Ethics and Social Responsibility Relevant to Facebook Essay

Ethics and Social Responsibility Relevant to Facebook - Essay Example The social networking sites operate at interpersonal levels. The communication involves the ethical and social considerations between friend to friend, parents to their children, employer to the employee, employee to the employee, doctor to patient, teacher to student, and buyer to sellers; in fact, it encompasses every human relationship which exists in the world. The ethics and the social responsibility related to the Facebook and how they are dealing with it shall be discussed in this paper. To take a deeper insight into the ethics and social responsibility of social networking sites, a brief history related to the social networking will be highlighted, regarding the information on how they have expanded. Definitions and history of social networking sites Social networking seems to be an ambiguous term used for such sites. Human beings are inherently social creatures. From the very start, they have developed different ways and modes to communicate with each other. They cannot live in complete isolation from each other. For this purpose, human beings have always facilitated and built structured social networks. These institutions and facilities included community clubs, public places, churches and communication technologies such as postal and courier system, telephone and telegraph system. However, with the passage of time and tremendous increase in technological advancement, they have started resorting to faster and quicker ways of communications in the form of information technology. Most of these are based on the software standards of Web 2.0 (Vallor 2012). Before the emergence of Web 2.0 standards, various forms of networking such as chat rooms, Bulletin Board System (BBS) and MUD’s (multi user’s dungeons) were being used for social interactions (Barnes 2001; Turkle 1995). These early social networking places worked typically as places of commercial, personal or academic exploitation. These were rather used for broad social purposes. The pur pose behind the emergence of Web 2.0 was to produce user-friendly, collaborative and communicative internet content. Though the initial aims of the developers were same as that of the previous social networking and internet but it evolved with the rapid changes in the technology. Social topography of the internet has been redefined by Web 2.0 social interfaces which built increased social networks between their users online as well as offline. This trend shifted the original function of internet from pseudonymous identities to formation of Sui Generis social networking (Ess 2011). Sites which adopted new trends The very first websites which adopted the explicit standards for social networking were Orkut, FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Beboand Habbo. The recent change in these trends is the rise in the media sharing sites such as You Tube, icro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Location based networking sites such as Google Latitude and interest sharing sites such as Pinteres t (Vallor 2012). Rise of ethical concerns related to social networking sites One of the sub parts of the computer and information ethics is the ethical implications of Social Networking Sites (Bynum 2011). With an increase in the social networking phenomenon and owing much to the effects and usage of the computer as a medium of social communication, the