The Ethics of Emerging Media

Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology

Bruce E. Drushel, Kathleen German, Bruce E. Drushel, Kathleen German

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441183354
• eBook ISBN: 9781441178237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Ethics of Emerging Media engages with enduring ethical questions while addressing critical questions concerning ethical boundaries at the forefront of new media development. This collection provides a rare opportunity to ask how emerging media affect the ethical choices in our lives and the lives of people across the globe. 

Centering on different new media forms from eBay to Wikipedia, each chapter raises questions about how changing media formats affect current theoretical understanding of ethics.  By interrogating traditional ethical theory, we can better understand the challenges to ethical decision making in an age of rapidly evolving media.  Each chapter focuses on a specific case within the broader conceptual fabric of ethical theory.  The case studies ground the discussion of ethics in practical applications while, at the same time, addressing moral dilemmas that have plagued us for generations.  The specific applications will undoubtedly continue to unfold, but the ethical questions will endure.

I

Citizens, Consumers, and Culture

1

eBay Ethics: Simulating Civility in One of the New Digital Democracies

Robert MacDougall, Ph.D.¹

Curry College

In their efforts to construct a stable and secure digital marketplace, eBay designers may have also created a workable template for an efficient neo-liberal social enclave. At one level, the business ethic on the internet’s largest auction site has the appearance and feel of honest, timely commodity exchange. With all the panoptic controls now in place, it is difficult to do otherwise, lest one risk being banned from eBay altogether. This chapter paper describes the key features of eBay’s user interface and argues that, particularly in digital contexts, top-down (i.e., corporate, quasi-governmental, administrative) entities can very effectively enhance their abilities to rationalize and control an otherwise seemingly democratic, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer situation. This study also highlights important relationships among the concepts of citizen, consumer, and socio-political actor today, and speculates upon the significance these various roles might play in a full-fledged digital democracy of tomorrow.

Today we find a broad array of digital communication media that constitute social environments for millions of people. These environments are often highly complex systems that can seem ecological, even biological in nature. As with any natural ecological system, human-made ecologies enable, constrain and, in part, define the entities that operate in and through them in various ways. These ecological systems always afford certain behaviors and limit others according to the specifics of their structure, layout, and general design features. Consider a lake, a river basin, a skyscraper, a commuter train, an interstate highway, a bicycle path, a laptop computer, or website. In every case, these systems carry particular biases, logics, and built-in predispositions that suggest and even prompt certain ways of experiencing, acting, and thinking about self and world. As James Carey (1989) succinctly put it, technologies have “teleological insight.” That is to say, while not always singular, nor rigidly deterministic, every tool has certain ends “in mind.”

A glance at the massive technological apparatus that is eBay reveals a relatively secure, stable, and highly efficient marketplace that allows hundreds of millions of people around the world to turn just about anything into extra cash. This remarkable success as a commodity exchange hub is closely linked to eBay’s self-described civility. The sublimation of control on the world’s largest consumer transaction website, however, is also consequential to social spheres traditionally conceived to be beyond the realm of commerce. As the interfaces, systems, logics, and functions that enable eBayers to do what they do emerge or are replicated elsewhere, an ecological analysis seems particularly apt. What follows is an abbreviated account of how eBay’s environment detects, encodes, defines, and directs its users.

Some History

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes conceived of an orderly human society — the leviathan — as a self-organizing system possessing a life and intelligence all its own. George Dyson, writing in Darwin among the Machines (1997), draws out the contemporary significance of Hobbes’ early notion of cybernetics or self-governing systems. Hobbes stated that “[h]uman society, taken as a whole, constituted a new form of life” and went on to suggest that “every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty” (in Dyson 1997, 3). From this, Hobbes maintained, the salus populi or people’s safety would be assured. Foreshadowing Jeremy Bentham’s insights on the panopticon about a century later, Hobbes’ thinking was that a healthy balance of internal and external surveillance — the policing of both self and other — would most reliably ensure peace and prosperity. Like the high-pitched détente sustained throughout the Cold War, the threat of effective penalty, if not mutually assured destruction, was seen to be a reliable instrument for maintaining modes of life.

Hobbes’ leviathan, Bentham’s panopticon and, later, Foucault’s (1973 and 1976) analyses of sexuality and the categorization of medical conditions together chart a history of emergent social control mechanisms. The fuller implications of various socio-technical systems deployed in cultures, and described by Mumford (1934), Innis (1950), Heidegger (1977), Ellul (1964), and Latour (1995) illustrate how the tandem technologies of definition and categorization can often be subtle, yet tyrannical in their capacity to direct and constrain the thoughts and actions of individuals and collectives alike. eBay counts, measures, and keeps track of all that occurs within its borders. Upon close examination, in fact, it becomes clear how this environment functions quite efficiently as a social-technical system of the digital kind.

Methods and Questions

This study is based upon an analysis of user content archived on eBay informed by ethnographic inquiry. Personal user commentaries obtained via participant observation and depth interview data were collected during the spring and fall of 2006. The core questions guiding the investigation include: How is the self/person negotiated and maintained on eBay? What is the nature of the relationship to specific others and to the collective? What does successful interaction look like and how is it structured? How are “violations” dealt with? And finally, how might behaviors adapted to this online venue contribute to an alteration in the way people think about themselves, each other, and the wider worlds they inhabit?

Marshall McLuhan’s “tetrads” or “laws of media” approach is applied to help make sense of the eBay environment. McLuhan’s approach characterizes and even makes tentative predictions with regard to how virtually any technology potentially enhances, reverses, retrieves from the past, and/or obsolesces particular features of human experience (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988). In its “reversal” quadrant, the tetrad reveals how, through a collection of procedures and rituals that are highly prescriptive on eBay, the structurally determined social construction of self results in a very specific kind of inhabitant that is counter-intuitive and quite unexpected. eBay frames, formats and presents not only its products, but also its users in quite systematic ways. Indeed, we’ll discover that it is the users who become the product-qua-content on eBay.

With the aid of ten research participants, we begin to see how the personal thoughts, beliefs, and values that tend to make up the central features of analysis in contemporary studies of social interaction melt away as impractical, non-functional, and even disadvantageous concerns. It was not uncommon, in fact, for research participants to report that they were somehow compelled to act as they did: “I had to,” “I didn’t really have any choice,” “this is just what you do,” “sellers need to be polite,” and “you better not mess around” were common retorts during conversations about intention and action.

The social formatting that takes place on the site is reminiscent of something Joshua Meyrowitz (1995) dubbed the “staging contingencies” of television. Like the commercial television context, eBay pre-figures and often reliably predicts the kind of individuals that emerge in its space. In so doing, the site prompts what for now can be called “ostensibly civil behaviors” in a patterned and systematic way. The behaviors prompted and channeled by eBay’s environment thus constitute an emerging but already robust normative code that may be representative of an emerging norm online in general.

On the Mechanics and Media Logic of eBay

eBay hosts peer-to-peer interaction sustained through a highly formalized feedback mechanism centered around the exchange of goods that is bound, almost gravitation-like, by the network effect of hundreds of millions of daily users. At first pass, these processes appear to be working symbiotically with and through eBay users who dutifully and often enthusiastically sustain a self-regulating social control system that explicitly models and patterns successful behavior. To be sure, eBayers take their rules very seriously, and the resultant social patterning on the site fosters an eccentric and highly self-conscious kind of social and political consciousness. This, in turn, appears to engender a “culture of consent” that may be particularly susceptible to hegemonic control. Indeed, eBay’s feedback system keeps tabs on virtually all activity that occurs in reference to auctions, payments, the shipping and handling of goods, and the fulfillment of transactions.

Through the posting process and feedback system, users essentially function as individual nodes that do the lion’s share of work for eBay in terms of advertising, promotion, quality control, security, and the distribution and circulation of commodities and capital. While eBay pedals virtually any kind of material item, it is the social and cultural capital in the form of user identities that is of particular interest here. eBayers are the primary dispensers of the various symbols that created and now maintain the eBay persona — the corporation’s most precious commodity. On eBay, a global intelligence with a collective aim is distributed among nearly three hundred million users worldwide. Everyday eBay (2006) contains a broad collection of analyses focusing on the online auction house as an important socio-cultural phenomenon. In the introduction to the book, it is pointed out that:

A crucial component of eBay’s success, both economic and cultural, is its organization of the site as a series of stages allowing sellers to design, perform, and sell memorable experiences, thematically linked goods, for which purchasers are willing to pay a premium. These performances, and the willingness to pay, exceed commonsense understandings of eBay as a giant garage sale or the old-fashioned auction house writ virtual.

(Hillis et al. 2006, 1)

On eBay a user’s feedback rating is conspicuously displayed at the top of his/her profile page, visible to any visitor with a single click. Through commentary provided by several participants we see how most felt that their own eBay spaces, and their reputations that have been indexed there, mean something more than ever before — and for so many, probably more than any other place online. One side effect of this indexing is that an individual user’s digital identity becomes a highly constructed and tightly controlled commodity intrinsically bound up with and embedded in the eBay brand. The development and eventual achievement of a good reputation on eBay becomes a legible, highly intentional, and strategic object to be designed and manipulated by users. But these are users who seem to be acting independently through self-interest and who are also effective nodes in a socio-technical control mechanism.

Of course, this is just good business — and it is nothing new. The merchants of ancient Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, and countless other trade hubs around the world also endeavored to be efficient and therefore sought positive recognition as reliable sellers in the open marketplace. To do otherwise was to risk being eclipsed by the competition across the way — or worse, banished from the marketplace altogether. In the process these cities slowly took on a kind of brand identity in and of themselves, gaining distinction and prosperity in step with the workings of their markets. So it’s not that we’re seeing a wholly new kind of activity taking shape on eBay. What we have instead is a new kind of personality and social being emerging: one adapted to the forms, pace, and scale of social interaction that typifies our relationships enabled and shaped by computer technology. eBay’s rigidly structured, primarily text-based interface that provides most of the social context for interaction is highly consequential in its capacity to realign values and perceptions of what constitutes successful actions, and by extension elicits positive and meaningful (here read functional) social behavior from its users.

Research participants offer insights that suggest how personal thoughts and private outlooks are rendered peripheral, even superfluous, concerns in the world of eBay because they tend to be non-functional and ultimately inconsequential to the way people behave there. Given this, we have to wonder if interaction patterns that are functionally beneficial in the eBay domain translate well to a sustainable way of being offline, in the “real world,” so to speak. Of course, the consequentiality of acts and deeds in eBay has been impacting the offline world in very real ways for more than a decade, as new users set up accounts every day and experience the real consequences of money orders, checks, electronic deposits, and stock values. There seems to be more to the story, however, and it concerns a psychic shift now in process. As opposed to focusing on individual intentions, however, this study draws out the side effects and the unintended social and psychological consequences of dwelling and acting on eBay.

Return to the Modern: Codifying Stability, Security and Social Control

The most significant observation made in Everyday eBay (2006) is one that turns much of the extant cyber-identity and cyber-politics literature on its head: the “reassertion of a fixed, stable, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction: Emerging Media: A View Downstream
• I: Citizens, Consumers, and Culture
• II: Ethical Practices of Conservators and Regulators
• III: Speech, Civility, and Privacy
• IV: Propaganda and Strategic Communications
• V: Journalistic Practice
• eCopyright