Topic 7: Vitual Ethics (after presentation)

In this presentation, we focused on Mark Poster’s reading to discuss about the virtual ethics. Based on his argument, we found that what is the good and what is the bad is hard to be defined on the internet. Then, we used two websites as the cases to study about it during the discussion.

One was the public forum discuss.com.hk and it contains some pornographies. In fact, the censorship about the pornography is not really effective, that mean any people, even the browser under 18, can access to it. In the discussion, some said it is not really bad because even kids read it, they may learn more about what the sex is and not to be too naive. However, when we moved to another page, the content was the girls were being the sexual object unconsciously, some said it is not acceptable because the girls in the picture were victims; but some said they may be the “actresses” and just pretend to be the victims.

Also, we showed the lesbian forum from Hong Kong Lesbian Community. We discussed whether it is morally good or not this lesbian group has their “community” on the cyberspace “visibly” and they may be “invisible” in the real society. But some pointed out the problem that this public forum may bring many support for the lesbians, on the other hand, may also bring the attack easily from non-lesbians or homophobias. It is because any one can access to this website, and the identity can may hide or fake, so the opposers may attack to the lesbians on the websites without thinking any consequences which may need to consider in the real society. Anonymity of identity is also one of the challenging ethics issues Poster has mentioned about it.

This presentation did bring out some ethics issue for the discussion and found that most of the classmates are open-minded people. But if could ask them any actual advices to control the problems which have mentioned during the discussion, the presentation would be perfectly good.

Bibliography:

Discuss.com.hk. http://www22.discuss.com.hk/forumdisplay.php?fid=16&page=5 (accessed 24 March 2008)

Hong Kong Lesbian Community. http://blur-f.net/ (accessed 24 March 2008)