Ethics in the Virtual World
“[T]he relative lack of concern about, and research on, children’s encounters with racist content […]. We worry primarily about children’s sexuality.” (Livingstone, p. 176)
This quote shows that the moral discussion of the use of Internet is based on a genital moral. I don’t deny that this is a huge point to consider, but there are others moral problems that should be studied too. You can damage a child not only in a physical way; there is a lot of psychological damage that can be infringed. For example: the liberties that have some totalitarian groups to express their point of view as the neo-Nazi sites, as Livingstone pointed out.
But there are others moral problems strongly discussed through the use of Internet: intellectual property is an excellent example of this. The points of music and movies have been discussed in class, so I want to bring another actual example. As a fan of Chilean football (soccer) I wanted to keep seeing the games on real time even if I’m living in Canada and I found a page (http://rojadirecta.com/) that linked and showed the games. But even when the page (the author of it) won the trial of the intellectual property in Spain, the government of USA blocks the website (as you can see in the link).
Another moral point to discuss is the concentration of power of mass media on the Internet. One more personal example: in Chile there is a project to construct hydroelectric dam in the south of the country (mostly in Patagonia). The ambientalist groups reject this project because the 60% of the energy generated in the country is consumed by the large mining (see http://www.patagoniasinrepresas.cl/final/index-en.php -I linked it in English for your comfort) so to construct a hydroelectric dam just benefits the mining. But the news conglomerates are publishing in the media that next year would exist power rationing by the water shortage and, in this way, generate public opinion to benefit the HydroAysen Project.
One last moral problem I want to point out: the imaginary construction of female bodies and subjectivities through virtual sites designed for girls as Barbie Girls (http://www.barbiegirls.com/). I visited this virtual world, but in order to start “playing” I need to create my avata. My options weren’t so many: the same doll (or body) that you change dress, colour and name it. The idea of avatars having the same body with different accesories seems extremly ideological and polemic but society seems to see the dangers in the chat room.
These kinds of behaviours should be subject to debate: what are the ethics in a virtual space? Because if conglomerates want to censorship material protect by copyright, while the conservatives want to censor the space from a genital morality; other social spaces have the right to build their demands and built a more democratic space.