The "Anti-Social" Aspect of Social Networks

Image from Thebalancesmb.com

How many times have you heard the phrase “Social networks are making us less social”? Are these technologies, meant for connecting people, really making us less social? Or have these technologies simply transformed what the action of being social may look like? How do we go about determining how ethical this decrease, or change, in social behavior caused by social networks is?

In Shannon Vallor's paper “Social Networking Technology and the Virtues” The argument is made that the empirical studies that have been done on the use of social networking sites and how they affect social capacity of individuals is not enough to cover a groundwork of how ethical these technologies are. In this case Vallor is correct, as our world is ever rapidly changing, just assessing how these changes compare to what may have been normal decades ago is not enough to justify whether these technologies are ethically harmful.

                                                                                                  Image from ecommerce-nation.com

Vallor argues for the usage of Virtue ethics in the use of certain empirical studies that would be able to capture not just how behaviors are evolving, but also how the moral character changes in users of social technologies. 

Using virtue ethics to better understand the effects on morals in users of these technologies gives a much better approach to determining how ethical new technologies,  such as social networks, are. As using empirical studies that can assess changes in moral character not only gives insight into how these technologies are changing behavior, but also as to whether these technologies are harmful to a community based on certain ethical values that the community seeks to uphold.

This brings another argument for the use of virtue ethics in determining the ethics of ICT’s. The use of social networks is not tied to one community, but is global. This raises problems in the field of ICT ethics because of the fact that different places around the world have different ethical values. The use of virtue ethics would allow for a system of determining ethics that could be rather simply tweaked to better fit different communities and what values those communities find ethically important.

                                        Image from Thenextweb.com

More studies must be conducted using virtue ethics to properly gauge how ethical social networks are. We must gain a more clear insight as to how these technologies are changing us morally rather than changing how we perform certain tasks.