Tagged: Resisting Techphobia

To wrap up this mini series on resisting techphobia, let’s look at some general questions about the ethics of technology.

Inherent Moral Value

It’s a standard ethical debate: does technology inherently have any moral value? Is a gun inherently evil or is it only evil when a person uses it to hurt another person? Does it become good if used to kill an animal to feed your starving family (before the upper-middle class contingent responds, not everyone can afford grocery store prices)? And if it can change so easily depending on our use, did it really hold that moral value to begin with or was it just a neutral tool?

Continuing a mini-series on techphobia, my next point is a simple one: this happens with every new type of technology. I’m only 27 but I’m old enough to remember the same way of talking about TV. People talked the same way about the radio. People talked the same way about newspapers. People talked the same way about the telephone. I’m even willing to bet that people even talked the same way about writing in general. Some of the predictions are true, of course, while others just sound like ridiculous hyperbolic paranoia.

Every few weeks a video about the evils of social networking goes viral on social networks. Nobody seems to see the irony in this. We could not spread anti-social-media messages very effectively without social media. This video was hosted on YouTube, which you may not call social media but it largely is, then went viral only through people sharing it with a simple push of a button.