
Disconnected
Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap
Carrie James(Author)
MIT Press
Published on 19. September 2014
Book
Hardback
198 pages
978-0-262-02806-6 (ISBN)
Description
How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities.Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James describes the nature of their thinking about privacy, property, and participation online. She identifies three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people he knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from "what's theirs is theirs" to "free for all"; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is "just a joke"; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass.
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
4 Tabellen
4 tables
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-262-02806-6 (9780262028066)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
09/2016
MIT Press
€27.40
Article exhausted; check different version

E-Book
10/2014
MIT Press
€29.49
Available for download
Persons
Carrie James is a sociologist and Principal Investigator at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was codirector (with Howard Gardner) of the Good Play Project, which collected the data that inform Disconnected.
Author
Harvard University
Foreword
ProfessorUniversity of Southern California