9.19

I am always amazed at the quantity and quality of the online information we can easily have access to in modern times. Instead of going to libraries or bookstores in search of the book we want, we can simply input key words into different search engines on various platforms to obtain the electronic edition of it. Instead of actually being in the place where the job interview is going to take place, we can simply use Skype to achieve a virtual face-to-face interview. Instead of writing letters to each other, we now simply take advantage of social media to keep in touch with our family, friends or colleagues. Undoubtedly, the technology has offered lots of merits to make our lives more convenient by saving our time and energy. But sometimes those merits blindfold people, leading them to only focus on the positive side which is surely not the entire story.

As said in the first article, law is one of the four forces regulating social systems (Lessig,1999) and legislation has already been proposed to curb the collection and retention of data, usually over concerns about privacy (Boyd&Crawford,2012). Also, features like personalization present difficult ethical questions and fragment the public in troubling ways (Pariser,2011). The concept of ethics related to the widespread use of social media is what intrigues me the most. In my last week’s post regarding relevant readings, I brought up the subject of how to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework or thinking system addressing the problems we should try to avoid when making critical decisions regarding usage of technologies, which can be related to my thoughts on this week’s readings. Maybe the most effective way to achieve the goal of realizing a better technological environment which highly protects the privacy of individuals is to establish explicit and applicable laws concerning this matter since social norms are too loose to uphold people’s rights in complex settings.  

The second articles says that privacy will always be a concern, but attitudes toward personal privacy appear to vary considerably among generations as well as individuals (Preece&Shneiderman,2009), making it even more crucial to set up new regulations or supplement the existing rules in case someone’s privacy is violated without their consciousness. We should come up with a unified theory that could be applied across a range of applications and social contexts and it might be the time to invest substantially in a National Initiative on Social Participation to ensure higher levels of success and safety for social media (Preece&Shneiderman, 2009).