The Ethics of Online Social Networks

Abstract

What will go online next? That is a question many people ask for very different reasons. And the answers the short history of the internet has given to this question during the last years were very different as well. Different from what we expected. And even different from what we thought that would be possible to go online. Social relationships are a very good example for that. When the first connection between computers via the telephone net was established in 1969 and the word ‘login’ was wired from Stanford to UCLA (apparently the connection crashed on the letter ‘g’) no one has dreamt of a network that would be able to build and reflect social relationships. But exactly that is what social networks in the internet do. And don’t get it wrong. It is not that social networks extended one’s relationships to the net, made it easier to foster them or allow for a more efficient communication within relationships. It is the relationships themselves that went online and exist in and are constituted by the networks. Or, in allusion to McLuhan: ‘The medium is the relationship’. Social networks essentially consist of representations of their users (often a profile), his/her social links and a variety of additional services to facilitate the exchange of information between them. Most online social networks are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail (often inbuild services), postings of various media content (pictorial, film, audio, textual etc.) and instant messaging. Although online communities are sometimes considered as a kind of online social network in a broader sense, online social networks usually mean an individual-centred service whereas online communities are group-centred. Such group-centred networks go back to 1979 when the first usenets were built. They were theme based and mainly impersonal. Social networks are very different.