technoculture314-09

Ethics and privacy are two social conceptions that are intrinsically associated but as we all know they are also frequently apart. Due to the modern electronic age, information of any kind, personal included, can be accessed by anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Regardless of social position, age and motive an individual has the resources to explore whatever information is available to them, but do they have the right? Growing up in a generation that has been dazzled with the effects of the world wide web, most people my age do not harbour the deep distrust of the internet that older generations do. We accept the wide range of information available to us as part of the communication, education and opportunity within our society, we even volunteer information about ourselves and our personal lives freely. Can we validly make a complaint them when our privacy has been invaded through our own use of this medium? Surely an individual is aware that any sharing of personal information is a risk, especially with the internet context. Didn’t our teachers and parents raise us to not talk to strangers? Yet we accept people we are hardly acquainted with or even in some cases don’t know as friends. We, and I say we because I am guilty of this too, invite these people into our personal lives under the misapprehension that they are all trustworthy. I think we do this for two main reasons, one, we have encountered this potential friend at some stage in the ‘real world’ and thus have a sense of familiarity with them and two, we understand that we are making an individual exchange with this person, we are actively making our personal information available to them in exchange for theirs. This concept of gaining something in return lulls us into a false sense of security, we sacrifice our privacy for the chance to invade theirs. Surely this kind of deal is regarded, as with any negotiation for power or information, (in this case information being power) as a risk and some might even say, a calculated one. Can we then complain about the lack of privacy we enjoy, when we have been the ones to more-or-less initiate it? The internet may be an electronic network but it still runs by many of the rules within visceral society, your actions whether online or outside have real consequences and lack of privacy is one of these. You cannot first create an environment for yourself and then complain about the effects that this environment creates, privacy is and has always been in society, a necessary sacrifice for any kind of social interaction .