The internet, ethics and morality assignment

Nowhere else in the world can a person achieve such anonymity as on the Internet. It is a forum for all discussions. There has never been a place in the entire world where a person could publish something that is available to so much of the world. With the exception of religious scripts, nothing written has ever had such a potential audience. (Hiltz 445) With the new medium being such a powerful instrument how can the world keep up? In what ways does The Constitution, a nationalist document written in 1787, deal with the international questions of 1996?

How can information be a crime? How should someone convicted of a computer crime be punished? According to an act passed recently in the U. S. Congress, it will be illegal to provide anything that the government calls pornography on the net, where it could be accessible to people under 18. One point about the legislation that arouses curiosity is the lingering question of who actually makes the call on what is wrong and what is correct for people to see and/or experience. Who is the person who gets to put their morality into this law? How is this person chosen?

Without those rights, there is no public sphere. Ask any citizen of Prague, Budapest, or Moscow. (Rheingold 282) Just as the ability to read and write and freely communicate gives power to communicate gives power to citizens that protects them from the powers of the state, the ability to surveil, to invade the citizen’s privacy, gives the state the power to confuse, coerce and control citizens. Uneducated citizens cannot rule themselves, but tyrannies can control even educated populations, given sophisticated means of surveillance. Rheingold 289) This assault on privacy, invisible to most, takes place in the broad daylight of everyday life. The weapons are cash registers and credit cards. When Big Brother arrives, don’t be surprised if he looks like a grocery clerk, because privacy has been turning into a commodity, courtesy of better and better information networks, for years. (Rheingold 291) The most insidious attacks on our rights to a reasonable degree of privacy might come not from a political dictatorship but from the marketplace. But high technology is often very good at rendering laws moot. (Rheingold 294) While a few people will get etter information via high-bandwidth super networks, the majority of the population, if history is any guide, are likely to become more precisely befuddled, more exactly manipulated. (Rheingold 297) Hyper realists believe that, The replacement of democracy with a global mercantile state that exerts control through the media-assisted manipulation of desire rather than the more orthodox means of surveillance and control(Rheingold 297) is the path of the future. In 1978 there were people predicting what the future was to bring. Privacy and security are well known issues. What is new … s the indirect knowledge about individuals that can be gained by the records of an individual’s activity: who the person communicates with; what types of discussion are enjoyed; with whom business is done or transactions are made; hoe he or she votes on issues or answers polls. (Hiltz 457) Business people first modeled their antireform communications on the familiar business letter. But as organizations grew, the special demands of internal communication led this form to evolve into another, the memo. (Agre) Today the modern memo has evolved further into a technological masterpiece called e-mail.

As technology progresses so does the benefit to commerce. Numerous benefits and advantages attend the use of virtual offices in today’s climate of global competition. (Snizeli) In many ways, modern telecommuting represents a computerized version of the “ putting out” or “ cottage” systems prevalent in Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries. During that time enterprising entrepreneurs would drop off raw materials at the cottages of workers, to be woven and dyed into finished cloth, for example. The resulting products were then collected and transported to market for sale, and a portion of the profits returned to the cottage workers. Snizeli) There is already much evidence that supports the fact that the Internet has already become an integral part of the American worker’s week. The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that approximately 30% of the U. S. workforce spends an average of 6-8 hours per week telecommuting. (Snizeli) There are many valuable things telecommuting can do for commerce in this day and age. numerous companies have benefited through increased productivity and the flexibility to increase or reduce the number of telecommuters in response to seasonal or cyclical changes in business conditions. Snizeli) he goes on to say, Telecommuting has been shown to result in productivity gains of between 15% and 20%, while saving companies sizable sums of money in office-space rentals. In addition, workers who previously found it difficult to work outside the home now use telecommuting as a vehicle to participate in the workforce. (Snizeli) With every upside there has to be a down. The downside to the whole telecommuting phenomenon is that there is a loss of the personal human camaraderie.

Not to say that the Internet is a force that makes things happen, it simply creates an atmosphere conducive to the free trade of information. The free trade of inspiration, in fact, inspires new and innovative concepts in business, government and other aspects of life. We must watch carefully the language we use to describe how IT and society interact. It is all too common, in the public press, the business press, and the academic journals, to talk about IT as some force outside of society that causes things to happen all by itself. Empirically there is little support for this proposition, and morally it is insupportable.

We should carefully examine statements on the order of, “ Computers solve problems. ” As scholars, we must strive to be more precise in our descriptions of these IT-society interactions. (Loudon) As far as ethics and morality are concerned, there is no established real universal standard for morality, but there are universal minimums and things built into our culture to enforce them. With the growth and onset of these new technologies there are now more ways than ever to evade the traditional safeguards that would stop people from being immoral.