Ethics and the Internet

The Internet is a fairly new medium, but more importantly, it is not a regulated medium.  This means that there is a lot of room for unethical things to happen on the Internet.  And boy do they happen!

The initial ethical issues that most people worry about are the privacy concerns.  What if someone gets my password?  What if they can log into my Internet banking?  Here is a website that lists a lot of similar worries.  Notice that exploitation of internet workers is not listed.

My ethical concern with the Internet is regarding the finances and exploitation of the workers.  Thankfully, the largest payers in the Internet game (Google as an example) have used their powers for good: offering free service, being transparent and valuing their employees.  However, could you imagine if the people who ran America's banks were instead running America's search engines or servers?  Yikes!

My contention is about the business of blogs, forums and websites, aka web 2.0 or social media.  There is no standardization or protection or regulation.  A web developer could therefore charge whatever price they want to develop a site-which is great.  But at the same time-there are no protections for developers, or bloggers when corporations are misguided about the value they offer.  

There are many corporations and decision makers that don't understand development or social media/web 2.0, and therefore don't want to pay for the work being done.  My concern is the ethical implications of a non-regulated internet-not for privacy concerns, but for the exploitation of the work that people are doing for companies that do not want to pay for it.  

Brands are getting endorsements by bloggers, often without pay, yet at the same time, the brands or corporations balk at the idea of actually paying a blogger to immerse the company in web 2.0.

I foresee corporations trying to take all that they can from social media, without paying for the work or the endorsements, and that to me is unethical.  

Ethics in Production

Business schools have ethics classes.  Law schools have ethics classes.  Even some undergraduate colleges or universities mandate an ethics class-but for the most part; film schools have no ethics class.

Production, whether it is for television, Internet or film has no standard code of ethics.  Being in, and knowing a lot of people who rely on production work as their livelihood, it seems that there are more sleazy people trying to screw you to reach their glory and money, than there are people trying to make an honest living.  And I’m not just talking about small ventures-I’m talking about major television network shows and companies that have the money to pay.

Unions can help this problem.  So if an executive or producer is trying to screw you, the union has the power to screw the executive or producer.  However, the people in charge have gotten wise to the union rules and have found work arounds.  They create unique titles that aren’t union jobs-even though it is the same position.  The workers are then getting paid a grossly undervalued paycheck, and are barely scraping by, just so the producer or executive can get a $40,000 + bonus at the end of a season or project.  This is wrong, even though it’s legal.

And don’t even get me started on the producers that have a complete disregard for the law.  A colleague of mine was telling me about his “brilliant” producer friend, who actually dressed up like a boy scout, and asked a grocery store for a donation for his “troop’s camping trip”, when really he was getting free food for his craft service.  To me, that’s not brilliant-that’s illegal, stupid and predatory.   And maybe my view on this is why I’m still only one step above the secretary…