How Far can People Get

Ethics, Online Persona, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña of Volcán Masaya

from El Ventarrón, Ticuantepe, Masaya, Nicaragua (2015)

How Far can People Get

In their pursuit of views and notoriety?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Friday, July 31, 2020 Post 355

How far can people go in pursuit of views and notoriety? How far can people get for the sake of likes or retweets? In every country across the globe we all have examples of people who, for the sake of getting an outstanding selfie, do risky stuff. These activities are often against the law, common sense, and the basic ethical values of respect for the authority and the weighing of one’s decisions that can affect other individuals.

Rachels & Rachels (2010), in their “minimum conception of Morality,” state that “Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason -that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing- while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decisions” (p. 13). Daredevils on social media are examples of the persuit of views and notoriety, and these perilous acts contradict reason and equal weight to the interests of anyone who can be affected by unreasonable decisions. Daredevil’s online personas do not meet the minimum conception of Morality stated by Rachels & Rachels (2020).

Back in April 2019, Mckeena Knipe, while visiting the area of Jaco Beach, in the central Pacific Costal area of Costa Rica, decided to get a Russian roulette selfie, a daredevil. For the sake of likes on Facebook, Knipe became viral and famous for posting a video about her trip to Costa Rica, but fully focused on her visit to Tárcoles River (INDICEPR, 2019), a river infested by aligators. Knipe found her daredevil fun especially when she got suspended from the bridge over the alligators. Her companion just held her with the strength of his right arm, while his left hand grabbed the bridge fence (their supporting point) to prevent them from falling down. While suspended in midair, Knipe turned to her camera with a smiling face (Mc Quiddy, 2019); then her video was posted on Facebook.

Based on this desire for notoriety, Knipe did not guide her conduct by reason because there is no sensible justification for risking her life as well as her companion’s. Knipe did not give equal weight to the interests of her companion and any other people she cared for at the time of this selfie. And what about the respect towards the laws in Costa Rica? She did not measure the implications of her decisions and how they could have affected people if something had gone wrong in this dicey act.

To conclude, “The reasons for why individuals would take risky selfies are likely closely intertwined with individuals’ reasons for using social media and in particular the posting of selfies” (Sung et al., 2016) (also quoted by Chen, Schreurs, Pabian, & Vandenbosch, 2019). Many social media users are in pursuit of views and notoriety for the sake of projecting a given identity and of popularity needs. “These drivers of social media use may in particular be gratified by the practice of posting risky selfies” (Chen, Schreurs, Pabian, & Vandenbosch, 2019), but this gratification seems to be ephemeral. People like Knipe want to be recognized as adventurous and exceptional in the eyes of their media followers. People like Knipe “may post dangerous selfies to enhance [her] social ties and more specifically [her] popularity status” (Chen, Schreurs, Pabian, & Vandenbosch, 2019), her notoriety.

How Far Can People Get by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Friday, July 31, 2020

Connecting to a Bigger Picture

Ethics, Online Persona, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at The British Museum, London, England (2018)

Connecting to a Bigger Picture

Who’s really listening in social media?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Thursday, July 30, 2020 Post 354

Social media is being used for numerous reasons. It is not just a place where an individual is torn apart between his personal online self and his professional persona; it goes beyond this point. Social media is also used by corporations, and even by people in the government to sway people’s opinions and course of actions. But is this way of seeing social media a full gamut of ways to gather like-minded individuals to act and behave in willful ways to favor ideas or political instability?

Let us take the case of fake news. In my home country, Costa Rica, congresspeople who do not favor our current government’s policies and ways of doing things have posted “campaigns” to discredit this presidential administration’s achievements. When confronted about the fake news he and his brother had published on their webpage, congressman Jonathan Prendas defended their publication of the news regarding the increase in the current sales tax in the country from 13% to 16% (Sequeira & Chinchilla, 2019), something that was not true.

Prendas’s news became viral and was then shared multiple times through different social media sites, and people started a wrestling match in earnest against the government and the approval of this new law. The question that remains unanswered is, “why did Congressman Prendas, being a member of a political party with a Protestant creed and religious affiliation, lie and induce others to error?” Part of the answer is that congresspeople know the power behind social media and try to exercise their influence as public, political figures. The cunning, immoral, and covetous intentions of the powerful can manipulate the mass to act, usually in their favor, even when a lie is contradicting the facts.

Now let us take the case of a marketing corporation behind a political campaign. My second example is related to the 2014 presidential election in Costa Rica. The winner, President Luis Guillermo Solís, had jointly worked with a marketing corporation that profit from their listening to the social media platforms used by voters in Costa Rica. Though the losing political party, whose candidate was Johnny Araya, all were cast down by the electoral defeat; they all underestimated the power exercised by the marketing corporation on all social networks to discredit Araya.

Araya’s ideas, projects, and political campaign promises were deemed to be inappropriate for the country and exclusive because the poor, the needy, and the middle class were going to be highly affected. Understanding his defeat, Araya stepped out of his running for the presidency (DW Akademie, 2014). Had voters read and understood Araya’s potential government program and path? Probably not, but influencers in social media paid by Solís’s campaign team strengthened the dire repercussions of Araya’s future actions if he got elected. Unethically or not, emotional contagion was used, and Araya’s dream to get elected president of Costa Rica evaporated into the ethersphere.

One thing is certain so far, corporations and people in governmental positions do listen to social media and quickly identify the trends in it, or they create those trends. If this is a sign that we are experiencing a greater connection to society, well it is happening, but this is not a two-way street, at least in a Latin American context. We have also understood that fake news can come from all sort of sources, even with spiteful intentions to discredit positive achievements in the government. Aside from this, we can also see that a political campaign can be taken to the social media platforms to sway people’s voting intentions. We are confronted with interesting ethical issues that were never, ever considered when social media were born in the world.

References

DW Akademie. (2014, March 5). Johnny Araya abandona la segunda vuelta en las elecciones presidenciales de Costa Rica. Germany. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from https://www.dw.com/es/johnny-araya-abandona-la-segunda-vuelta-en-las-elecciones-presidenciales-de-costa-rica/a-17478248

Sequeira, A., & Chinchilla, S. (2019, July 31). Jonathan Prendas defiende noticia falsa sobre alza del IVA en sitio web ligado a él. San José, Costa Rica. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from https://www.nacion.com/el-pais/politica/jonathan-prendas-defiende-noticia-falsa-sobre-alza/REH5KMKUOJC43HKI6HOFPUTVYE/story/

Connecting to a Bigger Picture by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Thursday, July 30, 2020

An Online Participator or An Active Listener (A Lurker)

Ethics, Online Persona, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at Sophia Wanamaker Gallery, CCCN, San José, Costa Rica (2019)

An Online Participator or An Active Listener (A Lurker)

One’s role as a social media user

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Thursday, July 30, 2020 Post 353


Let us know and give an insight into the reasons behind what I do.

Creating a parody of Nordic Mythology, Odin could have been labelled as a social media lurker. Had Odin been using some sort of social media platform, he would have known lots of what human beings in the different realms that existed beside Asgard, his home, longed for and thought of. Hugin and Munin, Odin’s ravens whose job was to fly around the world of men, would have been the software Odin needed to retrieve information regarding what happened in the world of men. Hugin and Munin would have been “lurking” around and bringing data that Odin was interested in accessing passively. Hugin and Munin sound like a good name for online software to spot social media users by their online persona, don’t they?

As a social media user that has no Hugin and Munin, I tend to be watching the game but without engaging much in it. My favorite way of online participation can be framed within the use of a self-journaling blog I have had for over 10 years. It is here where I share thoughts and teaching ideas with anyone interested in the language teaching field. I am not into promoting my blog though it can be easily tracked on the Web on any browser like Google Chrome. My intention is to share with novice teachers a bit of what I have empirically experienced especially in online education, distance teaching, online learning, virtual synchronous handling of classes, etc. I seldom promote my writings over Twitter, which is the only social media platform I have confidently but scarcely used for quite a long time.

Am I a lurker? Yes! I do not exactly follow behind corporations all the time, such as renown publishing houses, to increase my “listening” potential. But to be aware of what is now being said about emergency remote teaching, Webinars that can help me grow professionally and do my job more efficiently, I must lend my ear to get the news. I always do this through my professional social media profile, which is never mixed with my personal self or political affiliations. As a lurker I barge in on a “conversation” over social media with teaching experts if that is part of the rules set from the beginning; when I hold those conversations in a real/virtual, academic setting (like a Webinar), I do not want the speakers to be majestically worth with me if my opinionated persona gets in the way.

In conclusion, it looks like after this reflection and seeing my thoughts in black and white, as a social media user I am a dabbler, a person who uses a social media site sometimes but not that often. In terms of my social media persona, I want to keep it professional but do some creative work to contribute with my teaching community and community of practice. This is why I write a blog to keep my academic insights available for anyone looking for information in the teaching field where I have some expertise. Yet, I would not label myself an online participator nor an active listener (lurker) per se; I just want to try to understand a bit my online surroundings and people’s behavior in it and their ethical decisions, if any.

An Online Participator or an Active Listener (Lurker) by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Blurred Boundaries in Social Media

Ethics, Online Persona, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at Parque Francia, Panama City, Panama (2017)

Blurred Boundaries in Social Media

A simple ethical solution

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Tuesday, July 28, 2020 Post 352

	Opinion Prompt
	For example, you have been working at a new job for six months and are starting to become friends with some of your colleagues. One of them sends you a friend request via Facebook. · Would this be a problem for you? · What are the ethical issues around blurred boundaries that most affect you?

Starting new relationships with people at a new job is something normal all of us go through. Befriending others is part of being a social being, and this will allow to create and foster a comfortable atmosphere in the workplace. However, when people want to see a bit more than your professional persona, this desire can be the fagots of firewood needed to start a fiery bonfire. In other words, can others get to see the difference between your personal self and your professional online persona especially if the existing boundary is rather blurry? The problem with blurred boundaries is that they are like a bleak island where anything can manifest and then take shape and substance in many various ways.

Would a friend request via Facebook be a problem for me if it comes from a new co-worker? To be honest, it would not be a problem at all; I would simply tell my new partner that I do not have a Facebook account because I have never believed much in this particular social media site. I would also inform my partner that I do not have any intention, in the near future, to open an account, either. I may also suggest him to follow me on Twitter where I have a professional account that I use to get information from publishing houses and English Language Teaching (ELT) experts. I would also state that though I have this Twitter account, I am much of a passive user because I only use it to get information and not exactly to share information. I bet this answer will suffice, and my partner and I can go on with our relationship as if nothing has happened. And somehow my private life is not at stake.

Now, if you ask me about ethical issues around blurred boundaries that most affect me in this “friend request” scenario, I have some things to say. Back in 2004 Facebook was born, and through that decade it became more and more popular. Consequently, a lot of people I knew at the time got engaged and started experiencing dire repercussions due to their postings and statuses. Analyzing the situation, I decided not to mingle around with others in social media sites just because. And the first thing I was able to observe was the blurriness between people’s professional persona and their personal online self. In my understanding of the situation, both things have collided and turned into one. Can social media users pending approval of their friend requests differentiate one from the other if profile owners could not set a clear division?

Being rather dramatic in my statement of the facts, this blurriness told me (and others) of shadows and forebodings regarding the collision of online personas. I have a group of friends and another of family members where we share stuff via WhatsApp, but I do not get judged by a colored joke I send. But if I got to publish it on social media where any co-worker or boss can see them, can somebody predict what their reaction towards them will be? How will they judge me by not separating my hobby, personal self from my professional, academic persona? We have seen it before, when postings in social media can turn into a storm in a glass of water, and people’s careers can be severely affected.

The ethical solution is simple if you do not want your postings to be labeled inappropriate and disrespectful. The nuances can be plentiful when people start to decode your messages out of context through their local media outlets; misunderstanding will be very much present. For this reason, and as a sound suggestion, both selves must clearly know where the boundary between them is, and trespassing must not be allowed. A blazing torch should not be needed to find the boundary on social media blurry surface; it must be clearly drawn.

Blurred Boundaries by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

The Handling of Online Selves

Ethics, Online Persona, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at Musée d’Ordsay, Paris, France (2019)

The Handling of Online Selves

Beware of the effects when they collide!

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Sunday, July 26, 2020 Post 351

Opinion Prompt Regarding Online Identity

What questions does this pose for you, your family, friends, or colleagues on their online identities?

Think for a moment on your family members, your group of friends, the troop of colleagues of yours, and even yourself. How is it that all these people, including you, project who they are when they are online? How do they represent themselves online? How is each one of them perceived by others in this virtual environment. If communication is disembodied in social media, how does each user in the groups above handle their online self?

Your dear ones’ selves must find their space in social media as well as yours. We should assume that everyone is the warder of their online persona. The fact is that people in your professional or personal networks may not be aware of the seeds of dire repercussions when these two networks come together as one. People’s postings on social media may be deemed to be unsuitable, improper, impolite, and sacrilegious depending on who is reading or viewing them. This rises ethical issues on both sides of the spectrum that user’s online selves do not know how to cope with.

At one education institution I work for, a particular situation happened unwilfully several years ago. A teacher of ours, who had a YouTube channel where age inappropriate content of his authorship was uploaded regularly, was in charge of teen groups. In the eyes of the school administration this posed an ethical problem because it was then thought, “what happens if parents or their children get to watch the content of his puppet theater? And what if they discover that all this is the production of their kids’ instructor?” Was this teacher’s wrongdoing in the eyes of administration blameworthy? The fact is that his personal, professional, and hobby persona had collided, and, according to his detractors, his theatrical work online could damage the institution’s reputation.

My own children, my colleagues, friends, and basically anyone build their online identity as if they were in the real world. The lesson learned from the collision of online selves and the puppet theater of one of our teachers brings several morals everyone has to apply while their online personas are present in their social media sites: 1) The language we choose to use in our virtual lives can be amply criticized depending on who we are in the eyes of others; 2) the imagery attached to our personal postings is not separated from what we do professionally; 3) whatever is present in our social media profiles is used by visitors to construct the image they have of ours; and 4) if no niche knowledge is contributed, we are spiteful influencers that just intend to corrupt other people’s mind.

Based on what has been stated here, your family members, your group of friends, the troop of colleagues of yours, and even yourself “embody” different types of personas. At times, your family/friends-driven persona is present while interacting with them, e.g., on WhatsApp. Then your professional self manifests when you give your specialist opinion regarding the latest finance report in the office through the office Google Hangouts chat. And some other times your hobby persona shares with the world your artistic self in painting, design, photography, memes, and the like on a WordPress blog. The problem is not the co-existence of all these selves; trouble arises when one cannot be differentiated from the other(s).

The Handling of Online Selves by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Social Media Ethical Issues

Ethics, Social Media 0 comments

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña in Les Halles, Paris, France (2019)

Sculpture’s Name: L’Écoute by Henri de Miller

Social Media Ethical Issues

That matter when using it

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
Head of Curriculum Development Academic Department Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano	Senior Language Professor School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Saturday, July 25, 2020 Post 350

Opinion Prompt

What are the ethical issues that concern YOU most when using social media?

In terms of a local media outlet use, it must be confessed that I am not a user fond of it. That is, from the moment Facebook stepped on the cyberspace stage, I never felt drawn to participate in it and its so-called sharing of thoughts and ideas. Though my children do use this media platform all the time, I went for Twitter after considering the possibility of creating an account that could give me access to teaching materials coming from renown publishing houses and experts in language teaching. However, when I embarked on using it, several concerns started to pop up in my mind: privacy, target advertising, and the tracking of posts (or social media engagement).

How private is your information in a local media outlet? Though there are some sort of privacy terms that must be respected by a social media platform as well by its users, the 2018 privacy breach suffered by Facebook just showed the tip of the iceberg regarding social media vulnerability. As reported by Isaac and Frenkel (2018), the “attack on [Facebook’s] computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users.” And though Facebook claims that privacy control over users’ data was fixed and corrected, the fact is that nothing guarantees that another security vulnerability will take place soon. Hackers may eventually try to steal information from social media users and platforms any day, any time in the future. The job of cybersecurity officers sounds like tough work in my ears.

Another issue regarding social media that concerns me a lot is the artificial intelligence (AI) to track your history over the Web. The tracking of your online activity can be labelled as “target advertising.” Once a page like Amazon, Kayak, Booking, etc. is visited because one is curious to know about a given product or service, your browser gets infected with hundreds of ads with more connections to your browsing history and webpage visitation. As Pumphrey (2012) describes the experience of target advertising, back in the early 2000s “Companies began using browsing habits and other data collected from users to make ads more personalized, and promotions for shoes and all kinds of other products and services began following people across the Web.” All this makes me wonder how ethical and legal it is to use AI’s algorithms linked to my browsing history; is it OK to try to influence someone to buy products and services in this way? This is rather difficult to answer and more ethical debates around this need to be held with social media platform executives.

Social media engagement is my third concern. Tracking down your posts, whether these ones are “positive” or “negative” may have an impact on what others may think, buy, and feel concerned about. As Siu (n.d.) points out in an article about marketing, “one of the reasons marketers like social media so much is because it’s an easy tool to work with. Nearly all social media platforms come with helpful dashboards that lay out all the information you need in one place.” But where do all data come from? It gets to them from social media users who unwillingly give information without them knowing, and companies are backed up by the terms of use of the platform, which is the fine print no one gets to read in the end. Unethically or not, media engagement or the tracking of your posts can be perfectly used to influence individuals into action or inaction, like some kind of emotional contagion.

Social media ethics is by far an interesting subject to discuss. And probably there are more concerns that ethicists have already spotted and are discussing. But what is being done? Isaac and Frenkel (2018) reported that in congressional hearings in Washington “some lawmakers suggested that the government will need to step in if the social network is unable to get tighter control of its service.” And this includes moral supervision over users’ information, AI, and the use of engagement for marketing purposes.

References

Isaac, M. and Frenkel, S. (2018). Facebook Security Breach Exposes Account of 50 Million users. The New YorkTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html#:~:text=SAN%20FRANCISCO%20%E2%80%94%20Facebook%2C%20already%20facing,the%20company's%2014%2Dyear%20history.

Pumphrey, C. (2020). How do advertisers show me custom ads? HowStuffWorks.Com. https://computer.howstuffworks.com/advertiser-custom-ads.htm

Siu, E. (n.d.). 10 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement (Plus 7 Tools to Track It!). SingleGrain.Com. https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/10-ways-to-measure-social-media-engagement/

Social Media Ethical Issues by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Saturday, July 25, 2020