Facebook’s Ethics

Here’s a copy of the paper I recently presented at Liverpool John Moore’s Facebook Symposium for those of you who asked for it.  You can find details of the day here (which is where I nicked this image from).  It was a really good day with what must have been over 60 people attending.  Jane Secker, one of the other speakers has done a nice write up of the event here.

I wrote the paper with Kathy McGrath of Brunel University and Marie Griffiths who works with me at Salford.  The paper came about because for a while, Kathy and I had been talking about writing together.  Then, Kathy saw some of the work Marie and I had done before on Habbo Hotel which had and ethical bent.  However, Kathy thought that we didn’t really put the affordances of the technology to the fore.  I thought this was interesting as it fed into my thinking at the time regarding what’s different about social networking sites as compared to other technologies, how do we define them, and what role does technology have in shaping peoples experiences. So… Kathy came up with idea of us looking at the morality of technology via Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and we got to write a paper (using some data Marie and I had been collecting about facebook) about the role of technology acting with users.  It sort of sits as a response to much research which (over?) emphasises the role of human agency in such spaces.  Anyway, here’s the paper ( facebookworkshop) and below is the abstract.  A much extended version of the paper is being presented at the forthcoming International Conference on Information Systems (www.icis2008.org).

Facebook’s Ethics – This paper provides insights into the ethical issues raised by social networking technologies. We argue that much research has focused on the ends to which people deploy social networking technologies, and the consequences arising, with a view to making policy recommendations and ethical interventions. We suggest that research about social networking sites tends to adopt a tool view of the technologies and utilitarian notions of ethics so that the focus is on the behaviours of human agents – technology as an actor is downplayed. We focus explicitly upon the agency, and hence the moral character, of technology to show both the possibilities for, and limitations of, ethical interventions in such cases. We argue that technologies as well as humans have a moral character such that ethical responsibility for the consequences of social networking is diffused among a wide variety of actors. Taking this into account, it seems appropriate to suggest that blanket policy recommendations requiring the developers of social networking sites to revise their designs fail to recognize the diffuse nature of ethical responsibility. However, opening up such technologies to scrutiny on a regular basis can increase public awareness of the issues. Thus, we suggest an ongoing process of evaluating social networking sites is required and, moreover that there is value in studying the development and use of technologies in their infancy, or if established, in the experiences of novice users. Similarly, flash points in technological trajectories may prove useful sites of investigation.