Internet Ethics: Views From Silicon Valley

Welcome back!

 

As the summer of 2014 draws to a close, people are debating the merits of hashtag activism (and pouring buckets of ice water on their heads); Facebook is appending a “Satire” tag to certain stories; new whistleblowers are challenging pervasive governmental surveillance online; and Twitter is struggling to remove posts that include graphic images of the tragic beheading of a U.S. journalist. The Internet continues to churn out ethics-related questions.  New issues keep arising, new facets of “old” issues are continually revealed, and Silicon Valley is frequently mistakenly perceived as a monolithic entity with little interest in the ethical ramifications of the technology it produces.

 

But our community is neither monolithic nor uninterested.  Back in 2013, for example, the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics started a blog called “Internet Ethics: Views from Silicon Valley,” with the goal of offering 10  brief videos in which Silicon Valley pioneers and leaders would address some key ethical issues related to the role of the Internet in modern life. While that project was completed (and those videos, featuring the co-founders of Apple and Adobe Systems, the Executive Chairman of NetApp, the CEOs of VMWare and Seagate, and more, remain available on our website and our YouTube channel), we have decided to restart the blog. 

 

We hope to be a platform for a multiplicity of Silicon Valley voices and demonstrate that applied ethics is everybody’s business—not just the purview of philosophers or philanthropists.

 

We aim to blog about once a week, with entries by various staff members of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, as well as other Santa Clara University faculty members (and perhaps some students, too!) We look forward to your comments, and we hope to host a robust conversation around such topics as big data ethics, online privacy, the Internet of Things, Net neutrality, the “right to be forgotten,” cyberbullying, the digital divide, sentiment analysis, the impact of social media, online communities, digital journalism, diversity in tech, and more. We will also post advance notice of various ethics-related events taking place on campus, free and open to the public.

 

If you’d like to be notified as new entries are posted, please subscribe today!  (There’s an email subscription box to the right, or an RSS feed at the top of the blog. ) You can also follow the Internet Ethics program on Twitter at @IEthics, and the Center overall either on Facebook or on Twitter at @mcaenews. 

 

And to those of you who had been subscribed already, again, welcome back!