with our expensive cameras and video recorders, they immediately stopped playing and gathered around us with those amazed faces you see time and time again in many magazines. It was their first time seeing a video camera, and when we showed them that it was recording their very own images, they started waving and smiling to themselves on the little video screen. Completely enthralled by the camera and its recording capabilities, they even forgot to play with their hand-made soccer ball for a period of time. On the surface, they show a smile, but I cannot help but wonder how they, and locals in general, really feel about incoming tourism and the technology it brings with it.

Zora O’Neill finds herself on both ends of the tech-spectrum: she has been writing guidebooks since 2003 for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and Moon. Moreover, she recently wrote an iPhone app Cool Cancun and Isla Mujeres. With regard to the digital divide, she notes that “what I am afraid of seeing happen is that businesses that have websites become the only things listed in guidebooks (or their digital equivalent.)” Though this isn’t (yet) the case for the companies she writes for, she suspects that “as budgets gets squeezed” some guidebooks already “limit sending writers to destinations to research, and rely on what they can easily verify online.” In specific regards to Mexico, her area of expertise, she has observed that,

“There’s definitely a divide between savvy, foreigner-owned hotels with great websites and some Mexican-owned places that might be nice enough, but don't put themselves out on the internet as well or at all. And of course with interactive tech, like iPhone apps, businesses with websites or emails have an advantage, because people can click through to see more. For a biz with only a phone number, it's effectively a dead end for browsing.”

A website is the port of entry to attracting tourists. But coding html isn’t enough; in most cases, for a website to be successful, the information has to be in English, if not multiple other languages. There is not only a technological divide, but a language barrier, too, which go back to education. Seba de Praxis, an Argentinean native from Rosario, left his hometown to travel south to Bariloche. After falling in love with the Patagonian landscape, - glimmering blue lakes and snow-capped mountains, - he wanted to stay longer and work at a hostel. His good intentions, however, weren’t enough; he didn’t speak any English.

For three months, he put all his energies into learning the international tourism language, and with near fluency, was then accepted to work at Hostel Inn Bariloche. Here, one of his responsibilities was to go around town and approach incoming travelers about whether they had booked accommodations already, and whether they might be interested in staying at the Hostel Inn. Many times, travelers would tell him that they had already made a reservation at 1004, a hostel that received raving reviews on Lonely Planet. For de Praxis, it was a frustrating job; there was little that he as a sole individual could do to come up against the “Bible,” a term that the Lonely Planet guidebooks (be it print or digital) have acquired among backpackers over time.

De Praxis’ fight against the guidebook empire is a theme that Thomas Kohnstamm first addressed in Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A former Lonely Planet writer himself, Kohnstamm’s controversial story details how he put together the guidebook for Brazil. In one of many episodes, he writes that,

“The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant is a pleasant surprise…and the table service is friendly.”

While Kohnstamm’s musings need to be read with a grain of salt, and one can hope that not all travel writers behave in his unprofessional manner, he does have a point. Travel reviews, whether influenced by sexual propositions or otherwise biased initiatives, can be arbitrary. One restaurant is featured in a guidebook, and the one next to it isn’t. Why? Even though we can hope that there is a good reason for this, often there isn’t. And moreover, the establishment that isn’t featured can suffer a disadvantage, as both de Praxis and O’Neill’s standpoints have noted.

But travel writers aren’t the only ones with an ethical responsibility when they portray a place. The establishments, including hotels, restaurants, tour operators and otherwise, can play a great role not only in their own destiny, but in that of the fate of the destination they are situated in as a whole. Brian Meissner, owner of a boutique hostel in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay, says, “I am both affected by the question (of reviews and how Punta de Diablo is portrayed as an international destination) as much as in a smaller scope I affect it.” He proudly mentions that his hostel “has been featured everywhere from London’s The Guardian to Lonely Planet and even National Geographic, helping make Punta del Diablo an international destination.” He moreover outlines that this is in large part due to “our use and facilitation of travel writing, reviewing and tech-fueled information exchange.” In fact, he has observed that in Punta del Diablo,

“The town’s character is being retained by the French, Swedish, and Australian and other international vacationers who support the traditional industries and invest in property where they build small cabanas and seaside homes that reflect the town as it is, not as it was or could be. In contrast, speculators from Montevideo and Maldonado tend to lack perception of the foreign market and change the local tourism supply in order to provide offerings to a market they are not themselves part of. Lack of ability to identify with a place, its people, and the attraction of the two together, to me is a more dangerous element than rapid spread of information or 'discovery' that brings new influences.”

Meissner regards his property as fortunate to have received a lot of good press. Bad reviews, in turn, he confronts “by accepting the criticism” and “pledging to improve.” According to Meissner, “inevitable maintenance problems and physical limitations” spawn most negative reviews, and the important response is to make the overall experience “unforgettable.” “When you take that motto to heart you can always spin bad reviews from the tangible to the amorphous experience,” he affirms.

However, because of technology, there are more ways to “spin” reviews. What many consumers don’t know is that there are entire agencies and services devoted to review monitoring. ReviewPro, for example, offers a reputation management tool for hotels that allows them to monitor reviews and analyze their online reputation. “We talk a lot with clients (hotels) about how this affects them,” says Edwina Dendler, the social media manager for ReviewPro, “short answer is, reviews can have a huge impact on online sales due to the way online travel agencies list hotels.” Specifically, she explains that “ReviewPro helps hoteliers to increase guest satisfaction and increase revenue by proactively managing their online reputation. The company gathers more than 70 million reviews — in 10 languages – from thousands of sources, including over 60 of the most relevant online travel agencies, review sites as well as leading social media websites.”

Dana Communications similarly consults with hotels about the best practices of responding to online traveler reviews. Jeff Gurtman, the agency’s vice president of strategy, explained that the agency essentially does two things: “We provide hotels with best practices and training regarding review site responses and social media engagement guidelines and have the capability to manage the entire response and engagement process.” According to Gurtman, there is clearly a “right” and a “wrong” way to respond to reviews:

“At its best, online review responses become a great way for hotels to publicly showcase real world problem resolution. They can be an excellent way to show current and potential guests that they care about issues and take a proactive stance to address them. Honesty and transparency are key. Responses should neither be boilerplate nor generic. Responses should be "on brand" and directly address the reviewer's comments. In other words, not a form letter.

Publicly offering freebies is generally a bad idea as it can lead to a bunch of "me toos." In general hotel management should avoid making promises (i.e. free stays, meals, etc.) online as the result of a service misstep. While each guest experience is important to preserve, hotels should be careful to not capture the attention of opportunists cruising responses for potential freebies.”

Angela Berardino is the vice president of travel and digital communications of Turner PR, an agency that similarly “works with clients on a retainer basis to provide social media services, ranging from strategic planning to full-service implementation.” In bold, she highlights that “No member of our staff is allowed to create a personal review of a client, or a competitor, ever.” Berardino’s agency, like ReviewPro and Dana Communications, doesn’t create “fake content.” But Berardino has “heard stories of companies hiring people to create a large volumen of fake reviews – something that is not just unethical, it’s illegal under the new FCC guidelines.”

Berardino’s agency prides itself on helping clients engage with consumers. “We don’t ever recommend doing anything in that vein,” thus, creating fake content, she explains. “However, businesses can be smart about encouraging legitimate reviews by adding links to Yelp or Tripadvisor to post-stay emails or receipts, and integrating content/links from reviews into other social channels like Facebook and Twitter.” To explain more closely how her agency’s service works, she added:

“We look first and foremost at where business is coming from; for example, for hotels with a huge drive market Yelp is critical, while it’s less impactful on a resort that is located in a remote or non-urban area. Yelp doesn’t have Mexico content yet, but TripAdvisor has robust content for Mexico properties. OpenTable is huge in some cities, and not in others. We also look at the age and behavior demographics of the target audience – an urban boutique hotel has a very different audience than a traditional Caribbean resort, and those audiences behave differently online. Most sites that offer reviews also sell advertising or enhanced listings to businesses, and we sort through the value of those offers to help clients determine where to invest resources.”

The only digital divide Berardino sees, “is with businesses that don’t put any resources toward digital under the guise that 'social media is free' and/or 'I don’t use it, so why should I pay attention. (…) That’s probably the root of the divide – hotel/restaurant guests are online a lot, and hotel/restaurant staff often aren’t.” According to Berardino, this digital divide is “shrinking rapidly” and the “low barriers to entry for digital programs have leveled the playing field.” A business that previously couldn’t afford an expensive web designer can now create a simple page using a template. In fact, as Berardino affirms, “small independent businesses can often rock a social media program better than a large national chain, because despite the difference in marketing budgets, large chains often struggle to adapt quickly to all of the opportunities.”

Lalitha Swart, an experienced travel, high tech executive and Founder of TripSketch, a trip planning website with a green travel bias, is convinced that “digital innovations can be used to promote responsible tourism.” According to Swart, information on green travel, meaning “lowering your carbon footprint by using public transport, frequenting small, local businesses, taking a walking tour instead of a bus tour and so on,” is “not readily available. “Travelers have to search for that information.” Her website TripSketch seeks to inform travelers about responsible tourism, and specifically, short-term voluntourism opportunities, “where a traveler can mix tours and volunteer opportunities with a traditional vacation.” Examples would include overnight home stays in rurally disadvantaged communities, bringing school supplies to a school or an orphanage, visiting small locally owned restaurants, assisting in English conversation practice, or helping children with basic numeracy. Swart and her team recently developed a mobile app covering green activities, including social projects, for Nokia phones, which won first prize in the eco/green category of Nokia's Calling All Innovators competition.

Back in 2006, David Fennell, author of Tourism Ethics, questioned how easy it is for tourism organizations to market to the ethical tourist (Cooper & Hall 104). He asked, “whether ethical holidays are just a ploy to increase the margins for certain target market groups and to exploit a trend in society” (Cooper & Hall 104). While I by no means want to question Swart’s integrity and her motive behind dedicating herself to responsible tourism, the recent rise of focus on “green travel” does question whether companies are once again taking advantage of the responsible/ethical tourism trend to gain competitive advantage. And in this case, technology would be at the forefront of fueling the competitive advantage to exploit a trend for economic gains.

Also in 2006, Derek R. Hall and Frances Brown argued in Tourism and Welfare: Ethics, Responsibility and Sustained Well-Being that there is a “lack of pressure for companies to become ‘actively ethical’: while consumers often punish unethical companies, they do not necessarily reward ethical organizations” (9). Given that the WTO’s Code of Ethics still remains the same, and that few initiatives have been enforced since then, one can suppose that Hall and Brown’s statement generally remains true today. And yet prizes such as the eco/green category of Nokia’s prize awarding do show that technology shows an interest in rewarding those “actively ethical” organizations. Again via technology, a broadcast and a PDF press release, companies such as Swart’s gain attention – in this case, specifically my attention as she responded to one of my queries on “Help A Reporter Out.”

Some may continue to argue that “there is no such thing as bad press” or that “any press is good press.” In Berardino’s opinion, “as a general review, one really bad or really glowing review isn’t going to have a huge impact – but the average tone of those reviews is important.” But there remain places that want no press. A family-run establishment near my apartment in Spain, for example, has asked me not to write a review about it. An appearance in an international travel guide would have tourists trekking here everyday and snapping pictures. It would ruin the authentic, local and family-like atmosphere that reigns here every day, especially on Sundays. In fact, an unwanted review already appeared on Salir.com, the Spanish equivalent of Yelp.com. Here, the reviewer had misunderstood the name of one of the waiters, which I won’t publish here precisely because the owner’s wouldn’t want me to. The waiter’s new name became a running joke of those of us who return time and time again, and he actually responds to that name now.

As Hall and Brown note, “for, although information technology and communication have displaced personal contact in a number of aspects of travel and holiday provision, there remains a wide range of contexts where face-to-face interaction is still central” (166). In fact, I cherish the time in that particular restaurant, because it has no cell phone coverage. It is in true local places such as these that you can disconnect, experience the culture of the country you are in. How to find them? Definitely not through the latest app.

How much can you trust what you find on the web?

The reliability of online information has been a serious concern since the start of the digital age. And I recently found myself stuck in a rather uncomfortable situation in regard to an online review of my novel, “Karaoke of Blood.”

After someone posted a punchy and quite favorable review of my book on Amazon, I decided to let book reviewers know about it. I cut and pasted the five-star review into an email and sent it out to a list of a couple of dozen book critics. It was a mass email, and I really didn’t think anything would come of it, but I thought it was easy and simple online guerilla marketing, so why not?

A few days later, I did a Google search for the title of my book, and one of the first results said that Dwight Garner, an influential staff book critic at the New York Times, had just called it one of the best books of 2011.

Yes, my heart stopped. Yes, Pulitzer visions danced in my head (or at least American Book Award visions).

Then, my heart stopped for another reason. A search result lower on the page clarified Garner’s praise – he didn’t say that my book was one of the best of 2011, he said that the NAME of my novel (“Karaoke of Blood”) was in the running for one of the best TITLES of 2011.

Yes, just a slight difference.

What happened was that another critic at the Times, food writer Kim Severson, thought Garner meant “book” when he wrote “title,” and she told her readers via Twitter that Garner had chosen my novel as “one of the great books of 2011.” So, now I was in a position where I could easily take Severson’s comment about Garner’s review and circulate it as legitimate praise of my book. And if anyone called me on it, I could say it was just a simple misunderstanding – after tons of people had already bought the book, obviously.

I never once, for a second, actually thought of using this misinformation because I like to think I have worked my whole career to establish the kind of reputation of someone who would not do that. (Garner subsequently cleared up the confusion in another tweet.) But if I hadn’t any scruples, I could have had one of 2011’s great books, if only briefly, and undeservedly.

That entire crazy episode got me thinking about value of online information in general and how easy it is to take liberties with facts in this era of instantaneous publication. Perhaps the most egregious recent example was when fans of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) editorially attacked Wikipedia to make the information there gibe with some errant historical gaffes she had made. According to an article on Daily Kos, "[I]t appears that her supporters have altered Wikipedia to make it appear that John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father, even though he was only a child when his father John Adams, America’s second president, signed the Declaration of Independence.”

But just how insane or rare is such an act? Perhaps things are actually better for the fate of information in a wide open web. In the past, as the saying goes, the winners wrote history. It took decades, if not centuries, for progressive historians like Howard Zinn to set the record straight, or at least give a full account, in books like “A People’s History of the United States.” And while Bachmann supporters certainly “rewrote” American history, the new democratization of information allows legions of dedicated truth-seekers to immediately set the record straight.

Or does it? The web is a place brilliantly designed for people easily to create new identities for themselves. Often times these identities don’t match up well with reality. Two amazing recent examples involved separate cases of men being outed as having posed as lesbian bloggers. Both said they were trying to advance the cause of gay rights, but their rationale fell flat with many. According to a comment posted on a story about one of the bloggers on the Daily Mail’s site, “The narcissistic drivel that this man uses to justify his actions is very telling.... By engaging in this activity he has made it that much harder for any later legitimate blogger to be taken seriously. Rather than advancing anything or anyone this poor excuse has set back the cause of freedom and human rights by a significant amount.”

So can anything published online be trusted? That’s like saying can you ever trust anything that the government tells you. The answer: No, you can’t.

In an article about on the 30th anniversary of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incident, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) wrote that, “by reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.” In short, reporters reported what the government told them, which was not the truth, which led to one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

So the current focus on whether or not information on the internet is completely accurate completely misses the point. We will always live in a world of no truth, half-truths and whole-truths, and that’s the absolute truth. But if you’re looking for a way to increase accuracy and veracity on the web, democratizing access to information, and the ability to critique it, is an excellent place to start.

The curator’s challenge: Balancing new tools and traditional journalism ethics

The thousands of people who crowded around the New Hampshire State House one day in late April 2011 were there for a single reason: to protest planned budget cuts and proposed changes to collective bargaining laws. And they used every available tool to convey their discontent.

Standing on the plaza, they waved signs, chanted, passed out fliers and shared their fears about how the cuts might change their lives. For weeks, their outrage had percolated online, and it continued that day as rally-goers used their smartphones to publish photos, opinions and videos from the rally on Facebook and Twitter.

To cover the story fully, journalists in the newsroom at the Concord Monitor would need to follow the protestors both to the State House lawn and into the social networks they used. A small team of reporters went downtown to cover the crowd and the business of the legislature. As the web content editor, it was my job to document the digital side of the rally.

As the crowds grew and the day unfolded, I found myself in a place familiar to many modern journalists, struggling to strike a balance between new techniques and old standards. My tool of choice that day was Storify, one of several web applications that allow users to cover events in real time using tweets, Facebook updates, photos and videos published by the people involved. At their best, these apps produce results that are intense, emotional choruses of images, quotes and sounds. However, they also create dozens of potential pitfalls.

Social media isn’t a new reporting tool in our newsroom. In the past, we’ve used MySpace to track down the friends of a murder victim, quoted the tweets of public officials in our political column and described Facebook tribute pages created for soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this was a different kind of social media journalism, one that involved created something new from raw information. Practicing it made me part of an emerging class of journalists who call themselves not reporters or editors, but curators.

Some of the most experienced members of this new category are the staff members at Storyful, an organization that uses social media streams to document news around the world. Some of their recent work includes extensive coverage of this Spring’s protests in the Middle East and daily news digests told through links, tweets and YouTube videos. Irish journalist Markham Nolan, who has been working there for about a year, defines a curator as follows:

“We're selecting the most relevant, most accurate and factual bits and assembling a contextual narrative with them,” he said via email. “No one tweet or YouTube video can describe a situation, but by plucking the best items from the deluge of content that we are faced with, by including a variety of perspectives and adding intelligent context, you can give the reader a holistic sense of a news story. “

I’ve been dabbling in social media curation since late 2010, producing a couple of short pieces for the Monitor about the midterm elections and the colossal snow storm that swept the East Coast just after Christmas. But the rally was the first time I used the technique to cover breaking news. Sitting there in the newsroom, miles away from the State House plaza, I felt a little voyeuristic about grabbing photos, observations and opinions from the Twitter streams and Facebook pages of rally-goers. But I soon realized that these were open accounts belonging to users who wanted to publicize the rally. It was no different than standing in the crowd with a notebook, jotting down what I saw.

The experience was overwhelming. Tweets, posts, photos and videos piled up by the dozen. Few of the rally-goers used their real names. It was difficult to tell who was actually at the State House and who was relaying information second or third hand. In News Values: Ideas for an Information Age, Jack Fuller defines news as “a provisional truth, the best that can be said quickly.” Social media curation is, in many ways, the most provisional truth.

As I worked, I developed some guidelines:

1. Find trusted sources. It wasn’t long before I stumbled across Twitter and Facebook feeds belonging to people I’d interviewed over the years. Their ranks included lobbyists, lawmakers and state employees, many of who were connected to me on various social networks. I knew who they were and what stake they had in the game. I could provide that context to readers quickly.
2. Observations gathered by non-journalists are okay. Direct quotes are not. Several public figures spoke at the rally and dozens of people relayed versions of what they said. The gist of each of the reports was probably correct, I couldn’t count on an average rally-goer to put the same sanctity on direct quotations as a professional journalist. Instead, I relied on our reporters in the field to relay quotes, and used social media to gather the crowd’s reaction.
3. Be careful with content that insults or bashes someone or something. I had no reservations about using items from people frustrated about policy decisions, but I passed on anything that included flat out name-calling. It didn’t advance the story and it was unrealistic to get a thoughtful response from the target of jeers on such a short deadline.
4. Verify everything. I sent a text message to a reporter at the State House to confirm the size of the crowd and used our records to check the proper names of organizations. I also employed many of the techniques in Craig Kanalley’s How to Verify a Tweet, a post on the Twitter Journalism blog. Steps include checking the timestamp, seeing how long a person has used a social media account and, when necessary, sending the user a direct message.
5. Understand the tool’s limitations. My curated piece was part of a much bigger news package, one that dominated our print and online editions for several days. It was not the appropriate venue to explain the nuances of government budgeting or to fact check the claims of various lobbies. Those jobs fell to our team of State House reporters, who filed dozens of blog posts and articles that week. It was my role to capture the mood and observations of the average person who assembled that day.

None of these guidelines are particularly groundbreaking. In fact, they’re all natural extensions of regular, real-time journalism. In a recently-published guide to social media practices, the American Society of Newspaper Editors explains “there’s no reason that traditional ethics guidelines should go out the window.”

One of the editors quoted in the paper, John Robinson of The Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record puts it as follows:

“Don’t be stupid.”

Nolan’s work with Storyful includes plenty of old-fashioned techniques. He’s careful to include context and background, to seek the person closest to the story and to be transparent about the origin of the information. He also uses social media to engage – and vet – potential sources.
“All the attributes that make a good journalist make a good curator,” said Nolan. “We're constantly asking ourselves to check our sources, re-verify them as the circumstances change, and constantly re-evaluate content in light of new developments.“

To my knowledge, everything I published on the day of the rally was an accurate reflection of reality, but that isn’t always the case, as internet provides a host of powerful tools for anyone trying to cook up a hoax. There have been a few recent high profile examples. A blog called “A gay girl in Damascus,” which included detailed reports of the Arab Spring uprisings was, in fact, written by a guy from Georgia, not a half-Syrian, half-American lesbian. The truth was revealed only after the American government launched an investigation into the girl’s purported disappearance. In another case, hackers used a Fox News Twitter account to spread false – and graphic – reports of President Obama’s death.

But these risks, Nolan reminds us, aren’t necessarily a function of technology.

“Rumors and falsehood are older than news itself,” he said. “We're human, we're not infallible, and we're not sitting on a supercomputer with an infallible algorithm. We'll get it wrong from time to time. And the fear that it will happen tomorrow keeps us on our toes today.”

That fear is nothing new. I’m not the only reporter who keeps a tally of the corrections she’s had to file in her career. The number isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to make me always ask another question, always find another source. But journalists should not let this fear prevent them from experimenting with new storytelling tools. Instead, they should wade into social networks -- and what ever comes next – armed with ethics, personal experiences and the knowledge that, as always, the job of a journalist is to seek and report the truth.

British Tabloids

“Rogue” members of an org. almost never are really rogues. Their rogue modus operandi almost always reflects the organization’s modus operandi, or ethos.

I jotted that note to myself back in early June, after reading a Vanity Fair story about the British newspaper phone hacking scandal while on a flight home to Chicago from Paris. The story quoted Andy Coulson, former editor of the recently shuttered News of the World, describing the first case in the scandal—reporter Clive Goodman’s and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire’s 2006 convictions for hacking voice-mail messages of the royal household—as the work of a “rogue reporter.”

Goodman, it turns out, was anything but a rogue. His actions—for which he served a brief term in prison—appear to have been all too typical of the way things were done at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World and, quite possibly, at other Murdoch papers as well. Goodman, it seems, was just following his paper’s standard operating procedure when he hacked into the phones of members of the royal family.

No reporter, I always tell my ethics classes, ever publishes a story on his or her own. Publication is always a cooperative activity—it involves decisions by reporters, editors and an entire quality-control apparatus. When there is a screwup, it is the organization that screws up. And even in cases of true “rogue reporters,” like Jayson Blair or Judith Miller at The New York Times, the organization is ultimately responsible, because the quality control process obviously broke down and failed to catch their falsehoods, exaggerations and departures from standards.

At the most basic level, there’s nothing really new about what the News of the World was doing: acquiring personal information and communications and publishing it for profit. And it has been done electronically since the telegraph and the party-line.

But the existence now of the cellphone, text-messaging and other digital devices allowed the paper to do this on an industrial scale and with an intrusiveness that was nothing short of…well, scandalous.
In terms of tastelessness, the bottom seemed to have been reached in Britain in 1992, when details of a phone conversation between Prince Charles and the then-Camilla Parker Bowles were published. That was the conversation in which Charles spoke indelicately of tampons and matters usually not discussed in public.

But the News of the World took the practice of prying into private lives to previously unimagined depths with its hacking into the phone of a teenage abduction victim who later turned out to have been murdered. Not only did the paper hack Milly Dowler’s cellphone, but its hacker allegedly went so far as to erase some voice-mail messages in a full queue to make room for new ones, giving her family false hope she was still alive and possibly compromising the police investigation of her disappearance.

It was the disclosure of the Dowler hacking that apparently loosed the floodgates of public outrage in Britain. Thanks in no small part to Murdoch-style journalism, the British public has become pretty much inured to press intrusions into the lives of royals and celebrities. But the revelation that the News of the World was vamping on the tragedies of murdered schoolgirls and victims of London’s 2005 subway bombing—well, that was too much.

In her Vanity Fair article, reporter Sarah Ellison summed up the scandal thus:

The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another.

Not only have all of these entities now run afoul of one another, they have collided in spectacular fashion. Two top officials of Scotland Yard have resigned. The News of the World has been shut down. Two top executives of Murdoch’s empire—Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton—have been forced to quit. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who once employed Coulson as his communication chief, is trying to get ahead of the scandal and save his own job. A former News of the World reporter, Sean Hoare, who was a source for Ellison’s story as well as for several New York Times pieces on the scandal, was found dead under unexplained circumstance in his home outside London Monday. And there is talk of a revolt against Murdoch’s stewardship of his own creation, News Corporation, by independent board members. This scandal may yet consume a British government and Murdoch, too.

This disaster is the product not of one or even several rogue reporters. This is the product of a rogue organization.

The Neda Video

June 20, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of an event that shook both the media landscape as well as humanity. As a culture, we did not realize how far-reaching the new age of civic journalism would be. At that point, our society had three years of Twitter, four years of YouTube and even more years of Facebook experience—all tools that journalists of this younger generation must (and do) utilize, or face being left behind.

But June 20, 2009, was something the social media environment was not prepped for. On that day, Neda Agha-Soltan died, with images of her death placed on YouTube, spreading virally across the Web. (Please be advised that this video is extremely graphic and depicts the actual death of a person.)

Some background is needed for the Neda video. During the 2009 Iranian election protests of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Neda, a young Iranian woman, was heading toward an area where protests were occurring. She had gotten out of her car, which was stuck in traffic. It was then that an Iranian paramilitary official shot Neda in the chest, the consequences then taped on the cell phone video.

This video of Neda certainly does not disregard other leaks of injustice. For example, as journalist Amy Goodman pointed out in her book “Breaking the Sound Barrier”, the gruesome images and videos of protesting Burmese monks being murdered in 2007 surreptitiously made their way onto Burma’s cell phone and Internet lines, only to be “largely stifled by government censorship.”

The Neda video was different, though. It hit news organizations and social media within hours of occurring—and it spread like wildfire. It was the contemporary video that both haunted yet humbled. It was the video that was emotionally crippling yet politically inspiring. It was the video that both gave light to a large rush of political uprisings in the Middle East yet also gave a face to a martyr, a face that illustrated how people were literally dying for their basic human rights that we take for granted. But most of all, it was the video that everyone could see. It was, and still is, easily accessible. It was the video that showed the true power social media had, that non-journalists were the new journalists, that there was a new precedent of digital ethics on display.

Today, we currently live in a digital communications age that is being shaped by civic journalism and the technologies associated with it. With all of the recent popular uprisings taking place—from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Syria—it has become clear that social media must be used as a means to disseminate information, but we still must use our ethical and moral compasses to ensure the information is distributed properly and accurately.

The impacts of this video were far greater than millions of video hits and the tag of a “viral” video. The anonymous video, which was originally sent to the Guardian and Voice of America before reaching the mainstream media, actually received a George Polk award. The Polk awards are some of the most esteemed journalism awards in the United States, and this was the first time in the 61-year history of the Polk awards that an anonymous work won. The video clearly had reverberated across the Internet, spurring heavier coverage of the Iranian protests and numerous blog and news posts debating everything from the political ramifications of Neda’s death to societal reactions to viewing death through such a close—and quick—avenue.

Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma blog was one example of a publication that examined the societal implications of the quick digital publishing of the Neda video. Guest writer Steve Gorelick, a professor of media studies at Hunter College, wrote:

“Neda’s journey to martyrdom is probably inevitable. She is a potent and heroic symbol who might yet be the impetus for revolution.  But she was also a human being.  And keeping that simple fact in mind might just be our fundamental challenge in a digital world that creates, produces, and distributes images of potential martyrs with a speed that is at once dizzying and terrifying.”

Gorelick touched on another point: the ethical dilemmas associated with death and the martyrs created through that captured death have always been around, but never at this pace. Death and gore has always been an issue for journalists, but never has death and gore been able to be watched over and over again. Videos, in many instances, have supplanted still images. Today, a traumatic event happens, bystanders capture the moment, and it could be uploaded to any video-sharing site or news site within minutes or even seconds. This simply wasn’t an option during the 1968 Saigon execution, for example. Photographer Eddie Adams was only able to snap photographs of an executed Vietcong prisoner and then had to wait for the prints from a darkroom. The process to publish the photos and transmit them back to the United States took days. Had Adams had a smartphone, he could’ve uploaded a high-quality photo of the traumatic event, and perhaps the anti-Vietnam War movement—one of the largest anti-war movements in U.S. history—could’ve gathered a whole slew of supporters.

The crux of the Neda video, though, is the ethical implications and precedents it has now set for these types of video uploads. Numerous amateur videos continue, such as violent demonstrations in Syria and the recent case of Christopher Whitman, a 25-year-old U.S. student who was shot by Israeli forces with a tear gas canister during a nonviolent demonstration near Palestinian land.

As some print media editors have realized this past decade, the old tests for acceptability of controversial photos—such as the “breakfast test”—are obsolete:

“…Minneapolis Star Tribune photo editor Mike Zerby said, “the standard line is ‘we don’t bleed on your eggs.’ But I think at this particular newspaper we’ve grown past that."

Serge McCabe, photo director, The (Portland) Oregonian: "We have to use some of these photos sometimes or else nothing ever changes. The war in Vietnam really didn’t start drawing to an end or start drawing a lot of protest until those images started coming in."

Does the same hold true for the videos of today, which are shared at a rate that print newspapers could never match? Are we in era of digital communications where nearly anything is fair game? As Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute indicates, this era of civic journalism certainly asks non-journalists to disseminate the news, in its most true form, amidst massive cutbacks and areas of low coverage.

“As news resources decline and the capacity of non-journalists to document such moments grows, a new challenge is emerging: the wherewithal to collaborate with and enhance the storytelling of the people on the scene when journalists are nowhere to be found,” Mitchell said. “Journalists’ diminished capacity to witness, driven in part by dwindling financial resources, is aggravated when authorities try to control the flow of information by shutting down news bureaus, refusing visa extensions for some journalists, and taking others into custody.”

Of course, there is a certain intrinsic trust now placed with all civic journalists out there: That uploaded videos are, in fact, authentic, undistorted and fully representative of the situation. It is also pertinent that shared videos that are redistributed in other channels such as Twitter, Facebook or specific news sites should be both checked for verification and reposted with credit and authenticity as well. Those ethical questions of accuracy never waver. But ethical questions of whether a controversial video, involving gore and/or death in this instance, have pretty much been answered: Show the truth, as it happened.

There will always be gray areas with scenarios like the Neda video. These types of images depict humanity in its most vulnerable and horrifying state and simply are not easy to stomach. In a new era, a new millennium, of progressive video sharing and civic journalism, these uploads can certainly be compared with controversial journalistic images of the past. Accuracy and truthful display are ethical certainties in these digital cases, but honest dissent should not be silenced based on unpleasant images alone. The two years since Neda’s death have only reinforced this.

Digital Ethics and Kids

As digital communication continues to evolve as a way of life, it is nearly impossible to avoid the digital era from our homes, schools and workplaces.

As such, individuals in society need to realize the increasing significance of digital ethics and the role it plays in our daily lives.  People of all ages will be exposed to modern day technology at some point.

Children’s ethical systems are forged in the home with personal ethics developed from the family’s moral beliefs.  During childhood, moral knowledge is inherited into a framework by our culture, religious beliefs, economic status, social life, gender and those who we are surrounded by most often.

At the age when children begin school, they are placed with others with different moral beliefs and different family backgrounds.  These children continue to face an ever-challenging question of their own beliefs throughout their childhood years.

Children who are raised in families who have no moral or ethical knowledge run the risk of not practicing good ethical behavior. Some of these children will not make ethical decisions during their use of digital media nor will they realize they are doing right or wrong.

With the digital era becoming a prominent fixture in our daily lives, it is pertinent that children of today’s age have knowledge of digital ethics.  If children are not learning digital ethics at home, we, as a society, can’t expect them to know right from wrong in this regard.

For a student who uses media appropriately and respects the privacy and property of themselves and all others, whether they know the party on the other end or not, is practicing good digital ethical behavior.  They prove to do so by their actions.

However, a student who does not practice digital ethics at the beginning of a school year  may not have been surrounded by good moral behavior, or it could be the lack of an ethical system in the home.

“Ideally, parents should be the ones who model best behaviors for their children,” said Michael Cavanagh, Assistant professor who teaches journalism at University of Illinois at Springfield.

“Unfortunately, if parents are not savvy with digital media, it is hard for children, who think they know more, to listen to parents who have never downloaded a CD from Bit Torrent,” Cavanagh said.

As in days past, we face the challenge of trademark and copyright infringement, especially when it comes to the Internet and Web.  According to the copyright law of the United States, any original literary, musical, dramatic, artistic, architectural and audiovisual work that is fixed in some tangible medium or expression is protected and belongs to the author.

Many people are naïve to trademark and copyright laws, such as the case with Napster where people, especially college students, were downloading music for free.

“Most of my students admit to helping themselves to ‘free’ music downloads,” Cavanagh said.

Some people believe, because words, images, video, etc. are on the Internet or Web for everyone to see, that anyone is entitled to it and that is not true.  Copyright laws give authors exclusive rights to their works.

“Trademark and copyright is not something that is often taught in schools, nor is it well-understood by the public at large,” Cavanagh said.

Instead of schools enforcing the laws of trademark and copyright, they simply restrict children’s usage of the Internet and Web. While these students may not have complete access to it during school hours, they are left free to choose how they use digital media, often with their peers being most influential.

Trademark and copyright aren’t the only issues children face, plagiarism is another challenge.

“Copy-and-paste plagiarism is rampant at U.S. colleges and universities,” said Cavanagh, “Anti-plagiarism service Turnitin found 110 million instances of plagiarism in 40 million student papers in the last 10 months.”

Teaching proper research and writing methods during elementary years may help students avoid plagiarism as they grow into productive and honest students with continuing good behavior as citizens.

Spencerport Central School District’s Technology teacher, Dan Cleveland, teaches roughly 250 middle school students throughout the school year.

“In a way, adolescents are not necessarily mature enough to have the privilege to access all aspects of what the Internet has to offer,” Cleveland said.

Cleveland believes having adequate knowledge and comprehension of technological resources such as computers, the Internet, etc., is what it means to be literate in the 21st Century.  It leaves us to wonder, is the educational system on task with the 21st Century or does it lag behind?

“I believe we are working hard to all be at the same level to be teaching for the “21st century learners,” said Cleveland, “I feel it is difficult for all to be on board and following the same goal.

He continues, “As a technology teacher, growth in the 21st century is our ultimate goal, whereas in other subject areas, it may not be as important.”

In his district, as well as most other school districts, students are not allowed access to social networking sites and have limited access to the Internet and Web.  However, restriction only prevents usage, it doesn’t teach them right or wrong.

For Cleveland’s Technology classes alone he states that roughly 25-30 percent of his students have been properly educated in digital ethics prior to the school year and that number drastically increases by the end of the school year.

While this is only one teacher of one school district, it is apparent how important it is to teach children how to be digitally ethical.

If parents aren’t digitally savvy, it may be necessary to introduce not only ethics at large, but to implement digital ethics and its importance for students to become good digital citizens, into school systems.

Cleveland feels digital ethics should be introduced to children as early as first or second grade.

“The earlier we can create this safe-mind set for students, the better off they will be,” Cleveland said.

Lindsay Thompson, the mother of  a two-year-old and preschool age student, has similar thoughts to Cleveland.

“Good digital practices should be taught both at home and in school,” said Thompson, “Kids should learn the correct way to use the Internet at home and the school system should reinforce the good behavior.”

Not all homes are digitally savvy for various reasons.  With this lack of knowledge, it will be a continuous cycle, leaving future generations with unethical digital practices.  If ethics is practiced in the home, but digital ethics is not, general ethical behavior may still play a role on whether a student thinks twice by their actions in the digital world.

“I think the idea of digital ethics is a little beyond four and five-year-olds,” said Thompson, “But the principles can be applied to things they understand, such as being honest and having respect for others can be taught at a very young age.”

Even though most schools enforce good ethical behavior with signing a code of conduct by the student and parent, not all students and parents are fully aware what digital ethics means.

Instead of exposing students to the full capacity of what the Internet and Web have to offer, they are shielded from it and not taught all the right and wrong, good and bad.  The districts are taking upon the parents to teach it to their children.  However, if the parents don’t know, how will the children and who will do the teaching?

“It’s up to the older kids to teach it to the parents, in return, the parents will learn it too, until all the ages catch up with the present digital age,” said Mark Ellis, a high school senior from the Hilton School District.

“Kids download pictures and music all the time off the Internet for free, and so do their parents, because they think they can,” Ellis said.

If the adults are stealing music, breaking copyright and trademark laws, plagiarizing, sending inappropriate emails and texts, then we can’t blame the children for using the same behaviors.

“I know I’m not supposed to steal from a person, a business or from the Internet because my family taught me right from wrong, not the school district,” said Ellis.  “The school districts definitely need to teach it and talk about it more often in order to know the importance of what is right or wrong in the digital world, or else students may never learn.”

Times change and people continue to adapt to the new, but since the digital world is changing at a rapid rate, some people are left without the knowledge they need to practice good digital ethics, therefore passing on unethical behavior to their children. For those who do practice, they need to model that behavior, beginning at a young age and what better place to do so than in the school system.

Advocating Ethical Design

Visual lies are deadly, according to David Berman, a Canadian graphic designer and author of Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change The World.

“A naked woman draped over a car -- that’s a visual lie,” says Berman. “I’ve created a sentence that says ‘buy my car, and you’ll have more sex.’ You can’t say that (in an ad), but you can present it as a visual sentence, and the law doesn’t mind that very much.”

Both in his book, and throughout his career, Berman aims to expose the ethical pitfalls endemic to the graphic design industry. A number of designers will refuse if asked to create a design using untruthful language, Berman stated. However, using visual elements linked together to form an impression in the mind may result in a distortion of the truth just the same.

Calling the eye “the largest diameter bandwidth pipe into the human brain,” Berman believes people are much more influenced by things that look real as opposed to symbology. “We also live in a society that codified law into words, not pictures. It’s easy to get around a law with the vagueness that pictures connote.”

These “visual lies” now populating untold numbers of websites denigrate not only women, but also the entire planet, according to Berman. The seductive appeals are made possible by talented graphic designers, who contribute to environmental denigration by encouraging overconsumption of dwindling resources, Berman said.

“Designers tend to underestimate how much power they have. They’re culpable,” he said. He estimates that within a decade, the majority of humanity will be able to publish information on the web. And that’s why “almost everyone needs to know something” about ethical web design, said Berman.

“There are the ads you accidentally hit [while browsing a website.] There are many layers of persuasion and coercion,” Berman said. “What a designer has responsibility for in [designing a website] gets broader. When you are dealing with pure print design, once the job is done, the designer’s involvement is over. The technology was cut-and-dried. If I know how ink goes on paper, I can do a better design,” he said.

“With metadata, so much is hidden. It softens the line where design ends and programming begins,” Berman said. “You can have a very deceptive strategy with 28 different things you can do to try and trick Google. How do you trick someone to see a poster?”

Another example of deceptive coding on websites involves the file names that are used for graphics. “Some people do it honestly, and some deceptively,” he said. “What a designer has responsibility for, as a web designer, gets broader. With symbols and codes, the ethics can be in convention.

“Spam, in all its forms, is the best example of manipulation on an international scale,” said Berman. “Ninety percent of e-mail, globally, is deceptive. There are all sorts of calls to action, banner ads to distract you from what you really came to do. There is no precedent for the amount of effort expended to trick people.”

Seductive advertisements using exploitative imagery have long populated public spaces in North America through signage. Now that signage has greater impact through deployment of digital signs. Unlike signage, web design is interactive. However, interactive web interface is now possible with traditional signage through Quick Response (QR) codes that can be scanned by cell phones through a wireless connection. The persuasive power of the web is absorbing traditional signs within its orbit of influence, through incorporating QR codes.

“The challenge with the web is the interactivity, because we can publish so much so inexpensively,” said Berman.

Berman believes design is so powerful that “it can be a matter of life and death.” As such, it should be regulated in respect to its social and environmental impact. “This proliferation of visual lies” is just as deadly as faulty construction, said Berman. “Anyone can design a website, but not anyone can design a shed or a structure. If it is over three stories tall, there isn’t a jurisdiction in North America that would allow you to build something that large without a permit.”

Berman advocates for “a rejoining of cause and relationship” by researching and documenting the impact visual design has upon human behavior. As an example of the large-scale impact that unanticipated effects of poor design can have, Berman cites the U.S. presidential election in 2000, in which the outcome hinged on the defective graphic design of the ballots in Florida.

Designers have power over how human beings are depicted, said Berman. Certain hairstyles, skin color and leg length have been defined as normal. “It’s the subtler things that marginalize a population. It’s about how human beings are portrayed, and how certain national resources are consumed.”

Berman observes that graphic designers’ choices are also shaping public perceptions over body image. He points to a now familiar image: a young woman in front of a laptop computer propped up on her elbows, and lying on her stomach -- an image used in many advertising campaigns. “It’s a classic shot used to sell computers. Do you ever see a guy in this pose? It would look crazy. They use this shot, because the angle gets in her whole body.”

Berman insists ethical design matters because designers have such a huge impact on society. “We're familiar with the powerful branding campaigns of the cola makers -- the cigarette makers -- the alcohol makers -- the cosmeticians -- I'm sorry -- the cosmetics manufacturers. They're all working hard to convince people that they need and need and need in order to belong. We're familiar with the issues of young women and body image issues because of the false picture we've given in our society of what women should look like.” Therefore, he urges designers to “take the time to understand how the mechanics of persuasion works.”

Berman said any designer can choose to look at ethics in designing websites. “I don’t want to be known as someone people would say, ‘Could he ever trick people well! What a branding strategist! What a brilliant guy!’” he stated. “I don’t want to have people say that about me. I want to be known for choosing to make a better world.”

“There’s a lot to be worried about -- a lot of fragility. There is urgency, but there has never been more hope. Using the same technology, we can do ourselves in, or we can choose to make things possibly better,” he added. “We can choose which ideas we’re going to share with people … are we going to share our style addiction, our trivia, or how to drink caffeinated sugar water? We have the power as designers to share that.

“First you need to know how to do good design, then you need to do good.”

The Rise of Snark

Outside a barn along a flat-country highway in southern Delaware, hamburgers grilled over charcoal flames. A pile of watermelons – the prized crop of a local farm – sat nearby, for sale. Inside, men and women gathered on the concrete floor ready to bid on NRA belt buckles, pictures of Ronald Reagan and homemade pies.

Everything was as it usually is at the annual Sussex County GOP picnic auction on a Sunday in September. Everything except for the television cameras from far away – Philadelphia, Washington, France, Japan.

They crowded around the building entrance, and when Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell arrived, they shoved each other and their microphones forward, shouting questions. Whether she still practiced witchcraft, whether she only visited a blood-stained alter once during high school, whether she cancelled appearances on two Sunday talk shows to avoid humiliation. By the time one well-meaning reporter asked the political novice with the utmost sincerity if “dabbling in witchcraft” would “hurt her in November,” it was hard not to find the whole thing comical, rather than political.

How did this happen?

Well, two nights earlier, a left wing comedian announced on his late night cable show that he had a video from 11 years ago of O’Donnell saying some very strange things on a Fox program called “Politically Incorrect.” He presented it with a warning for the tea party favorite.

“Christine, if you’re watching, I created you,” said Bill Maher, host of “Real Time.” “You need to come on this show. If you don’t come on this show, I’m going to show a clip every week. I’m the only one that has them. I have hoarded them.”

It didn’t even take until midnight for the Internet to prove Maher wrong about hoarding them. Or show how a single 40 second clip could upend an entire election and derail reasoned political discourse.

Within an hour, someone uploaded the “Real Time” segment to YouTube. At 1:31 a.m., a liberal website, Think Progress, linked to the video in a blog post titled "Christine O'Donnell in Oct. 1999: 'I dabbled into witchcraft.'" It described the major-party Senate candidate as “an unemployed, anti-masturbation activist” and “best known for her regular and bizarre punditry.”

By the next morning, The Huffington Post, a liberal Internet news site, picked up the story, posting the video with a short blurb. These links and others were shared on who knows how many tweets and Facebook status updates. People started commenting on the YouTube video by the dozens. One quipped, “Palling around with witches,” as opposed to terrorists, of course. Another opined, “At least she's not a marxist like (Chris) Coons,” referring a college column in which O’Donnell’s Democrat opponent called himself a “bearded Marxist“.

By late Saturday, the digital sensation made main stream news when O’Donnell cancelled appearances on “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday,” a direct result of the witchcraft video, many assumed.

So now you can see what all the fuss was about outside a barn in southern Delaware. It was O’Donnell’s first public appearance since the “dabbled into witchcraft” video made worldwide news.

“I'm disappointed that she is not appearing on any of the Sunday news shows,” observed a commenter on Wonkette, a blog founded entirely on snarky, hilarious insincerity. “I was looking forward to her head spinning around as she throws up pea soup on Chris Wallace.”

*****

Just as the intersection of politics and the Internet introduced the nation to Tina Fey and her Sarah Palin impersonation in 2008, a phenomenon like O’Donnell could only exist in the digital age.

A little more than 1 million viewers tune into premium channel HBO for a typical episode of “Real Time,” or about 1 or 2 million fewer people than the typical audience for one of America’s favorite Friday night cable shows, “WWE Smackdown,” according to Nielsen Media Research.

But the number of people watching an original broadcast suggests little relevance in today’s climate.

“The vast majority of people did not watch the Tina Fey impersonation or the witchcraft video the first time it was broadcast,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

Experts are quick to point out the existence of political satire dating back to print cartoons of the colonial area, but it’s easy to see how “snark” – a more biting, dismissive cousin of sarcasm – has become more pervasive than ever. With so much information bombarding us at all times, we need shortcuts to make it digestible, to boil it down into a more manageable, entertaining package, Thompson said.

Internet users have, virtually, unlimited outlets to consume, create and share commentary, and stories lending themselves to such abject irreverence. Their humorous or cruel or ironic words spread to millions of eyes without any help from major newspapers or television networks.

“In that way, we’re all pundits,” said Danna Young, an assistant professor UD who has studied political humor and satire. “I don’t have to even have an original thought. I can just say, ‘Right on, dude.’”

Delaware is the second smallest state by area and the 6th smallest by population. It has one major newspaper and no television station of its own. The tiny First State’s flash into the spotlight eventually led to a “Daily Show” spoof, featuring University of Delaware assistant professor Jason Mycoff as the straight-laced academic describing the state’s political climate.

“I did it because I thought it would be fun,” Mycoff explained. “It’s true you don’t want to be seen as the buffoon they are targeting. But as long as you’re not the buffoon, it’s not ’60 Minutes.’ It’s not a serious interview.”

As for whether he gets his news from Jon Stewart, “I actually read,” Mycoff joked.

In another age, the O’Donnell video might have sparked a few days of coffee shop conversation, Thompson said, and then everyone would have moved on, perhaps to more substantive issues.

But especially for people outside of Delaware, paying only peripheral attention to the Senate election as a sideshow, witchcraft became the central issue of the election. The O’Donnell video followed a rather predictable arc, Young said.

It starts with a funny video relatively few people see initially. It’s uploaded to the Internet, posted on blogs and shared on social media. It gets traction as more people watch it and offer biting assessments in comments sections. It’s remixed and parodied and shared some more. Sometimes, the mainstream press hops on board, providing an overview of the digital sensation. The cycle seems to near completion when Jon Stewart offers a scathing, satirical assessment of the whole topic. Then, the citizens of the Internet offer more pithy and sarcastic comments until the story runs out of steam or something funnier comes along.

“All these people have the opportunity to become political actors just by forwarding something or posting it,” Young said.

****

But what if the smarmy attitude – as popular as it is – spills over into mediums for straight-laced reporting? Will newspapers and networks be tempted to engage in it too?

Growing more and more partisan and commentary-laden, cable networks especially have decided that answer is yes, Young said.

“In a diverse media landscape that features everything from opera to jersey shore, a lot of networks have adopted a more entertainment approach,” she said. “And that means heightened drama and building tension, and it also means more of this snarky, mean-spirited attitude.”

But the answer in traditional print media hasn’t been so clear. In his recently released book “The Ethical Journalist: Making Responsible Decisions in the Pursuit of News,” veteran journalist and former Penn State University professor Gene Foreman includes a case study of a political reporter maintaining a blog. The reporter’s posts throughout the day took on a harsh, witty tone. Meanwhile, his newspaper reports maintained a straight, no-frills approach.

Journalists venturing into snark run the risk of appearing less than objective and damaging their credibility, a problematic situation when the same reporters must write straight news stories for the next day’s paper, Foreman said.

“They want to match the citizen blogs, some of which are very popular,” said Foreman, a former managing editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. “But the citizen blog doesn’t have the same responsibility as a journalist at a mainstream newspaper.”

Foreman said he appreciates the value of blog and understands the need for reporters to be lively and relevant. But too much dripping sarcasm lowers discourse, and it’s up to professional journalists to hold themselves to a higher standard, he said. Foreman is less amenable to the new age of commenting – on blogs, on message boards, on news stories.

“Comments have debased our society,” Foreman said. “It just exposes a mean side of people.”

As for journalism’s use of snark, it remains to be seen how reporters of the future – citizens, profession or otherwise – will handle their online decorum. For all we know, the whole might seem quaint years from now.

“I imagine journalism as a profession is going to have to wrestle with how to make that distinction,” Young said. “Do you treat a private citizen with kid gloves or do you treat them differently because they’re a citizen journalist?”

*****

Whether anyone likes it or not, situations that invite snark will get attention, generate page views and grab headlines. O’Donnell went on to essentially embrace the situation, creating her famous “I’m you” campaign ad, in which she states, “I’m not a witch.” Rather than diffuse the situation, it fed the snark machine. Witchcraft became impossible to ignore.

Lost in the chaos of that barn in southern Delaware, one reporter in fray could be heard arguing with one of O’Donnell’s aides over why he asked so many questions, so insistently, about witchcraft.

For better or worse, as the reporter put it, “A United States Senate candidate saying she dabbled in witchcraft is a story.”

It’s just the way the story is told that’s changed.

BUSINESS Communications AND TRANSPARENCY

Openness and sharing may be the hallmarks of social media and online communities, but transparency and disclosure can be a tricky area for companies to navigate when building their online profiles and presenting information to clients and customers in the digital world.

Ethical gray areas still exist when it comes to transparency, and a mistake in judgment can have negative ramifications for companies in any industry. Experts say the key to avoiding fines, tarnishes to a brand and all around online-community-building-chaos lies in developing proper internal policies, communication and education surrounding digital engagement.

Michael Brito, vice president of social media at Edelman Digital, cites a lack of internal policies to regulate and support social media engagement as a major contributor to transparency and disclosure issues for companies. “All these companies were on a quest to have a social media presence, and they jumped into it right away. Employees are just kind of out there,” he said. “I think the root cause of transparency and disclosure problems isn’t so much that companies are being purposely deceitful, it’s that they never developed internal governance models to educate and empower people to engage the right way.”

Without proper safeguards in place, issues can quickly arise.

For example, rogue employees may be publishing information about a company or promoting its products without reporting back to the company internally about what they are posting and without disclosing their employment at the company. Others may be posting comments in response to news articles, OpEds, blog posts or in other online forums without being briefed on the organization’s messaging and without identifying their association.

“When no one’s talking internally and when one-off employees are doing their own thing, it can be disastrous for a company,” said Brito.

He also cites potential problem areas with employees on Twitter, using an example of an employee with a large following who tweets about a personal interest area, but not about the company. “Let’s say she then mentions the company for some reason. At what point does she need to identify that she works there?” Brito asked hypothetically.

Companies also can run into problems by not properly disclosing affiliate links and relationships with bloggers, according to Patrick Thoburn, a member of the ethics advisory panel at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and co-founder of Matchstick, a Toronto word of mouth marketing company.

“Marketers have encountered big issues with disclosing terms of engagement with bloggers,” he said. If a blogger is taken on a company trip, for example, it needs to be disclosed. “In some ways even higher standards apply in online media,” he said, noting that the Federal Trade Commission has become more active in regulating the digital marketing world.

Brito also cites hired bloggers as a big problem area. “Per FTC guidelines, bloggers need to disclose that relationship if they are writing about a product. If they don’t already, companies need to know that.”

Online contests can create transparency issues too, according to Thoburn. A consumer might enter a contest and start tweeting about the company. Initially, the contestant and the company don’t have a material connection. But should he win, they might, and proper disclosure would have been required from the beginning.

Another online publishing dilemma for companies: who writes the content of tweets and other postings for CEOs or high-ranking executives? Well-known CEO tweeters likes Tony Hsieh of Zappos write their own tweets, but less engaged CEOs may be tempted to use ghostwriters. However, doing so rates low on the transparency scale and doesn’t provide much business value. “Most people are savvy enough to know whether it’s the actual voice of the person and not just a rewritten press release,” Brito said. “You shouldn’t be tweeting if you don’t have time to do it yourself.”

Sima Dahl, social media strategist and president of Chicago-based marketing consulting firm Parlay Communications, agrees. “Executives need to write their own tweets,” she said. “If you’re an individual online, you need to be that person and you need to do so under your own voice. If you’re not comfortable, don’t try to fake it.”

Transparency and disclosure issues can pop up without warning, and companies need to be prepared to evaluate some scenarios on a case-by-case basis. But thinking about dilemmas that may arise, instituting an open culture and setting guidelines before unleashing employees to engage can go a long way toward mitigating issues.

“Internal social media policies are very effective at educating employees and achieving compliance,” Thoburn said.

Brito said companies are realizing that controls like governance models, firewalls and training are needed to avoid negative issues. Even younger generations that are very proficient in social media can be culprits of disclosure lapses. "It’s not top of mind for them,” Brito said. “For example, for the new hire who’s excited to start tweeting about the company, organizations really need to have employee engagement and ethics training in place.”

Dahl says it’s important to harness the energy of those employees, and to set them up to succeed. “You want to have employees talking about how great your company is,” she said. “Whether it’s how to launch a successful blog, create their first Twitter handles or how to compose healthy tweets, provide the proper education and advice up front and then let your employees go. You’ve hired smart people, so instill a sense of trust, and then be swift in disciplining someone who breaks that trust.”

But developing and implementing those guidelines can be a challenging task, and it requires support from leadership and departments throughout the organization. Dahl notes that it’s easy for companies to get hamstrung: “A lot of times companies get scared. It’s the sort of thing where if you stop to consider all the ethical and legal implications, you won’t move forward.”

That’s why she advises companies to collaborate across departments. “Include people throughout the organization,” she advised. “You might find people who are already engaged and want to be engaged in departments outside of marketing. Show them how to talk about things and engage them to lift your brand.”

Brito said companies that communicate effectively in the online sphere often gather a committee of representatives from legal, marketing, human resources, communications, IT and various business units to create social media centers of excellence that are responsible for creating guidelines and training. “In order for it to be comprehensive, everyone internally needs to be part of the process,” he said.

Organizations like WOMMA that keep track of ethical issues and FTC guidelines also can be helpful in developing standards and guidelines. WOMMA educates members on ethical issues and provides a member code of ethics that can serve as a reference point for developing internal ethics policies.

For example, standards of conduct required by WOMMA’s code of ethics include making meaningful disclosures of relationships or identities with consumers in relation to marketing initiatives that could influence a consumer’s purchasing decisions; meaningful and prominent disclosure of all forms of consideration or compensation received from a member, marketer or sponsor of a product or service; disclosure of material aspects of commercial relationships with a marketer; compliance with the FTC’s Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising; and genuine honesty in communication.

Without standards in place, companies leave themselves open to reputational, legal and brand implications. “Remember that people and competitors are watching what you’re publishing online,” Thoburn said. “A lack of ethical behavior can be a competitive disadvantage, and competitors will be happy to point out ethical shortcomings.”

Daliah Saper, principal with Saper Law Offices in Chicago, said companies that make mistakes with transparency can leave themselves open to FTC fines and can be targeted by competitors for deceptive trade practices.

As Brito notes, they also lose credibility. “Companies that defy the trust of an online community will definitely have a hard time regaining their reputation.” But he also says companies are beginning to understand that. “Companies today are getting it. They don’t want to deceive people,” he said.

And Saper suggests relatively easy ways to avoid liability. “Monitor your bloggers and employees, and be dedicated to being very transparent.”

With transparency such an inherent part of today’s online communities, experts say companies need to make it part of their daily decisions. As Thoburn explains, “There’s a strong spirit of transparency in the roots of the blogosphere. Social media is very much imbued by principals of transparency, and companies need to take the time to maintain it and do things right.”

Web2.0 Suicide: The Luxury of the 21st Century

“Great, I’ll just friend you on Facebook,” a girl said to me. Probably seeing the blank expression on my face, she added: “You do have Facebook, right?”

It was an early morning in August 2005, and I had just arrived at Columbia University in New York City. The campus was as bustling as ever, and like over 1,000 other students, I was eager to begin my undergraduate studies. Many of them were hauling one item after another, – a pair of sneakers, a reading lamp followed by an oversized beanbag – to their future dorm room. I, however, carried a single suitcase. Still jetlagged, I was one of the few international students attending Columbia. Back then, the idea of Facebook hadn’t crossed the ocean to my home country Germany,. I had no idea what the girl was talking about.

“Uh, no.” I stuttered. And that was the last time her emerald-green eyes ever met mine. I don’t even remember her name.

In 2005, one year after it was created, Facebook was still limited to university campuses in the U.S. In fact, a college email address was required to join. The same year, the company launched a high school version, and in 2006, expanded to include commercial organizations. In 2010, the site closed in on 500 million monthly visitors, and is now the most popular online social networking portal.

But just as the number of Facebook visitors has been on the rise, it appears that many other users are committing the opposite: Web2.0 Suicide. “Meet Your Real Neighbors Again!” and “Sign out Forever!” are the slogans of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine, which “lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.”

Here’s how it works: let’s say you have 1,000 “friends.” The machine will delete your social networking presence eleven times faster than “manual suicide,” that is, if you did it yourself.

As of right now, it works with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. The site clarifies to the user that “we are not deleting your account! Our aim is rather to remove your private content and friend relationships than just deactivating/deleting the account!” Thus, in addition to changing your profile picture, password and removing all private content and notification, the program ultimately joins your account to the Facebook group “Social Network Suiciders.” Similarly, it removes all your tweets on Twitter and on MySpace, it even leaves a status message that you’ve “committed suicide.” On LinkedIn, your profile picture and password are changed, and all your business contacts are deleted.

But what about the ethical ramifications of “killing” all of one’s virtual friends and employers? What does one lose and what does one gain by not participating in Facebook and other social networking site? In his FAQ to the Web2.0 Suicide Machine, Walter Langelaar explains that he and his team do not consider the site unethical. They are convinced that “everyone should have the right to disconnect” and that “seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom.” According to the creators of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine, “users are entrapped in a high-resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world.” In their opinion, “merely deactivating the account is just not enough!”

Others would argue that deactivating and/or committing “web suicide” can have serious ethical implications. Even though you are not “killing” your friends in real life, as another FAQ of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine clearly states, you could be losing what is called “social capital.” Nicole Ellison, an associate professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University, has written extensively on the relationship between Facebook use and social capital, an elastic term that generally refers to the resources accumulated through the relationships among people . According to Bourdieu and Wacquant, these resources can be actual or virtual (p. 14).

In a 2007 research study titled “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends:’ Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites,” Ellison concludes that not participating in Facebook can cause a loss of social capital with one’s peers and potential employers. Specifically, Facebook played a positive role in bridging social capital, that is, it “crystallize(s) relationships that might otherwise remain ephemeral,” (p. 21). Moreover, Facebook use was related to measure of psychological well-being, “suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction” (p. 21).

Ellison’s study certainly has its limitations; it was based on only 286 students at Michigan State University, and dates back to 2007. However, the positive relationship between measures of Facebook use and perceptions of social capital are reflected in cases of “web suicide.” A particularly compelling and perhaps even disturbing post from another “web suicide” blog, www.lifewithoutfacebook.com, reads:

12.30.09 Today I feel it. I actually feel it. Almost like an addict. I have had the urge to go to Facebook numerous times tonight. To check news feeds and photos and see what people are up to on New Years. It is only day six. This might be harder than I thought. The feeling of freedom has momentarily been replaced by a feeling of being on the outside. I literally feel like the only person that I know that is not part of the group. I deleted my Facebook bookmark. My will is strong, I will live to fight another day…

For this blogger, “a feeling of being on the outside” is the result of his or her “life without Facebook.” In today’s hyper-connected society, socializing on a virtual level has become a standard. As Harry McCracken, Time magazine’s technology expert, explains: Facebook “has become a default form of identity on the web – if you don’t have an account, it’s becoming like not having an email address or a driver’s license.” Precisely for this reason, McCracken himself began writing about “Life Without Facebook.” The site is such an integral of modern society that, if one doesn’t use it, one risks losing part of one’s social capital. When the Web2.0 Suicide Machine joins one’s account to the Facebook group “Social Network Suiciders,” they are officially out of the loop.

According to McCracken, the fact that Facebook plays such a significant role in today’s society “has lots of fascinating implications.” Portals like Facebook can come to define a person’s identity. Similarly, gadgets and apps are taking over our lives, as Mickey Meece of the New York Times proposes in a recent article titled “Who’s the Boss, You or Your Gadget?” According to Meece, smartphones and laptops are tipping the work/life balance, and many people feel the need to be connected 24/7.

In fact, one could question whether modern technology use, including Facebook, has become an addiction for some. The “web suicide” blog cited above would certainly resonate with this idea: the writer feels “almost like an addict,” experiences an “urge” and ultimately, expresses a “strong will” to fight the temptation. Janet Bayer, a recent graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, would concur:

To some people, yes, Facebook can be seen as something similar to a drug (…) Some people have structured their whole life around it and spend all their wake hours on the site. But most people I know – including myself – simply don’t have the time or luxury to procrastinate all day and lose themselves in it.

McCracken, however, agrees that Facebook is not an addiction; “As with all other things in life that are interesting, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and there are downsides.”

Nora Sturm agrees:

The bigger problem is behavioral: people, including myself, are easily entertained and can waste serious amounts of time and energy engaging in mindless, pointless surfing. Facebook is just one example of this.

Whether or not one considers Facebook an addiction or drug, the fact that it has come to assume an important role in today’s identity creation poses serious questions. Ellison’s adversaries would argue that Facebook promotes online rather than offline relationships. In 2008, Saumya Vaishampayan titled an article in the Tufts Daily: “Life without Facebook: Is it possible?” Back then, the Tufts university student already observed that several of her classmates are “no longer ’In a Relationship’ with Facebook,” the most common reasons being that it hampers productivity. According to the students interviewed by Vaishampayan, Facebook only maintains virtual, rather than physical, ties.

Celestine Chua, the creator of “The Personal Excellence Blog,” has done precisely the opposite of losing herself in Facebook. She is making money from her “web suicide.” Her blog, which has been featured in over 25 media outlets, including CNN, details that she deleted Facebook from her life in December 2008. She later writes about the “increased time, productivity and reduced clutter.” Chua now provides coaching for people who want to follow her footsteps and achieve their very own “personal excellence.” In fact, when I tried to contact her for an interview, I realized that she did not have an active email address, and was met with this message:

If you'd like to contact me, I'd like to inform you that I've closed off my email from personal communication. This is part of a move to (1) Get a social life outside of email and (2) Focus on why I started TPEB to begin with, which is to create high value content for people around the world.

Chua is “happy to contribute” to “publications/sites with at least 10k circulation.” Anyone else who would like to contact her can schedule a $120/hour coaching session. A link to make a PayPal payment is made available. Ellison may argue that Chua has lost social capital, but she has made economic gains.

In fact, Chua isn’t the only one abstaining and benefiting. In her article, “New Year’s Resolutions Go Online for Added Support or Pressure,” New York Times writer Stephanie Rosenblum reports on the importance of the web in setting and meeting goals. For those who would not normally follow through with a resolution on their own, putting promises online can be the best motivation as it creates an online audience for success or failure.

In her article, Rosenblum cites several websites that help people reach their goals. While StickK.com, for example, addresses all types of resolutions, other pages focus on particular goals. Rosenblum explains: “For a would-be hard boy, there’s PEERtrainer.com. A procrastinating writer can go to 750Words.com. Smokers have DeterminedToQuit.com.” No matter what one’s goal is, publishing it online can create motivation. To a certain extent, one might say that the sites bank on online social capital: with the world watching, one is more likely to stick to their goals.

Yet the accessibility of personal data on the Internet has caused countless privacy concerns; as such, those concerns continue to spark debates particularly in the educational realm. For example, children younger than 13 are not allowed to join Facebook, though many of them easily overcome this hurdle by putting in a false birth date. Valentina Castillo, a current law student at Georgetown University, observes that her younger brother “waited to use Facebook until he was the appropriate age.” Her “dad also wanted him to wait for a while.”

Some could assert that in the modern age, it appears that opening a Facebook account is equivalent to losing one’s virginity. Castillo adds: “the one funny thing is that I’m not allowed to comment on his (her brother’s) wall. He said that if I do, people would think that I’m his mother, and then he won’t be cool anymore. ”

Thus, using Facebook comes with a whole new set of behavioral codes and parenting issues. A child whose parents do not allow him or her to use Facebook may feel like an outsider among his or her friends who have accounts. On the other hand, the child could make him or herself vulnerable to dangerous situations by posting personal information online without realizing the consequences. Moreover, educators and psychologists have expressed concerns that children are spending too much time online. In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv argues that in former generations, children spent much more time outdoors. Now, children are glued to TVs, videos, and computers, and as a result, are experiencing a range of behavioral problems. Specifically, Louv coins this the “Nature Deficit Disorder” (p. 1).

Teachers, too, are affected by the implications of online social networking. William Kist, associate professor at Kent State University, teaches literacy methods courses for pre-service teachers, and explains that teachers are advised, if not required, to limit or delete their profiles on sites such as Facebook. In an article titled “I Gave Up MySpace for Lent: New Teachers and Social Networking Sites,” Kist outlines that this applies especially to new teachers, who can easily sabotage professional aspirations by posting “potentially embarrassing content” (p. 246). In the same article, he interviewed several of his students, who felt that the restrictions were unnecessary, also alluding to the fact that their social capital was being compromised by not being allowed to use Facebook. Ellen, one of the pre-service teachers in Kist’s class, explains that she, "gave both MySpace and Facebook up for Lent. It’s been so weird not to be on them. I am totally out of the loop as to who is dating whom. One of my friends had a baby, and I didn’t even know it. Between that and student teaching all day, I feel very isolated."

According to Ellen, sites such as Facebook have “become an extension of our expression of self.” Kist points out that some of his students “were defiant about their right to participate in social networking sites being taken away.” Amy, another pre-service teacher, affirms that she “[has] and will continue to use these sites to stay in contact with my friends and family” said Amy. She went on to question why society is so frightened of teachers’ having genuine relationships with students (as mentors and friends). “Developing a trust in their teachers and having a genuine relationship with a teacher helps a student to get the best education he or she can, because it helps the teacher to understand the individual student and his or her needs. If we forget that basic principle of education, it's all a lost cause.”

Other users, too, concur with Amy and argue that there is no need to be extreme for reasons such as these. Just as Google incorrectly flagged the entire Internet as malware, social networking does not need to be ruled out entirely. Instead, it can be used in moderation as a beneficial tool to connect with friends, family, and employers. It is up to the users to be conscious of the information they share, and the amount of time they spend online. Sturm maintains that, “whenever [she] want[s] to disconnect, [she] can simply deactivate Facebook.” Castillo suggests another viable alternative: “I prefer to use an app called Self Control. You can list the websites that you want to be blocked from while still using the Internet. This is great if I need the Internet for research, but don’t want to waste time on Facebook. I think it's an amazing tool.”

Bayer, on the other hand, cannot wait to use the Web2.0 Suicide Machine:

I look forward to the day when I no longer have to be "alive,” and accessible, and can allow myself not to be found." Are Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerman accessible virtually? Is social networking expected of them? I don't think so. Being virtually invisible - or the freedom of ' ‘web suicide’ is a luxury, that one must first earn.

In the meantime, she plans to continue using Facebook to connect with peers and employers, optimizing her social capital.

While there will always be non-users arguing against Facebook, one must recognize that in today’s society, it is an incredibly powerful networking tool. With a few simple clicks, users can reach other users all over the world, be they friends, family, employers or people they have never even met. For this same reason, privacy concerns will always exist. Facebook requires a consciousness that only a minority of users have. If, however, a user is conscious about his or her Facebook activity, the platform can serve as an effective tool to maintain personal relationships and advance professional contacts. Businesses, too, have realized the importance of social media marketing. Media Bistro offers a Social Media Marketing Bootcamp, and at Birmingham City University, you can earn an entire Masters in the same field.

For the individual user, or the parent instructing his child about Facebook use, such educational resources are a little scarcer, although they do exist. Kist, for example, has published a book titled The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. Though it is targeted primarily at teachers, parents can make use of it, too. Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, addresses general concerns about technology use, as well. Individual users, in turn, can resort to articles such as Barbara Kiviat’s “Using Twitter and Facebook to Find a Job,” published in Time magazine. In other words, the information on how to make the best of Facebook is available. It is up to the individual user to to take responsibility, and optimize the possibilites of online social networking.