Blog Entry 1

These first four weeks have covered many topics that students have been able to thoroughly and thoughtfully discuss.  Several of these topics were the main issues concerning ethics and digital media, ethical theories, and most recently, intellectual properties.

In the very first chapter of Ess, I learned about the central issues involving ethics and digital media.  Perhaps one of the most interesting things from this chapter was the idea of convergence and how “digital media bring together both traditional and sometimes new sorts of information sources” (Ess, 11).   So, analog information is obsolete now.  It is not a specific type of information…it is just information in general.  Ess compares the idea of convergence to ethics and says that the new digital media has created new challenges that we never had to encounter with the traditional ethical issues (Ess, 11).  Now, the former distinct issues are converging with areas that were never covered before (for example, digital music piracy).   Before this chapter, I had really never thought about how things used to be in regards to analog media.  The ethical issues that information professionals need to face today are certainly different than what they used to be.

We discussed utilitarianism and deontology.  These two basic, yet very important, ethical frameworks are two topics that I had never heard of before.  I know that I have a set of morals and principles that I hold to and consider important to myself; I never thought that I identified with one ethical theory.   After reading this chapter as well as Tavani, I still cannot say that I identify with only one ethical theory.  It surprises me to know that there are people who do adhere to one ethical theory and live by it.  Tavani had many interesting things to say about moral systems and how to justify them.  The Tavani readings helped to further explain the ethical theories that we learned about from Ess.  We learned about different types of utilitarianism as well as deontological views.  Explanation about why we need ethical theories was given in chapter two of Tavani, and I gained a greater understanding of the importance of ethics.  Tavani stated that, “An essential feature of theory in general is that it guides us in our investigations and analyses” (Tavani 53).  I had previously thought of ethics as something that you needed to be in a “mode” for.  Now, I understand that ethics are very much within us, and are something that we do automatically.

 Perhaps the most interesting topic that we have covered so far is the issue of intellectual property and the intellectual commons.  This section opened up my mind to the difficulties that are inherent to ethics and digital media.  There are so many protections for intellectual property, and digital media has seemed to give those protections trouble.  People are finding their way around copyright law or simply ignoring it, and disregarding the law in general.  I particularly enjoyed reading about the different views that countries have on copyright law.  It surprised me that, in many Asian cultures, it is considered a sign of respect to copy someone’s intellectual property.  In these cultures, the people do not consider this copying theft.  In the United States, we have a completely different view.  Here, we place more emphasis on the individual than the community (Ess 77-78).  Reading more about intellectual property has gotten me to seriously consider whether or not my occasional downloading of songs is wrong or not.  I think I have become more aware of the different stances that cultures take on intellectual property and the consequences of intellectual property theft.  I have been able to discuss much of what I have learned with my friends who are also students.  Many of them have taken ethics classes, and it is nice to compare what they have learned with what I have learned.