6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Lite Intro, October 7, 2010
This review is from: Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the GoodPlay Project (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) (Kindle Edition)
The increased freedoms and means of communicating and interacting with others that has been brought about due to the technological revolution of recent decades has had an enormous impact on society. Among those who have been most affected are the young, as they tend to be predominantly the first adopters of new technologies, as well as the ones who are least rooted into the "old ways" of doing things. This state of affairs has raised a new set of challenges for all those who are concerned with that young people's well being and safety. Just recently there have been several highly publicized cases of "cyber bullying" - instances where young people have done harm to themselves due to actions of others online. However, online involvement for the most part can be a very positive experience for young people, as they are able to interact meaningfully with their peers, and safely explore social circumstances that may not be otherwise accessible to them.
This short report brings up several of the issues mentioned above, as well as many others. Most of them are already familiar to people who have been following the latest "digital" trends, and in that regard there will be very little new and path breaking material in this document. I was hoping to get some new insights from the latest research in this field, but there are hardly any new empirical findings that are presented here. Most of the "case studies" that are dealt with are actually just hypothetical situations that are used to highlight certain points or potential sources of problem in the digital world. They may have been based on actual real-world experiences, but that is nowhere clearly spelled out. This report is good in that it highlights and brings to one's attention some important issues, but otherwise it is rather thin on substance.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intro to a Book They Haven't Written Yet, September 16, 2010
This review is from: Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the GoodPlay Project (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) (Kindle Edition)
This prologue to a impending study has its virtues: it emphasizes what we still have to learn, it presages important research, and it collates the knowledge and speculation we already have at hand on contemporary digital ethics. But it tells us little we don't already know. It mainly lays out the hypotheses Carrie James and her research team intend to investigate in the near future.
James, et al., turn the bulk of their attention to new digital media's ethical implications for "identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation"--a list they repeat with mantra-like regularity. I applaud this as a focus of research, because these concerns have remained controversial since Tim Berners-Lee wrote HTML code twenty years ago. James and her team elucidate well both the promises and perils of these issues, but mainly focus on information and speculation that I have seen treated at great length elsewhere. This white paper primarily offers unaccustomed depth to this length.
Perhaps it reflects my prejudices, but I would prefer to see this eye for detail applied to work the researchers have already done, not what they purpose to do. Since they admit the research will require three years before they can offer meaningful conclusions, it seems premature to announce what they hope to find. I appreciate their attempt to lay out the parameters of what we still stand to learn, and perhaps this will prompt even more research and greater diversity of opinion. But in the final summation, this feels like the early chapters of a book that hasn't been written yet.
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