Social Media and Networking
Social networking is a term given to sites and applications which facilitate online social interactions that typically focus on sharing information with other users referred to as “friends.”
The most famous of these sites today is Facebook but there are many others, such as Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, to name just a few. There are a number of moral values that these sites call into question. Shannon Vallor (2011, 2016) has reflected on how sites like Facebook change or even challenge our notion of friendship. Her analysis is based on the Aristotelian theory of friendship (see entry on Aristotle’s ethics). Aristotle argued that humans realize a good and true life though virtuous friendships. Vallor notes that four key dimensions of Aristotle’s ‘virtuous friendship,’ namely: reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life, and that the first three are found in online social media in ways that can sometimes strengthen friendship (Vallor 2011, 2016). Yet she argues that social media is not yet up to the task of facilitating what Aristotle calls ‘the shared life.’ Meaning that social media can give us shared activities but not the close intimate friendship that shared daily lives can give. (Here is a more complete discussion of Aristotelian friendship). Thus these media cannot fully support the Aristotelian notion of complete and virtuous friendship by themselves (Vallor 2011). Vallor also has a similar analysis of other Aristotelian virtues such as patience, honesty, and empathy and their problematic application in social media (Vallor 2010). Vallor has gone on to argue that both the users and designers of information technologies need to develop a new virtue that she terms “technomoral wisdom” which can help us foster better online communities and friendships (Vallor, 2016).
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