School - I026: V - Choose One of the 10 Commandments by Virginia Shea and Write an Example of Your Own Experience

This week's session is about specificities of social networking.

We were asked to pick one of the 10 commandments created by Virginia Shea and write an example of our own based on it. Those are as follows:

1. Remember the Human
2. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life
3. Know where you are in cyberspace
4. Respect other people's time and bandwidth
5. Make yourself look good online
6. Share expert knowledge
7. Help keep flame wars under control
8. Respect other people's privacy
9. Don't abuse your power
10. Be forgiving of other people's mistakes

Those were written down 10 years ago and most of the people don't follow any of them and if they do then in a very limited manner. It is very difficult to choose from those just one, because most of them apply at the same time in the same place, therefor I am bit widening the topic and focus one of core powers in the society - the press, especially the online press.

#1 Remember the Human

I see that most of the modern media is either without context or the context is shifted in a very focused way. The very good example here is the media war which is going around Ukraine and Russia. Perfect example how the context can be shifted to your own side and actual truth is hidden in some other location. At some point of time I've stop believing the stories which were written and started just following feeds from LiveLeak, but drawing the line between reality and fiction got blurrier every day and it still is blurry. I want to believe, but what can I? 

Even Today one example of context. Texas lawmaker ridicules anti-abortion measures by filing anti-masturbation bill. Referred one can be found here and original one here. Just leave out a part where the women was sarcastically saying that in order to stress the problem about abortion and you have all another story.

#4 Respect other people's time and bandwidth

Taking the last example which I gave on the chapter above, it directly indicates that to find out the truth I needed to start looking the source of the news myself. I read one information from one source, second one from another source. Wasted my time, my bandwidth. I am lucky that I have AdBlock installed.

This is recurring pattern all through online media. See this, can you believe that he just did it. Click to learn more, and then, 2 lines of meaningless  story. I just got click-baited. Basically everybody are aiming for your clicks. More clicks, more adds can be displayed, more money can be cashed in. All falls on the amount of adds which somebody can present to you. Basically the title of the article is mostly not correspondent of the story and you have fallen to easiest con what is available in the web.

#6 Share expert knowledge

How, today, it is possible to trust any information which is available, I am not only talking about online information, also offline information. There is so much noise, so much false information present, who tells that the information is validated. Do you have to look it up yourself from different sources and then determine which source to use. Again we can take the first example here. Was the referred article expert knowledge? I would say no.

Data manipulation to get what you want is actually quite common. You just need to have enough followers and any knowledge can become expert knowledge. There are forums out here where people blindly believe that world is flat. 

Or this illustration:

#8 Respect other people's privacy

It all starts from some article, which gives you limited information, which I mentioned with #1. It goes on to point #4 where the article is covered with adds and every request has got special tracking ID attached to it. You are now marked, cookies are set, referrals in URLs are set. Where ever you go, that information can be reused to understand what you have watched, where you have been. There is no privacy if you take it out of box. You need to add additional measurements to gain back your privacy. Online media has got you stripped.

#9 Don't abuse your power

Taking all this into account, I believe that all who ever work with media and has followers will abuse the power. 

# Conclusion

There are some commandments of netiquette, but they don't stick today. I want to believe that people are having some moral compass, but I just cannot. To protect yourself, you need to be skeptical about everything you read, you see. Don't let your trust blind-sight you. Take preventive measures when you read something from the media. 

The truth is out there: