Social ethics of the Internet

The Internet is defining new social ethics: they are called Netiquette.The most well-known instance is email etiquette. I recommend those short email etiquette guides.

What are ethics? The (current) Wikipedia definition is of course valuable: "Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as how a moral outcome can be achieved in a specific situation (applied ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), what moral values people actually abide by (descriptive ethics), what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), and how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is (moral psychology)."

In the case of the email etiquette, I guess we're just technically talking about normative ethics (do's and dont's), but in the larger context, ethics arise in the set of all possible social situations that are shaped by the medium itself, the Internet.

So in addition to email etiquette, we would find such ethics emerging in socially interactive applications on the Net. They include:

• Instant messaging
• Forums and discussion boards
• IRC and public chat
• Social networking applications
• Twitter :-)

Let's look at a few of them.

Instant messaging

The social dynamics that occur during a one-to-one IM session are surprising. The aim of IM as a software system is to recreate the communication possibilities of a face-to-face encounter, and add to it the unique features of the Internet. To this end, the state of the art of IM clients and protocols has been in constant evolution. What are the socially significant features of IM ?

• Smileys: they add the equivalent of the face expressions, which convey an overall emotion (hence meaning). Fittingly, they are called emoticons.
• Status (available, busy, away, etc.): serves to inform the potential interlocutor to be prepared for a specific overall behaviour on the part of the person who advertises such a status. For example, when I message someone who is "away", I don't expect an immediate reply. When I message someone who is "busy", I'd better have an urgent message to deliver to him; otherwise he could reply angrily. This is why people end up setting one of these statuses when they want to avoid being interrupted at the computer, thus acquiring the right to answer at their leisure - and hopefully respecting the same rule with others. We just found an ethic. If I'm "available", I'm fair game :-)
• The instant typing feedback: that feature has gone through stages of evolution.
  • First we had the UNIX `talk` system where any typed keystroke was immediately seen by the other. This led to hilarious situations of frantic deletions due to misspellings or unchecked emotions. It was like seeing the other person think - which is not what we want to do on either side!
  • Then we had the natural idea of waiting for Enter to be pressed before sending the utterance. The problem with this innovation is that it swung the rhythm of the conversation the other way: after too much spontaneity came high obscurity: we didn't know if the other person was responding or thinking. In a conversation, there is a sense that each player should respond when the other closes his thought. This thought can take one submission (one Enter) or many. So if I don't know whether you haven't finished your thought or are waiting for me to respond, I am hesitant to answer. Therefore the conversation goes out of sync and communication is considerably weakened.
  • The solution was to add a hint that someone is typing or not. This feedback is generally sufficient to allow people to hold off in most situations unless they want to interrupt the other's thought. Synchronization is possible again. In some cases, though, an explicit "That's it." will mark the end of my thought. It's a shame some modern IM clients still don't have it. But with that information, the decision of when to type becomes yet another ethical choice.
• The information that a user has closed his chat window is a perverse information fraught with sensitivities.

I guess by now we see how social ethics interplay with the software medium. And I didn't even hint at sex chatting!

Social networking

This is where the full scale of social behaviour becomes digital. The ethical choices made in this (sub-)medium are comparable in magnitude to the decisions made in physical social interactions. Facebook is surely a sociologist's dream.