Digital media ethics in the Digital Age
I remember watching The Oprah Winfrey Show with my mother (…and sometimes without her) after school as a teenager. For any of you that don’t know the show well, Oprah frequently brought on thought leaders and authors as guests. Just as cellphones had started to become ubiquitous, Oprah had on a guest that proclaimed that the idea of civility must now be redefined given the introduction of these devices into our society. Should we turn off our phones in class? At dinner? Are our landlines strictly for professional acquaintances or close family? Is it “unprofessional” to have a DMX song set as your ringtone? When it comes to technology, the only constant is change. Just as the advent of cellphones required that we reexamine what it means to be civil, new technology keeps us on our toes, too, I think when it comes to ethics. When I was an undergraduate student in the early 2000s, I remember one professor had to consider whether we could use Wikipedia as a source (she allowed i...