News story reflection by Renile

Dennis, O'Reilly. "The Internet and the Death of Ethics." CNET news. 12 October,2010. Retrieved on 15 April,2010. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-20018998-68.html Do we need to have internet ethics? It is a very difficult question to answer. To some people, they may argue that, we can do or write whatever we want in the cyber world on the condition that it is not illegal. However, the writer of this article argues that he has already seen the death of ethics on the internet. For instance, those cases of plagiarism, using names of other people for sending emails and posting indecent videos in order to attract more viewers for earning money from advertisers are severely serious nowadays. However, what make things even worse was that people didn’t realize the seriousness of these actions. When do we become conscious about computer ethics? Actually, in 1989, the internet Advisory Board first issued a memo about computer ethics for the sake of the US government. As more people came to realize the issues of computer ethic, later, the Computer Ethics Institute set the ten commandments of computer ethics to entreat computer users to treat the others with consideration and respect. From the perspective of sociology, achieving social goals is so important to many people in today’s society, i.e. to make money or to achieve high social standard. Nevertheless, different people might use different ways. Some may follow the tradition path to earn money. But some might choose the other way round such as by uploading indecent video to make money or by copying works from others to make money. In my opinion, the reason why they did such things might be because internet is a good place to get information and easy to access. By one click, you can get what you want or who you want to contact. As some might think that the information is available online, it means that they are willing to share it with everyone in the cyber world. Hence, lots of people would believe that copying information is not a serious matter and ignore the seriousness of it. Besides, it is a controversial matter to determine whether loading indecent video for making money is ethical or unethical, as they may argue it is not a law-breaking activity. Those are just some examples quoted by the writer. I am sure there might be a lot more different examples. I believe that it is a very difficult task to set a line to determine where the ethical line should be put in the cyber world. However, the presence of the 10 commandments is a signal for warning us that we need to change and re-examine our attitude towards using internet. To conclude, I want to quote the words from Virginia Shea, I also believed that internet user “should behave to the same standards of behaving in real life.”