So why should we think that this generally pushes us toward goodness or evil? Cocking and van den Hoven suggest that there are key features of the Internet that are redefining our social world (60) and introducing a moral fog that tends to lead people away from the prosocial and toward evildoing (132–33). It is, after all, a tool for efficient communication. If, for instance, I am a manufacturer of boutique oven mitts and I want to get the word out, I can have a social media algorithm present information about my company just to those people who are likely to be most interested.īut put in this way, one might initially be skeptical that the Internet as a tool is, per se, conducive to evildoing or good-doing. One need only look to the subreddit r/IronMaiden or post to the wall of the official Iron Maiden Facebook group.) In addition, the end user can have sophisticated algorithms tailor just what sort of information and communication they wish to consume or would be interested in consuming, further reducing the cost of communication between people. (To communicate with fans of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, for example, one needn’t set up a lengthy and costly mail sign-up sheet or run advertisements on heavy metal radio-in itself inefficient insofar as it would speak to fans of Metallica also.
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Furthermore, it is possible to communicate directly with those whose interests, proclivities, and so on are your targets but also to do so without doing substantial research on how to communicate with those people in particular. Couple these with the fact that it is possible to reach an extremely large audience, depending on one’s forum, and that this audience is worldwide. It is or can be anonymous (further reducing its costs).
It is virtually costless to the end user (beyond the general costs they pay for data access). Communication-sending information from one person to another, whether this is by text, video, audio, or any other medium-is simply more efficient than it has ever been. What distinguishes our online lives, at least in those corridors of the Internet that Cocking and van den Hoven identify as being especially susceptible to evildoing, is the efficiency of communication. However, one might understand each of these characteristics under a more general heading. What, at heart, makes our online worlds different than the worlds we occupy in the ‘real world’? What makes cyberspace a distinct moral environment?Ĭocking and van den Hoven suggest that there are a number of features that render our lives online particularly susceptible to evildoing (43–58). However, or so it seems to me, one thing about which Cocking and van den Hoven are certainly correct is that online communities present a kind of unpredictable intensification of our moral atmosphere, likely displaying features characteristic of many technological advances in communication, and that presents unique features of its own. In short, there is nothing inherently evil about the change in our world given its e-ness. In particular, I will argue that the same features of our online existence that engender evildoing also give rise to important instances of moral progress and moral good. However, or so I shall argue in this brief commentary, I think that while Cocking and van den Hoven are correct to investigate the moral effects of our online existence, and are quite obviously correct to be concerned about the potential for evil such online worlds present, the online worlds we inhabit are diverse and morally complicated.
They write, ‘Our online-transformed worlds have delivered new and widespread forms of moral fog that limit and negatively shape moral imagination and understanding’ (147).
Our lives online-for various reasons, they discuss-draw us (or, at least, some of us) away from a ‘prosocial’ mindset to one that is much more susceptible to harm, whether directed to self or other. Online worlds create, in their view, a kind of ‘moral fog’, one that leads to a special kind of ‘evildoing’. And with this change in methods of communication comes changes in the way our moral world is organized.įor Cocking and van den Hoven, this change is for the worse.
We communicate, simply put, more efficiently. Computers interconnected with each other, whether it be by dial-in message board or the Reddit app on our smartphones, fundamentally alter the way people communicate. I was very pleased to be asked to read and to comment on Evil Online, which strikes me as a timely and important moral investigation of our era.