AUTHOR
Amaya Noain Sánchez and Porfirio Barroso Asenjo

ABSTRACT

In the context of Digital Age, all brand new forms of interaction via social media can offer a wide range of chances affecting our daily lives. Computers are changing almost everything in our personal life, business and, by extension, entertainment. Internet and other potent informatics implements make available a diffusion of information like we had never seen before. That is, in fact, a revolution only comparable to Guttembergs’ creation of printing presses. At the same time technological developments generate new opportunities sets of choices that are ultimately positive for humans progress, there is no doubt that these technologies have produced some collateral damages in several ethical aspects. Mason (1986) was summarized ethical issues related to information technology usage by means of an acronym – PAPA (Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility). Our current research focuses on one of these issues, piracy, and analyses the state of art in Spanish legislation context.

Digitalisation reverting cultural products to the immaterial and the Internet facilitating total automation whereby digital products can be copied infinitely and distributed on a global scale are challenging the prevalent property regime in terms of cultural production fundamentally. The unauthorized downloading and streaming of movies and television shows from the Web is a growing problem for the entertainment industry around the world. Software piracy is globally widespread common practice that costs software manufacturers billions of dollars annually and make authors do not get any benefit for their creations. In a few key countries such as Spain, however, it has become an epidemic that is forcing movie studios to consider no longer selling DVDs in the country. Governments are being pressured into adopting some legislation penalising copyright infringers and, in the Spanish case, new controversial regulation allow collapsing web pages with filesharing and prohibits Internet access to users downloading digital copyright protected content without paying. Unlike in the U.S., France and, under proposed legislation, Britain, piracy is not against the law in Spain unless it is done for profit. The country’s minister of culture, a former filmmaker who is backing a bill that would make it easier to shut off access to websites that facilitate piracy, blames the problem on deep-rooted cultural attitudes.

The proposed law would reverse, in effect, the burden of proof, empowering a new commission to shut down suspect Web sites pending the outcome of any court appeal. However, the number of creators and IS professional thinking about the inefficient of these laws is increasing at the same time they demand new strategies of content producers. Legitimate digital distribution is not filling the gap. Apple Inc.’s iTunes, the world’s biggest digital-media store, does not sell movies or television shows in Spain, as it does in Britain, France and Germany. On the other hand, users feel they are being treated as a continuous guilty when, every time they buy any digital storage device, they have to pay a digital canon in order to support this damage produced by the piracy acts, even also we have no intention to break any property right.

Metodology: Our methodology is a quantitative research on the current measures took in the last years in Spain in order to combat piracy. To accomplish this task, the chosen material could be no other than this mentioned legal text and the reactions published by mass media of the main actorss of this conflic: creators, produccers, distributors, consumers and internet asociations. Content work that would allow us to extract the main complains advantages and shortcomings of these measures and the point of view of a wide range of actors involved.

Findings: regulation of digital content has arrised new generations of problems difficult to solve with ancient property rules. Sometimes creators temselves are totally contrary to the use of some measures involving penalize downloading creative content and renounce voluntarily to their rights. Public opinion in Spain support this attitudes and feel property legislation an inefficient law that helps to limit their access rights.

Research limitation/implication: Although our research is limited to an analysis of ethical implication of piracy, and sumarised the dilemma of an ancient and inoperative model of controling piracy in the specific context of Spanish legislation, we consider that this study will be very useful. We hope conference directors, programmer committee, presenters and finally, people interested in solve the dilemma between piracy and property rights, find this work profitable. We offer also a complete framework of study of ownership and regulation in Spain that can be used to make a comparision with the current situation of piracy in others countries.

Practical implications: This document aims to call the attention to the need of discussing what the useful ways to combat piracy and softwary coping are, reconciling rights of users and content creaters.

Originality/value: The paper contributes to know and show, nowadays, what is the state of this ethical dilema in Spanish country.

REFERENCES

1. Barroso Porfirio (2007) Ética y Deontología Informática. Editorial Fragua, Madrid, 134 pages.

2. Barroso Porfirio and Gonzalez Mario (2009) Education On Informatics Ethics: A Challenge To Social Development (Abstract presented and appraoved to ETHICOMP 2010).

3. Mason Richard O. (1986). Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age. Management Information Systems Quarterly, Volume 10, Number 1, 5–12.

4. Ministerio de Cultura de España. http://www.mcu.es/ (last access: 1/02/2011).

AUTHOR
Ekaterina Netchitailova

ABSTRACT

Facebook is a new media environment where the collapse of contexts and the presence of a potentially wide audience asks for a careful examination of one’s performance and behaviour on Facebook. On Facebook people can have different audiences which, otherwise, are separated in real life (like colleagues, friends and family) and it can be tricky, since when users create their profiles or post something on Facebook they need to be aware that their audience is quite diversified.

Danah Boyd calls Facebook a networked public, which according to her is 1) the space constructed through networked technologies and 2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the interaction of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics, according to Boyd, “support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways.” (Boyd D., 2010, p. 1)

Boyd argues that in networked contexts information which was not supposed to be public can become public due to the properties of the network. “This stems from the ways in which networked media, like broadcast media…, blurs public and private in complicated ways. For those in the spotlight, broadcast media often appeared to destroy privacy. This is most visible through the way tabloid media complicated the private lives of celebrities, feeding on people’s desire to get backstage access…As networked publics brought the dynamics of broadcast media to everyday people, similar dynamics emerged…” (Boyd D., 2010, p. 39)

Boyd distinguishes four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability, and three dynamics, – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts and the blurring of public and private , which characterise the networked publics.

Persistence means that online expressions are automatically recorded and archived. Replicability means that the content made out of bits can be duplicated. Scalability means that the potential visibility of content in networked publics is big and searchability means that the content in networked publics can be accessed through search.

These characteristics together with three dynamics mean that what is posted on Facebook can be accessed by a large public and stay around for future visibility. This can cause serious issues for privacy, as well as for one’s own behaviour on Facebook, as people often forget about a potentially wide audience on Facebook while posting something on it.

Thus, Facebook pauses new questions about privacy and about one’s behaviour in public. Facebook is a semi-public space, and even if one limits the amount of friends or who has an access to a profile, the content of one’s profile can still potentially be open to a larger public. We behave differently in public and in private, while at work or at home, among friends or colleagues. Facebook potentially mixes the two environments and creates a new social context, a new semi-public space, where new rules of behaviour and performance emerge.

Erving Goffman in ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ talks about human behaviour as a performance, defined as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers.” (Goffman E., 1959, p. 32)

According to Goffman our behaviour is determined by a social context. We behave differently in different social situations.

Meyrowitz argues that electronic media, especially television, have led to the overlapping of many social contexts which previously were distinct.

Thus, Meyrowitz argues that before electronic media there were sharp distinctions between ‘onstage’ and ‘backstage’ behaviours. But ‘by bringing many different types of people to the same ‘place’, electronic media have fostered a blurring of many formerly distinct social roles. Electronic media affect us, then not primary through their content, but by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life.” (Meyrowitz J., 1986, p. 6)

The merging of situations leads to a new behaviour, which Meyrowitz calls middle region. The middle region behaviour arises when audience members get a ‘sidestage’ view. They see parts of the traditional backstage area together with parts of the traditional onstage behaviour, and see the performer move from backstage to onstage. An example of middle region behaviour is when children stay long enough with the parents. Parents do not usually discuss such topics as death, sex or money in front of the children, but if the children stay present at an adult party, parents might start discuss adult topics in front of them, while avoiding the explicitness characteristic of an adult party. The longer children stay with the parents, more likely they are to see the childish side of adults.

Middle region behaviour is the behaviour that results from the merger of previously distinct situations, and electronic media, according to Meyrowitz is the primary cause for the creation of a middle region. Television, for instance, has led to the fact that more and more people would have a glimpse of a private life of celebrities and politicians, which would adapt their behaviour because their private life was more exposed to the general public.

Meyrowitz wrote his book before the advance of the Internet, but his definition of a middle region can easily be applied to Facebook. As mentioned previously, Facebook is a semi-public space, where distinct social contexts merge together. Facebook behaviour can be called middle region behaviour where we have to handle the fact that colleagues and friends alike can see what we post. Even if one chooses only to include very close friends into one’s social network, the semi-public profile of Facebook means that one has to think carefully about the implications of Facebook performance.

Based on the interviews with 19 participants and observations on Facebook this paper tries to see how people negotiate the collapsing of contexts on Facebook.

AUTHOR
Miranda Mowbray

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses an issue that may arise from the combination of the accelerating growth in the number of pervasive computing devices, and the continued rise of social computing, in particular microblogging. The issue is unwanted friend requests from inanimate objects.

A Twitter user who wants to be sent in real time the tweets published by another Twitter user’s account, or to read private messages sent by that account, must first send a friend request to the account. The act of sending a friend request to a user’s account is also known as “adding” the user. A tweet sent by Eugene Huo said:

Man, I gotta watch what I talk about on twitter… as soon as you mention something they find you… a rice cooker just added me.

It was probably a company advertising rice cookers rather than an actual rice cooker that added Eugene Huo, but in the future it might well be a rice cooker. Pervasive computing devices are already using Twitter as a communication channel, in growing numbers. Everyday objects that tweet include a toaster (@mytoaster), a garage door (@connectedthings), shoes (@ramblershoes), ovens (@bakertweet), a house (@ckhome), and a catflap (@GusAndPenny). There is a home security system that sends public tweets about which doors are open – this is perhaps not a good idea.

Most of these objects send out data on Twitter but do not receive it. However, Twitter offers an easy-to-use channel through which pervasive computing devices can receive data as well as transmit it. Pervasive computing devices on Twitter may be able to gather useful information from other devices and from human tweeters, including tweeters who are strangers to the owner of the device. The potential of such information is demonstrated by the fact that measures based on human Twitter activity have been found to predict the result of the most recent UK general election and box-office takings for Hollywood films better than the previous best prediction methods. Information from human tweeters can form a rapid and flexible service in emergencies. Company service representatives are already using Twitter by following customers and other users who tweet words connecting to their brands, and responding to any complaints: in the future these companies’ products themselves might use Twitter or other social networks to automatically mine real-time information from customers that could be used to enhance the service provided by the product, or proactively solve problems.

Moreover, the Twitter interface offers an intuitive way for human users (especially remote users) to interact with a service. A playful example of this is @tweet_tree, a Christmas tree whose lights change colour according to commands sent to it by Twitter users. Other automated Twitter accounts have looked up stock prices, announced the football results for a user’s favourite team, or played games with users. In these cases the user controls the automated account by sending it “direct messages”, which are private one-to-one messages that can be sent by a Twitter user to any of her followers.

This raises the spectre of human users being bombarded with friend requests from inanimate objects with embedded computing systems, where the owners or manufacturers of these objects wish the objects to receive potentially useful information from the human users in real time, or wish to enable and encourage the users to interact with the objects via direct messages. In fact unwanted friend requests are already a problem on Twitter, because the most common Twitter spamming technique involves automatically sending friend requests to a very large number of users. A user who accepts and reciprocates such a request may find herself receiving unwanted communications from an automated account – whether this is the Twitter account of an inanimate object, or a spammer, or even both at once. Or her private tweets may be automatically harvested and used in ways that she does not wish. But even if she refuses every one of these requests, receiving very frequent friend requests can be annoying in itself. It may also lead to the user mistakenly refusing requests from some people (or objects) that she would in fact like to be friends with on Twitter.

To address this, some form of validation service is needed to help users decide whether a requesting account is likely to be one that they wish to communicate with, and to enable them to automatically refuse or accept requests from some classes of accounts. Several Twitter validation services, most of which have the aim of identifying spamming accounts, are currently available. Unfortunately they have some limitations, the most common being that their accuracy could be undermined by changes in popular software for automated Twitter accounts. This limitation is shared by some measures for spammer identification suggested in papers by Lee et al. and Stringhini et al. Indeed, several of the measures used by account validation services are unable to distinguish benign Twitter accounts from automated accounts that operate some types of spamming software in current use. One particularly interesting service, TrueTwit Basic, uses a CAPTCHA challenge to attempt to discover whether or not an account is automated, under the assumption that human users do not generally wish to grant a friend request from an automated Twitter account. But this assumption may become decreasingly valid as useful pervasive computing services move to Twitter.

In addition to pointing out limitations, this paper identifies some useful features of several validation services that might contribute to a more robust solution. If we cannot resolve this issue we may find ourselves befriended by hundreds of rice cookers.

AUTHOR
Brent Mittelstadt , Ben Fairweather , Mark Shaw and Neil McBride

ABSTRACT

This paper is the result of a research project at De Montfort University to identify the ethical impact of Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) systems on the healthcare relationships between patients and their doctors and payers within the United Kingdom. The project is complementary to two other European research projects, PHM-Ethics and ETICA, which focus on ethical issues of emerging technologies. The aforementioned research project complements these projects by taking a patient-centric focus.

Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) technologies are currently being developed to supplement traditional “brick and mortar” medical care with health monitoring outside the hospital. A primary factor spurring the development of PHM is the rapid aging of the global population which will increase the burdens placed on current healthcare systems, in many countries outstripping available medical resources. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the available literature discussing ethical issues relating to development and implementation of PHM technologies as present in the United Kingdom. Papers that only discuss development or implementation but lack a discussion of ethical issues are also included in the review in recognition of a general lack of scholarship dedicated to the ethics of PHM thus far.

A clear definition of “Personal Health Monitoring” does not exist in the current literature. For the purposes of the literature review a working definition was established–Personal Health Monitoring refers to any electronic device or system that monitors a health-related aspect of a person’s life on a constant basis outside of a hospital setting. Recently developed examples include GPS tracking devices used with mental health patients, blood pressure wrist monitors and ambient assisted living environments. It is predicted by the authors that the widespread implementation of PHM technologies will have some of the following effects:

1. An increased amount of accurate medical data will become available to some medical personnel.
2. Patients will have the tools and information to increase control over their own health through examination of personal medical data as well as recommendations and alerts provided by PHM technologies.
3. If doctors or paying organizations within the NHS are given access to PHM-derived data, the relationship between patients and these groups will change. As an example, if such data is used as a primary tool in diagnosis it may decrease the accuracy of diagnoses and alienate patients, as the chance exists for the account of the patient to be disvalued. Decontextualization of symptoms may take place if the patient’s account is ignored.
4. Medication and treatment recommendations can be monitored for compliance.
5. Patients will be in contact with medical equipment on a more regular basis.

Recognizing that “Personal Health Monitoring” is an emerging term not yet widely used in academia, complementary search terms were employed during database searches such as “personalized health,” “pervasive health,” “personal health,” “health surveillance,” “ambient assisted living,” and “smart homes.” Five databases were searched (PubMed, Scopus, IEEE, EBSCO, and CINAHL) from May 2010 to February 2011 to identify literature discussing the development, implementation and ethical issues relating to PHM technologies. Attention was given to the discussion of ethical issues (or lack there of) in each article, with the goal of reviewing the issues identified in the literature.

Ethical issues identified in the literature included problems of social integration and personal identify for “smart home” users, “medicalization” of the home environment, privacy concerns relating to data processing, patient and physical dependence on information technologies that may fail, lack of physical contact/examinations, and patient acceptance of new technologies. In some cases issues were identified through application of the Four Principles approach advocated by Beauchamp and Childress.

In general, ethical issues relating to development, implementation and data processing of PHM technologies were given little attention in the current literature. Although several issues were identified, none were given more than cursory treatment in the literature. As a result further research into these areas is both appropriate and necessary (preferably) prior to the widespread implementation of these technologies within the UK to ensure they are used in an equitable and beneficial manner. This work contributes to this need for scholarship by suggesting further ethical issues that may arise in the development, implementation and widespread use of PHM. Additionally, examples of PHM technologies are reviewed and common features are identified in an attempt to contribute to the development of a common definition of PHM. Although this is not the primary purpose of the paper, it is recognized that a common definition would be beneficial to the field. PHM technologies in development outside of the UK are also included in the review in recognition that such technologies may be used here in the future.

AUTHOR
Ananda Mitra

ABSTRACT

In the five year period starting in 2005, one of the most significant and visible application of the Internet has been the exponential growth of people who have enrolled themselves with networking sites to establish virtual connections with people they might know in real life. This has been described in popular culture as “social media” and has certainly attracted significant popular media attention. This paper examines the phenomenon within the theoretical contexts of discursive and narrative construction of reality where individuals are able to use a variety of representation tools – from text to video – to create a personal narrative. Previously it has been suggested that the discourse on social media sites can be labeled as “narbs,” an abbreviation for “narrative bits.” The narb becomes the building block for the identity narrative that is discursively produced and circulated amongst those who are “friends” of the individual. Since the number of friends could be very large in the case of virtual connections, and not all might be considered friends in the conventional meaning of the term, it is becoming increasingly important to be careful about the way in which narbs are produced and used. There is growing evidence that institutions ranging from universities to law enforcement agencies are using the narbs to gauge the identity of individuals. The identity narratives then become central in making attributions about an individual, and eventually decisions about the individual are based on the attributions which themselves need to be problematized with respect to authenticity, trustworthiness and agency. This paper offers a framework of considering the narb in a careful and systematic way where observers interested in making critical decisions about individuals are able to make appropriate judgments about narbs.

Much of the analysis that is used at this time to make the decisions about individuals relies on a specific narb. For instance, a waitress at a popular pizza restaurant was terminated from her job for a single narb that was posted by her. In some cases applicants for jobs have been eliminated from consideration because of a single narb that someone else had created about the individual. Instances such as these point towards a need to examine the narbs about an individual in a more systematic manner. This paper suggests an approach where the examination of the narbs take into consideration several issues. First, it is important to consider the volume of narbs and their frequency to gauge if there is sufficient information to base judgments and if the information is recent and regularly updated. Second, it is important to consider the author of a narb and see who the “agent” is. Third, it is important to consider the content of the narb with respect to the way in which it is constructed using which specific representational tools such as text, images, video, etc. Finally, it is important to explore if the narb actually provides any spatial information about the individual and allows for understanding how an individual moves through space. Most of these are components of any narb and provide an understanding of each narb in these terms as well as an understanding of the narrative that is produced by a set of narbs. The authenticity and trustworthiness of the narrative is then dependant on the relative value of these different components of the narb. For instance, it would be unwise to attach a great deal of value to the identity narrative if the majority of the narbs are produced by someone other than the individual.

This paper will also argue that among all the four different components of the narb, the issue of agency is perhaps the most important. It is quite possible that an individual would have numerous narbs on their social media Web site, but if the individual also has a large number of friends then the larger number of narbs could well be a function of the size of the network, whereas most of the narbs are actually authored by someone other than the individual. A simple example of this phenomenon is the abundance of birthday greetings that might populate the profile of an individual on the date of birth where all the narbs are indeed authored by others who might have a tenuous real connection with the individual. Because of the way in which the number of connections can grow exponentially and the others can influence the identity narrative produced by narbs, it is particularly important to examine the agency of narbs before coming to specific conclusions about the nature of an individual.

It is important to consider a systematic approach to the analysis of narbs not only for the benefit of institutions that might rely on narbs to understand their people better, but also to allow individuals some basic guidelines for managing their narbs. There is some popular literature that offer “tips” about who to be-friend and what to say on social media sites. However, much of these are a-theoretical and somewhat inconsistent. It is important at this juncture to consider developing a system where there is a clearer understanding of the way in which narbs are constructed as discourse, and thus can be de-constructed to unravel the ethical components of the discourse. The qualitative aspect of the analysis can be well grounded in discourse and narrative analysis, but I would suggest in this paper that it is important to consider a numeric analysis of narbs before embarking on a discourse analysis to create the identity narrative which might eventually remain unreliable because of the nature of the narbs used for the analysis. Understanding the different components of a narbs as suggested here could help avert the pitfall of mistaken attributions based on unreliable narbs.

AUTHOR
Richard Mills

ABSTRACT

Social News websites deploy voting systems whereby their community of users rank and sort large volumes of content collectively without explicit organisation or editorial control. The primary focus of this paper is the website reddit.com. On reddit, individual users can submit items of content (either links to web resources or text posts) and also vote (up or down) on the items submitted by other users. This voting system is also applied to comments on Posts. On any given day tens of thousands of users participate in content submission and voting; with the aggregate of this activity producing a ‘front page’ list of the 25 items which are seen by a large number of visitors to the website. Through the voting interface large numbers of users make a collective decision about which posts are displayed on the front page. Furthermore, each of these posts is accompanied by a democratically mediated discussion which is contributed to by thousands of individuals.

This paper will present research on reddit.com conducted using a variety of methods. As with any Social Media site reddit’s web servers contain precise and accurate records of all activity taking place on the website. Reddit’s administrators have provided one month of voting data from their servers for the purposes of research (henceforth ‘back-end’ data). This back-end data allows for questions relating to patterns of behaviour on the website to be addressed. However, back-end data has been anonymised with respect to post identity; making it unsuitable if we wish to consider qualities of the content being ranked. Reddit (again in common with many Social Media applications) provides an Application Programming Interface (API) which can be used to extract and store data. This paper will present details of the data extraction process, and offer examples of research questions which are more suited to back-end and front-end data respectively.

The interfaces deployed by Social News websites bear some similarity to those of Social Bookmarking websites. The major dissimilarity between Social News and Social Bookmarking is the degree to which Social News websites focus attention on the website’s front page; and absence of tagging on Social News sites.

This paper will present the following analyses related to back-end and front-end data obtained directly from the website.

• The hypothesis that Social News websites focus attention on their front page is supported by a Power Law (with exponential cut-off) distribution of votes between posts. This is seen as key to allowing a sense of website identity to emerge among its large user-base.
• The lifespan of a post is analysed in great detail, with results suggesting that early voting (within the first hour) is a strong predictor of the post’s ultimate success of failure.
• The relative attention received (in terms of votes and also hits) by posts in different areas of the website is analysed; suggesting that the front page is indeed where most of reddit users’ attention is focused.
• Patterns of User behaviour are studied; and it is revealed that people use their functionally identical accounts to participate in diverse ways.
• Several strategies are also identified whereby users seek to maximise the impact of their votes in determining what the front page will look like.

Content analysis has also been employed in an effort to understand what the broader significance of reddit is with respect to public discourse on the Internet. The background to this is the literature about public discourse on the Internet (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Negroponte, 1995, Sunstein, 2002; Noam, 2003). Case studies are being conducted on reddit’s coverage of the Wikileaks diplomatic cables (November/December 2010) and the current Egyptian protests. The primary aim of these case studies is firstly to determine how coverage of the stories on reddit differs from that of conventional news outlets. Preliminary results suggest that many posts on reddit link to conventional news outlets, with these articles being discussed through the commenting system. There are however also posts which speak to aspects of the story not covered by conventional news outlets; and text posts by users which espouse particular points of view; ask questions of the community; or which call on reddit users/visitors to engage in some form of collective action related to the ongoing story. A large proportion of posts about these subjects address the conventional news’ coverage of the story directly; often these are highly critical. This suggests that Social News websites may be of particular importance to issues surrounding the convergence of old and new media (Jenkins, 2006).

The method employed in these case studies involves looking at the profile of submissions on the topic, and comparing this to the voting reception each submission receives. A secondary aim of these case studies is to establish whether reddit’s voting interface is capable of expressing conflicting points of view; for example if I see a pro-wikileaks post on the front page does this mean I am unlikely to also see an anti-wikileaks post appearing here? What proportion of posts about the subject are for or against the topic, and is this proportion reflected in the number of posts of each persuasion that reach the front page? These questions relate to issues of fragmentation and polarisation of public discourse on the Internet (e.g. Negroponte, 1995).

Finally, this paper will present the results of an ongoing experiment which looks at how well reddit’s voting interface performs on the task of sorting large volumes of content such that the ‘best’ content (as judged by reddit users) has the highest rank and will be seen by the most people. This experiment also looks at whether an item’s voting response on reddit effects reddit users’ perception of the content; and if so how quickly this relationship is learned/un-learned.

REFERENCES

Y. Benkler. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006.