Like most things that we encounter in life, there's always more than one side: Let's take the situation at hand: A child has committed suicide and you have to report about it. So how do you go about doing this? According to Malone's article regarding Megan Meier and cyber-bullying, there are two ways to take this argument.
Before I get into anything, I do have to say that I wish (and this is solely in a perfect world) that social media and social networks could have a filter or a way to intervene in situations of cyberbullying - my only real qualm with this method is that how does anyone know what is bullying or what isn't? Furthermore, why don't those being bullied just stop using their account, or start a new one, without the bullies in question. You can always unfriend people, delete posts, or just flat-out block comments/filter comments.
To be honest, when you look at the situations involving a girl being bullied on myspace or anyone being bullied on Facebook, the easiest way to divert attention from the bullying and move on would be to just shut down the old account and make a new one.
Problem solved.
But sometimes there are cases when people search and try to find others that can give vital information to find out who the person is. This is when it's starting to go too far.
If it's a minor case of bullying, then generally, changing your account status would solve the problem. Its at a severity level that people don't really care. If something, say loyalties, were to really become a main factor in the bullying, then you might have people researching, investigating, and trying to locate the bullied child. This is when something needs to be done.
So The Suburban Journals writer Steve Pokin, a 30 year veteran of journalism, took the approach of writing the story without identifying the neighbors, but by writing a story about a girl's heartache and two parents who were grieving. I look at this from Bok's point of view - First, lets look at our own personal gains and ethics: We could say as Pokin that we are writing this from a standpoint of justice - we need to let the world know that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But what about the lack of crimes and allegations? What about the parents' point of view.
The next level would reveal from the opposing side, the neighbors in question of being identified, as terrified as to what would happen if they were singled out and punished as an example not from the law-abiding hands of the law, but from the rough hand of the common public. Let's face it - there are men and women that wanted to beat, maim, and even kill the neighbors that did this to the child.
Since we're still at an ethical dilemma, we should see what would happen if we take other points of views - the police don't know how to treat it, since they don't have any crimes they can tag onto the perpetrators; the common man would want to strike down those who would do something like that to a child, as well as those who protect their names. But was that a bad thing for Pokin to do? Unveiling those names could have still provided more disaster on a secondary and tertiary level: What if someone used those names to find them and harm them in an act of vigilantism.
The best thing to do is go from the other side and see how that would work out - in this case, the Post identified the neighbors after it finally appeared on the blogosphere. Let's take something like Kant's Categorical Imperative and put this to use, as that we would want to treat those the way we want to be treated. Based on this, we could say in defense of the Post that they merely identified the neighbors first off because they were already identified, and had false information added. SImply put, if I were being identified in this situation, I would have wanted the whole truth, and no false allegations added to my name. Really, the Post could be following Kant's imperative by the fact that we should know - that we would want to know anyone else's name, and therefore there shouldn't be any reason to withhold those names.
Honestly, I find the first situation more compelling of the two I have worked out: while transparency is clear in Kant's method, as well as Justice (we known the truth, and we want Justice for their crimes), the situation of harm becomes the biggest problem - people are sure they want to hurt these neighbors as a whole, and that they are willing to tarnish a man's journalistic career because he is being loyal to his code of fairness - he has simply presented a story, and explained a situation that is a problem, and instead of people doing something about the situation, they wish to deal with the problem at hand - the unknown neighbors. in a case like this, Autonomy is key - the actions of the journalist was to keep people safe (in my opinion), and as well, since no laws were found broken, why violate these people's privacy? While they were not necessarily punished in public, the severity of the situation will be found on their shoulders (that is, to say, that they aren't sociopathic and devoid of all emotion).
Really, I think of community here as failing a big, despite their desire to right the wrongs done against the child: While a girl died from this, an example needs to be made, but as the saying goes: an eye for an eye makes the world blind.
Before I get into anything, I do have to say that I wish (and this is solely in a perfect world) that social media and social networks could have a filter or a way to intervene in situations of cyberbullying - my only real qualm with this method is that how does anyone know what is bullying or what isn't? Furthermore, why don't those being bullied just stop using their account, or start a new one, without the bullies in question. You can always unfriend people, delete posts, or just flat-out block comments/filter comments.
To be honest, when you look at the situations involving a girl being bullied on myspace or anyone being bullied on Facebook, the easiest way to divert attention from the bullying and move on would be to just shut down the old account and make a new one.
Problem solved.
But sometimes there are cases when people search and try to find others that can give vital information to find out who the person is. This is when it's starting to go too far.
If it's a minor case of bullying, then generally, changing your account status would solve the problem. Its at a severity level that people don't really care. If something, say loyalties, were to really become a main factor in the bullying, then you might have people researching, investigating, and trying to locate the bullied child. This is when something needs to be done.
So The Suburban Journals writer Steve Pokin, a 30 year veteran of journalism, took the approach of writing the story without identifying the neighbors, but by writing a story about a girl's heartache and two parents who were grieving. I look at this from Bok's point of view - First, lets look at our own personal gains and ethics: We could say as Pokin that we are writing this from a standpoint of justice - we need to let the world know that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But what about the lack of crimes and allegations? What about the parents' point of view.
The next level would reveal from the opposing side, the neighbors in question of being identified, as terrified as to what would happen if they were singled out and punished as an example not from the law-abiding hands of the law, but from the rough hand of the common public. Let's face it - there are men and women that wanted to beat, maim, and even kill the neighbors that did this to the child.
Since we're still at an ethical dilemma, we should see what would happen if we take other points of views - the police don't know how to treat it, since they don't have any crimes they can tag onto the perpetrators; the common man would want to strike down those who would do something like that to a child, as well as those who protect their names. But was that a bad thing for Pokin to do? Unveiling those names could have still provided more disaster on a secondary and tertiary level: What if someone used those names to find them and harm them in an act of vigilantism.
The best thing to do is go from the other side and see how that would work out - in this case, the Post identified the neighbors after it finally appeared on the blogosphere. Let's take something like Kant's Categorical Imperative and put this to use, as that we would want to treat those the way we want to be treated. Based on this, we could say in defense of the Post that they merely identified the neighbors first off because they were already identified, and had false information added. SImply put, if I were being identified in this situation, I would have wanted the whole truth, and no false allegations added to my name. Really, the Post could be following Kant's imperative by the fact that we should know - that we would want to know anyone else's name, and therefore there shouldn't be any reason to withhold those names.
Honestly, I find the first situation more compelling of the two I have worked out: while transparency is clear in Kant's method, as well as Justice (we known the truth, and we want Justice for their crimes), the situation of harm becomes the biggest problem - people are sure they want to hurt these neighbors as a whole, and that they are willing to tarnish a man's journalistic career because he is being loyal to his code of fairness - he has simply presented a story, and explained a situation that is a problem, and instead of people doing something about the situation, they wish to deal with the problem at hand - the unknown neighbors. in a case like this, Autonomy is key - the actions of the journalist was to keep people safe (in my opinion), and as well, since no laws were found broken, why violate these people's privacy? While they were not necessarily punished in public, the severity of the situation will be found on their shoulders (that is, to say, that they aren't sociopathic and devoid of all emotion).
Really, I think of community here as failing a big, despite their desire to right the wrongs done against the child: While a girl died from this, an example needs to be made, but as the saying goes: an eye for an eye makes the world blind.
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