For this study, we have considered Facebook Marketplace (FBM) to understand how knowledge from the social networking world affects consumer choice and behavior, ie, users' economic decisions.[...] the FBM could be considered as a digital socioeconomic system where availability of digital trace data from user interactions would enable studies of population-level human interactions (Sundararajan et al., 2013).

Democracy is in crisis and one core feature is a communications crisis: a failure of institutions to reliably generate and curate the circulation of information and communications. Capitalism, the internet and Covid have all been unkind to journalism: newspapers and their reporters have been decimated. Newer media – such as Facebook, Twitter and Google – have amassed enormous power in a remarkably short time. They are the new gatekeepers of free expression, as witnessed by the Twitter ban of Donald (...) Trump. Social media platforms are also the bullhorns of disinformation: they seem to exacerbate polarization, sow distrust, speed the spread of misinformation and encourage conspiracist thinking. Can the media companies be trusted to self-regulate? What alternatives do we have? I argue in the end that the Facebook Oversight Board offers a hopeful model. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

The marketplace of ideas theoy has been utilized as one means to justify,from a societal perspective, contempora y public relations practice. Proponents confend that practitioners serve society in true Miltonian fashion by helping clients inject their views into that marketplace. One must question, however, whether afunctional marketplace of ideas exists relative to the public relations process. Further, by focusing ethical questions on individualistic practitioner behavior relative to that marketplace, practitioners may not be paying sulyicient attention to (...) the demands of distributive and social justice. (shrink)

Aim Facebook is an increasingly popular online social networking site. The purpose of this study was to describe the Facebook activity of residents and fellows and their opinions regarding the impact of Facebook on the doctor–patient relationship. Methods An anonymous questionnaire was emailed to 405 residents and fellows at the Rouen University Hospital, France, in October 2009. Results Of the 202 participants who returned the questionnaire (50%), 147 (73%) had a Facebook profile. Among responders, 138 (99%) (...) displayed their real name on their profile, 136 (97%) their birthdates, 128 (91%) a personal photograph, 83 (59%) their current university and 76 (55%) their current position. Default privacy settings were changed by 61% of users, more frequently if they were registered for >1 year (p=0.02). If a patient requested them as a ‘friend’, 152 (85%) participants would automatically decline the request, 26 (15%) would decide on an individual basis and none would automatically accept the request. Eighty-eight participants (48%) believed that the doctor–patient relationship would be altered if patients discovered that their doctor had a Facebook account, but 139 (76%) considered that it would change only if the patient had open access to their doctor's profile, independent of its content. Conclusions Residents and fellows frequently use Facebook and display personal information on their profiles. Insufficient privacy protection might have an impact the doctor–patient relationship. (shrink)

Facebook claims that it is building a “global community.” Whether this sounds utopian, dystopian, or simply self-promotional, there is no denying that social-media platforms have altered social interaction, political life, and outlooks on the world, even for people who do not regularly use them. In this book, Roberto Simanowski takes Facebook as a starting point to investigate our social-media society—and its insidious consequences for our concept of the self. Simanowski contends that while they are often denounced as outlets (...) for narcissism and self-branding, social networks and the practices they cultivate in fact remake the self in their image. Sharing is the outsourcing of one’s experiences, encouraging unreflective self-narration rather than conscious self-determination. Instead of experiencing the present, we are stuck ceaselessly documenting and archiving it. We let our lives become episodic autobiographies whose real author is the algorithm lurking behind the interface. As we go about accumulating more material for the platform to arrange for us, our sense of self becomes diminished—and Facebook shapes a subject who no longer minds. Social-media companies’ relentless pursuit of personal data for advertising purposes presents users with increasingly targeted, customized information, attenuating cultural memory and fracturing collective identity. Presenting a creative, philosophically informed perspective that speaks candidly to a shared reality, Facebook Society asks us to come to terms with the networked world for our own sake and for all those with whom we share it. (shrink)

Rapprocher Facebook du Kula mélanésien, un système archaïque d’échanges intertribaux décrit par Marcel Mauss, permet de souligner la capacité de la plateforme phare du Web 2.0 à répondre à des besoins socioculturels anthropologiquement attestés. Tous deux obéissent à une contrainte implicite de réciprocité qui, au-delà du contenu matériel des échanges, possède une fonction symbolique : les interactions mises en œuvre et la recherche de partenaires traduisent une quête de prestige, de mana selon le fameux terme chinook. Le Kula et (...) les murs de Facebook offrent une immense vitrine où chacun valorise son mana et scrute celui d’autrui tout en cherchant de nouveaux partenaires. Mobiliser le Kula tel un modèle de Simmel – un schème d’intelligibilité – indique l’ancienneté de ces traits culturels : la combinaison des dimensions matérielle et symbolique dans les échanges entre pairs et, en l’absence d’instance régulatrice, le risque lié à l’emballement de ce processus inévitablement concurrentiel.Our comparison between Facebook and Melanesia’s Kula, an archaic system of inter-tribal exchanges described by Marcel Mauss, has highlighted the ability of the flagship Web 2.0 platform to respond to anthropologically verified socio-cultural needs. Both systems obey an implicit demand for reciprocity, which, over and above the actual content of exchanges, has a symbolic function: the interactions at play and the search for partners reflect a quest for prestige, or mana as it is famously known in Chinook. Kula and Facebook’s walls are a gigantic shop window where anyone can show off their mana and look at other people’s, while also seeking out other partners. The use of the Kula as described by Simmel – as a model of intelligibility – suggests the ancient roots of these cultural traits: the combination of material and symbolic dimensions in exchanges between peers and, if there is no regulating authority, the risk that this inevitably competitive process may run out of control. (shrink)

The marketplace of ideas is a colourful metaphor with a long history of being used to argue for freedom of speech. This paper draws on its historical antecedents to begin with an orthodox understanding of the metaphor whereby the absence of substantive regulation is taken to be conducive to the good functioning of both economic markets and public discourse. This anti-regulation reading is then challenged by analysing a series of legal cases showcasing prohibitions on misrepresentation and fraud. These speech (...) regulations are explained by the economics literature on information asymmetry, which illustrates how honesty regulations maintain good market functioning by facilitating credible reliance by market participants on one another’s assertions. What is thereby proposed is a re-imagining of the marketplace of ideas metaphor which lends support to honesty regulations in the realm of public speech. One potential analogue for these legal and economic findings is identified in the work of Shiffrin and her arguments for deontological sincerity requirements in the public sphere. (shrink)

In 2008, a group of researchers publicly released profile data collected from the Facebook accounts of an entire cohort of college students from a US university. While good-faith attempts were made to hide the identity of the institution and protect the privacy of the data subjects, the source of the data was quickly identified, placing the privacy of the students at risk. Using this incident as a case study, this paper articulates a set of ethical concerns that must be (...) addressed before embarking on future research in social networking sites, including the nature of consent, properly identifying and respecting expectations of privacy on social network sites, strategies for data anonymization prior to public release, and the relative expertise of institutional review boards when confronted with research projects based on data gleaned from social media. (shrink)

Abstract:A marketplace of morality (MOM) is a place where individuals act under the influence of their moral desires. A MOM produces an output representing the aggregate acted-upon moral preferences of its participants. Individual behavior is influenced by POPs, or passions of propriety. People implement POP preferences when they buy stock, purchase goods and services, choose jobs and so on. Firms respond by social cause marketing and other devices which encourage customers to align their social preferences with those represented by (...) the firm. The outputs of MOM constitute an important reference point for understanding business morality. Even so, the normative status of MOM outputs must be subject to principles of universal morality. A principle of greater preponderance is offered as a means for determining when a MOM output is ethically legitimate.A theory of moral choice, based upon the concept of a MOM, may have potential for providing a unifying framework integrating moral preferences, reasoning, behaviors and organizational contexts with broader political and economic concepts. (shrink)

Society has reached a new rupture in the digital age. Traditional technologies of biopower designed around coercion no longer dominate. Psychopower has manifested, and its implementation has changed the way one understands biopolitics. This discussion note references Byung-Chul Han’s interpretation of modern psychopolitics to investigate whether basic human rights violations are committed by Facebook, Inc.’s product against its users at a psychopolitical level. This analysis finds that Facebook use can lead to international human rights violations, specifically cultural rights, (...) social rights, rights to self-determination, political rights, and the right to health. (shrink)

This volume is an entertaining, multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. Facebook is a social networking service and website that launched in 2004. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends,and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. With discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to (...) "friending," to the efficacy of "online activism," this book is a systematic attempt to understand Facebook, also offering perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0. (shrink)

Abstract:A marketplace of morality (MOM) is a place where individuals act under the influence of their moral desires. A MOM produces an output representing the aggregate acted-upon moral preferences of its participants. Individual behavior is influenced by POPs, or passions of propriety. People implement POP preferences when they buy stock, purchase goods and services, choose jobs and so on. Firms respond by social cause marketing and other devices which encourage customers to align their social preferences with those represented by (...) the firm. The outputs of MOM constitute an important reference point for understanding business morality. Even so, the normative status of MOM outputs must be subject to principles of universal morality. A principle of greater preponderance is offered as a means for determining when a MOM output is ethically legitimate.A theory of moral choice, based upon the concept of a MOM, may have potential for providing a unifying framework integrating moral preferences, reasoning, behaviors and organizational contexts with broader political and economic concepts. (shrink)

After arrival in a hospital, a man with suspected meningococcal septicaemia slips into a coma. One of his friends posts a message on the patient’s Facebook ‘wall’ informing three named contacts that the patient has meningitis and tells them to speak to a doctor. At the request of the Health Protection Unit (HPU), this message is later modified, to reduce unnecessary anxiety and to provide better guidance (Mandeville et al., 2013). Based on the harm principle and considerations of reasonableness, (...) it will be argued that in this case the HPU is justified to contact the close contacts of the patient individually (via Facebook or otherwise), and to require the enterprising ‘friend’ of the patient to post a modified message on the patient’s Facebook wall advising close contacts to contact the HPU, without naming close contacts. Generally, the internal logic of social networking sites like Facebook (sharing personal information with a broad range of ‘friends’) is contrary to the logic of health care systems (keeping breaches of confidentiality to a minimum). Social networking sites (SNS) could justifiably be used for contract tracing, provided that such use complies with the well-established norms of health care systems. (shrink)

In contemporary Nigerian society, the evolving trends in Christian religious culture suggest that neoliberal (social) mind-set is influencing certain practices in many Churches. The objective of this paper is to examine how the above-mentioned contemporary culture influences current religious landscape. The sociological concept of commodification was adopted as a way of ‘reading’ this religious context. The research methodology combines theoretical and ethnographic approaches to this study. The research findings show that neoliberal mind-set is influencing how religious commodification shapes the characteristics (...) of Nigerian Christian marketplace. (shrink)

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if (...) any. In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ‘complete’ friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ‘virtue friendship’ are examined in relation to online social media : reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century. (shrink)

Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their (...) characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation. (shrink)

Citing corporate concentration and lax enforcement since the Reagan era, the Biden administration has declared a new era of aggressive antitrust prosecution, bringing antimonopoly actions against tech giants such as Meta, Google, and Amazon. But what’s so bad about monopoly or corporate concentration? The standard answer appeals to economic consequences, such as higher prices or deadweight losses. This paper offers a different framework. It argues monopolizing can be a form of cheating, which is a wrong that attaches to means, not (...) just ends; an athlete who cheats but loses still does wrong. In particular, this paper argues that certain market-controlling strategies constitute a form of cheating I call ‘structural cheating,’ best illustrated by the metaphor of creating an unlevel playing field: rather than compete fairly on merits such as product quality and price, a firm that acquires rivals biases the market in its favor, thereby entrenching a dominant position that effectively forces would-be competitors to compete uphill. By framing (alleged) antitrust violations as cheating, while using the FTC’s lawsuit against Facebook (now Meta) as a test case, this paper provides a needed corrective to those citing market success as evidence of merit or skill. A further upshot is the structural cheating account better explains the distinctively problematic features of social media market concentration than Heath’s Market Failures Approach. More generally, this paper provides a normative lens for analyzing fair market competition and shows why it’s not only winning or losing that counts in capitalism, but how one plays the game. (shrink)

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as “contextual integrity.” Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the (...) sites’ privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of “friendship” online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users. (shrink)

This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the ‘social logic of the derivative’. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of derivative financial instruments. Second, that the algorithms that (...) Facebook uses share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments – both are outcomes of the influence of the ‘cyber sciences’ on managerial practice in the post-war years. Third, that the future potential of Facebook lies in its ability to apply the logic of derivatives to the financial valuation of ordinary social relations, thus further extending the process of financialization of everyday life. (shrink)

Currently, the Internet has become a part of the everyday life of human beings. The way of communication between people has changed and social networks are dominating in the lives of everyone. One of the most used social networks is Facebook, but besides that it is used for communication and entertainment, Facebook can also be used for learning. Therefore, the main issue of this paper is the use of Facebook for educational approaches by students and teachers. Case (...) studies are the challenges of integration of Facebook in High Education in the municipality of Kumanovo in the Republic of North Macedonia in 2016. Special emphasis is devoted in usage of Facebook in schools as the main questions were whether students use Facebook to ask for help for assignments or any material, and do teachers use Facebook to post assignments and to communicate with students. To understand this, there are conducted two questionnaires, one to students and one to teachers and interviews with school principals, and finally responses of people who participated have been analyzed. The result is that by joining Facebook in education, students are more motivated to learn, Facebook helps students to learn by sharing knowledge with each other and by using Facebook at school, teachers will find it easier to inform students. (shrink)

This study proposes a conceptual model for utilization of Facebook for professional integration of ethnic minorities, based on the social capital and weak social ties theories. In particular, the research focuses on differences among ethnic groups of Facebook users in their willingness to create intergroup work relations and its various influence factors. A designated questionnaire was composed and administered to 120 subjects from three ethnic groups in Israel: Jewish, Muslim-Arab and Druze. We found that the proportion of intergroup (...) professional relations was higher on Facebook than in the offline workspace in all three groups. There were numerous differences between the three examined groups: self-disclosure was significantly higher for Druze and Jewish users than for the Arab users, while the willingness to create intergroup professional connections was much higher for the two minorities than for the Jewish users. This study contributes to understanding the factors that influence social network behaviour of different ethnic groups. Our results indicate that social networking sites can catalyse creation of intergroup professional relations. Utilization of social networking sites as a platform for professional promotion might constitute a first step in the process of professional and cultural integration of minorities in the ethnically heterogeneous society. (shrink)

We argue a main but underappreciated reason why the Facebook emotional contagion experiment is ethically problematic is that it co-opted user data in a way that violated identity-based norms and exploited the vulnerability of those disclosing on social media who are unable to control how personal information is presented in this technologically mediated environment.

Alcohol displays on Facebook are ever present and can be socially desirable for college students. Because problematic drinking is a concern for college students, this research sought to understand how different types of information on a Facebook page influence first year college student likelihood to drink. Telephone interviews were conducted with 338 incoming college freshmen from two large national universities. Data were obtained from a vignette prompt that presented a scenario in which a senior college student’s Facebook (...) profile displayed wall posts, pictures, and status updates that were drinking related or prosocial in nature. Participants were asked to report intention to drink alcohol with that student if they were together at a party. Findings supported the following hypotheses: Wall posts were most influential (the stickiest), followed by pictures, followed by status updates. Findings provide additional empirical support for established online impression formation patterns, and also provide evidence that virtual cues are being ingrained as schemas in interpersonal communication. These results are discussed in relation to the concept of sticky cues in impression formation. (shrink)

As reflexões apresentadas neste artigo foram produzidas a partir das etnocompreensões dos candomblecistas sobre o que pensam sobre identidades, pertencimentos e memória na cibercultura dialogando com o Orunkò e as identidades que formam o povo nagô no Facebook. O digital em rede é utilizado para manter os laços familiares como estratégia de conexão e reconfiguração do estar longe, mas não estar sozinho, porque nós estamos com vocês. Esse é o sentimento produzido pelos pertencentes do candomblé que utilizam o (...) class='Hi'>Facebook e o Whatsapp dentrofora do terreiro. As relações são ressignificadas, utilizando os dispositivos móveis como celulares e tablets com acesso à internet, na convergência das culturas e na reinvenção da tradição das religiões Afrobrasileiras. A partir de uma perspectiva teórica engajada e crítica com a posição de etnopesquisadora que vive a pesquisa e luta por uma epistemologia do pertencimento, trago as minhas etnocompreensões do que compreendi das lutas que constituem o povo preto de axé nas redes educativas: Facebook e terreiros, a partir da etnopesquisa e etnografia virtual realizada em suas páginas no Facebook, e análise das narrativas digitais: comentários, imagens, vídeos e fotografias, apresentando questões como religiosidade afrobrasileira, afetividade e epistemologia do pertencimento. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to show how new technologies come to alter one’s initial enjoyment and comportment towards a hobby. What I show is that new technologies serve to transform leisurely activities into a technique, in the Ellulian sense of the term. I begin from the outside in, as it were, by first articulating what I take a hobby to be. Secondly, I then examine the time-honoured pastime of fishing to show that new technologies, if utilized, either cause the (...) hobby to take on aspects of traditional work or in other cases, causes the hobbyist to quit the activity because the hobby is now deemed undesirable; the technological advancement makes the hobby too easy. Thirdly and finally, I turn my attention to another kind of hobby or leisurely activity, which some have called “Facebooking.” Looking at Facebook through an Ellulian lens, there are, to be sure, some rather unsettling aspects of the activity, but despite this, all is not lost; Facebook may be used as a tool to practice the Ellulian virtue of non-selectivity. (shrink)

This study employs the uses and gratification approach to investigate how different forms of Facebook use are linked to bridging social capital and bonding social capital. A survey of 152 college students was conducted to address research questions and to test hypotheses. Factor analysis identified six unique uses and gratifications: (a) information seeking, (b) entertainment, (c) communication, (d) social relations, (e) escape, and (f) Facebook applications. Findings reveal that intensity of Facebook use and the use of (...) class='Hi'>Facebook for social relations are positive predictors of bridging social capital, whereas the use of Facebook for escape is negatively linked to bonding social capital. (shrink)

Human research involving the use social media raises many of the same issues as medical research. The publication of a paper in June 2014 investigating “emotional contagion” received extensive publicity recently because of the methods used. The approach involved manipulating the “News Feeds” of Facebook users, but the participants were not informed of their involvement in the research and had no opportunity to consent or opt out. Some commentators have argued that although it would have been preferable to obtain (...) informed consent, it was not strictly required because the research was unlikely to cause significant harm and was important. This paper argues that the research was unethical because it should have been overseen by an independent ethics committee or review board and informed consent could and should have been obtained. Regardless of the importance of any research and irrespective of its likelihood to cause harm, the ethical principles that have evolved since the 1940s should be followed in all instances when experimental research is being carried out on human participants. (shrink)

This article focuses on the study of online communities and introduces an empirical study of social media production involving an online group called “Arab Canadians”. The study builds on Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ and argues that Facebook provides the platform for an online nation in which users, whether Canadians or prospective immigrants, interact and exchange ideas about a country whose imagined concept varies from one user to another. Facebook here is a virtual nation that offers the community (...) members an imagined sense of identity and belonging which they aspire to get. The results of the study revealed that the majority of comments carry highly positive sentiments towards Canada and its people, yet there is evidence that some comments are moderated. The study concludes that the Facebook administrator functions as a centralized gatekeeper who filters online chatter and leads the discussion to a certain direction. Building on the theory of networked gatekeeping, the study argues that vertical and horizontal flows of communication shape the online debate that takes place in this virtual space. Through a close analysis of these practices, the article sheds light on the role of social media in shaping online identities constructed around virtual nationhood. (shrink)

Given the prevalence of social media, a nascent but important area of research is the effect of social media posting on one’s own self. It is possible that an individual’s social media posts may have predictive capacity, especially in relation to health behavior. Researchers have long used concepts from the theory of reasoned action to predict health behaviors. The theory does not account for social media, which may influence or predict health behaviors. The purpose of this study was to test (...) a model including Facebook alcohol displays and constructs from the theory of reasoned action to predict binge drinking. Incoming college freshmen from two schools (312 participants between 18 and 19 years old) were interviewed prior to (T1) and 1 year into college (T2), and their Facebook profiles were evaluated for displayed alcohol content. Path modeling was used to evaluate direct and indirect paths predicting binge drinking. Path analysis suggested that Facebook alcohol displays at T1 directly predict binge drinking at T2, while alcohol attitude both directly and indirectly predicts binge drinking. Based on these results, a preliminary model of social media presentation and action is discussed. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine whether Facebook use affects biological response to stress and to characterize participants’ use of Facebook during a stressful event. Methods: College students completed a modified Trier Social Stress Test including video recording. Participants were randomly assigned to the Facebook group or control group (no preparatory materials). Pulse and salivary cortisol were measured and compared using t tests. Trained coders assessed videos for 13 common Facebook actions and (...) categorized them as purposeful (tool based) or nonpurposeful (distraction); pulse was compared between groups using Fisher’s exact test. Results: Of 41 participants, 14 (36%) were male and 36 (88%) were Caucasian, mean age was 19.6 ± 1.4 years; 19 participants were randomized to the Facebook group. Comparing Time 1 and Time 3, there were no significant differences in cortisol or pulse change between the Facebook group and the control group. However, males in the control group had a mean pulse reduction of −3.5 ± 0.2 bpm between baseline and Time 3; males in the Facebook group had a mean pulse increase of 10 ± 8.6 bmp (p =.01). Overall, 58.8% of videos were categorized as primarily tool based. Participants who primarily demonstrated distracted use of Facebook had higher than average pulse rates at Time 3 (mean 85.1 vs. 73.6 bpm, p =.03). Discussion: Male Facebook users and participants who demonstrated distracted Facebook use showed increased biologic signs of stress during a stressful event. Some college students may find Facebook use detrimental to performance in stressful situations, but this may vary by gender and type of use. (shrink)

Argues that outdated institutional structures and higher educational philosophies are negatively contrasting with significant changes in today's faculties and student bodies with a result that higher education is more competitive and less ...

In June 2014, a paper reporting the results of a study into ‘emotional contagion’ on Facebook was published. This research has already attracted a great deal of criticism for problems surrounding informed consent. While most of this criticism is justified, other relevant consent issues have gone unremarked, and the study has several other ethical flaws which collectively indicate the need for better regulation of health and mood research using social networks.

In the past few years, a wave of protest has spread across the world. The particularity of these uprisings lies in the way the Internet is used to support them. Scholars have analyzed these movements as being closely related to a generation that relies on the Internet as a means of organizing themselves as a force of social change. That is, the Internet is seen as a way of promoting the active participation of young people in political issues. Public opinion (...) and the mass media hail the Arab Spring revolutions as movements beneficial to the democratization of oppressive regimes. By contrast, when disobedient movements emerge in democratic countries, they are generally more cautious in evaluating these movements as enriching democracy. This cautious opinion also concerns the use of social media. In this article, the so-called Twitter revolutions are discussed in light of the theories of social psychology that analyze the relationship between disobedience and democracy. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 43-45, October 2012.

Lithuanian football league have the lowest ranking in all Europe. By this it was choosen to analyze what strategies Lithuanian major teams are using on social network Facebook. Digital technologies based on software and social networks become more effective and integrated, causing transformation in all spheres of the global economy. As European major football clubs shown that more people are interested in football club, the more football club can make a profit. Technology growth driven by that social networks become (...) the main tool to attract more fans to club community. This has opened new science strategy how to use social network to make club growth. The purpose of this study is to analyze what strategies Lithuanian A-league teams are using on Facebook to attract more fans to their community. The objective of the study is to assess the devotees approach to Lithuanian Football League-played football teams at the social network aspects of cooperation on Facebook. Study methodology. Study methodology includes analysis of the content of the online social networking sites of Lithuanian football teams and survey of 39 questions in order to find out the attitudes of followers to the aspects of cooperation between football teams in the Lithuanian football league in Facebook on Facebook. The scientific novelty of the study. The growth in popularity of football in Lithuania and all over the world to scan all new way to attract more fans to a certain football team. Results of the study. Results show that football teams that want to capture most of their followers must use text or video-type content in communication on social media Facebook. Conclusion. It is very important to fill the content on their social network Facebook, because the needs of the followers are satisfied by the fast and efficient presentation of sports news. In addition, it turned out that the most followers choose to watch the content of their favorite football team's photo or video-type content rather than textual content. (shrink)

The influx of religious activities and religious discourse on the Internet has made it pertinent to examine the fundamental roles of language in the expression, presentation, understanding, and advancement of any set of religious beliefs and practices. One main aspect of online religious activities that continues to arrest the attention of scholars is the uniqueness of language used by religious practitioners. For instance, new linguistic strategies and devices have emerged as a result of bending language to suit trends on a (...) new medium. The emergence of the Information Communication Technology in the twenty-first century has also resulted in the manifestation of computer-mediated communication, with its attendant pervasive new forms of language and practices. Nigerian Pentecostal churches have used the Internet, especially the social media such as Facebook and Twitter, in propagating their doctrines. This study identifies emerging lexical trends in the way six Nigerian Pentecostal churches use language in extending their practices on the new media and submits that such innovations are leading up to the birth of a new cyber-variety of Nigerian English. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the claim that Rawls’s overlapping consensus is too narrow to allow most mainstream religions’ participation in political discourse. I do so by asking whether religious exclusion is a consequence of belief or action, using conversion as a paradigm case. After concluding that this objection to Rawls is, in fact, defensible, and that the overlapping consensus excludes both religious belief and action, I examine an alternative approach to managing religious pluralism as presented by Adam Smith. I (...) show that Smith’s so-called “marketplace of religions” assumes and encourages religious conversion. I then offer objections to Smith’s approach from Rawls’s point of view, concluding that, while Rawls cannot adequately respond to the Smithian challenge, in the end the two positions are complimentary. (shrink)

This article argues that the study conducted by Facebook in conjunction with Cornell University did not have sufficient ethical oversight, and neglected in particular to obtain necessary informed consent from the participants in the study. It establishes the importance of informed consent in Internet research ethics and suggests that in Facebook’s case, a reasonable shift could be made from traditional medical ethics ‘effective consent’ to a ‘waiver of normative expectations’, although this would require much-needed change to the company’s (...) standard practice. Finally, it gives some practical recommendations for how to implement such consent strategies, and how the ethical oversight gap between university-led research and industry-led research can be bridged, potentially using emerging Responsible Research and Innovation frameworks which are currently gathering momentum in Europe. (shrink)

Previous research on the conversation analytic phenomenon of ‘repair’ has focused on its design and function in spoken interaction. Conversely, research on written text or writing rarely focuses on interaction. In this article, we examine repair in written discourse; specifically in online settings. The data corpus comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook ‘chat’. First, we show that, as in spoken interaction, repair happens. This basic observation supports conversation analytic arguments that features of talk, like repair and laughter, do not ‘leak randomly’ (...) into interaction but are precision-timed and designed to accomplish action. Second, we report on two types of repair: visible repair which can be seen and oriented to by both participants in the interaction, and message construction repair, which is available only to the message’s writer. While the practice of message construction repair is made possible through the affordances of the online medium, it nevertheless shows how participants in written interaction are oriented to the same basic contingencies as they are in spoken talk: building sequentially organized courses of action and maintaining intersubjectivity. We suggest that assumptions about differences between spoken and online interaction are premature. Rather, we argue that online interaction should be treated as an adaptation of an oral speech-exchange system. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of performance circuits as a means for understanding economic transactions. The concept of the performance circuits emphasizes the script-like sequences and the existing cultural narratives that enable the believable performances of those scripts. The concept of performance circuits allows for Zelizer’s concept of relational work to be applied in ethnographic studies of economic life, decomposing the constituent parts that enable the accomplishment of value in the marketplace. The paper opens with a dramaturgical performance at (...) the United States Federal Reserve and then turns to microstudies of handicraft production, modern art markets, and neighborhood branding to demonstrate how one can study market dramas unfolding, sometimes unremarkably, emotions being generated, and background representations making loosely scripted actions understandable. (shrink)

This research explores the spread of unreliable information on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign. By analyzing information-sharing behavior on 252 Facebook pages, our study highlights the wide variety of information sources shared by several political communities, notably news published by partisan websites or activist blogs. Our results demonstrate that political parties – particularly, those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum – tend to re-share a large amount of information reflecting the same ideological positions as (...) their own. This trend is amplified by a phenomenon of endo-citation, that is, a “circular circulation” of information between Facebook pages within the same political community. Our results focus on the information practices of the far-right, tracing a clear over-representation of sources that are unreliable or likely to relay disinformation. We argue that this circular transmission of information creates an “unreliable information bubble” that characterizes far-right information-sharing behavior. (shrink)

Facebook, the second largest social network on the Web with around 60 million members, is one of the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today. With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users. Very surprisingly, indeed, in the past months Facebook has been literally invaded by Italians, Which is the reason for this huge success (...) of Facebook? One of the reasons is that clearly young Italians' discontent and frustration with the current political situation and with their political representatives is finding in the Web a channel to let youth voice be heard. Facebook is also a media for channelling Italians' emotions, self representation, and symbolic environment at the same speed of their telefonino : indeed Facebook not only provides multimedia content and a high interactive environment, but it also provides personalised features. In other words, it is my personal content which is available on the web and it make me feel as if I was in the centre of a virtually worldly networked stage. We will argue Facebook is realizing what Guy Debord calls "the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images": Facebook is seen as an alternative tool able to amplify an individual's alienation and narcissism, which, are a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism. Under Marxist theory, Facebook does not appear what Jaron Lanier claims to be collaborative communities. We finally argue that Facebook is not a promising example of a new shift from capitalism to a new form of economy based on openness, peering, sharing and global action -- which they called Wikinomics; but rather new disguised forms of advanced capitalism aimed at eroding space to more challenging modes of Internet collectivism. (shrink)