Can I link social media and ethics?

Occasionally I get sick of social media sites. You reveal just enough about yourself to be vulnerable to anyone who wants to over analyse what you do and just have to hope that there's nobody out there who personifies the terrible combination of both disliking you and giving a shit about the information you post on the internet.

I found a twitter profile entirely devoted to hating me, I have been mocked when my scrobbling on last.fm reveals that my music taste has been (shockingly) influenced by the the tastes of my acquaintances. So why do I bother tweeting? Why do I bother scrobbling? The only point of these things seems to be to try to look awesome in front of strangers.

Except for interesting statistical data, I don't get anything out of scrobbling to last.fm personally and other than the occasional @reply, again I don't actually personally receive any great benefits from tweeting. It all seems to be done with the vague hope that the occasional stranger will see what you have done and think "well isn't she wonderful?" or "wasn't that useful?".

The benefits I do get from these kind of websites, however, is the content which is posted by others. Twitter enables me to find out about the topics which are trending in people's conversations locally, nationwide and worldwide, whilst last.fm enables me to find people with similar tastes in music to me and discover music which they love and which I never would have come across otherwise. The statistical data amassed in these sites is almost like a huge, worldwide act of human altruism accidentally (or purposely) committed by the apparently self obsessed. We are all making the effort to put data into this worldwide datastream and the only way that we can ever get benefits from this is by trusting that others will do so too.

An even better example of this kind of altruism is the phenomenon of wikis. The fact that people will make the effort to write entries into websites like wikipedia, without any guarantee of anything in return, is amazing and in return we have created this huge record of human knowledge which everyone with a computer can use.

It's an interesting analogy to the apparent altruism which appears to happen in human relations. We create moral rules for ourselves which will only benefit us if everybody follows them, but which could make our lives much worse if we were the only one to follow them. There are so many situations where lying, cheating, killing or breaking promises might make your much more pleasant, and yet you don't because of the rules which we follow almost without realising we are doing so most of the time. Also, in a situation where nobody is following the rules, if you are the only one doing so then you are sure to fail miserably.

If one person was to just give up on morality without fear of guilt or discovery, this person could have an absolutely wonderful life, and nobody else would know any better. However, the more people who act like this, the more humanity would descend into chaos, because nobody could trust anyone or anything. If promises (and therefore contracts) became meaningless, if you couldn't rely on people to not just kill you in the street, if almost everything which anyone said was a lie, there would be no humanity; life would be (as Hobbes said) "nasty, brutish and short."

So each of us makes our little contribution to the information amassed on the internet and in return we get enormous gains in the amount of information which is available to all of us. Each of us tries to be the best person they can be, and we each can live in the security of knowing that others will do the same.

So next time somebody asks what the point of twitter is, you can tell them it's for the good of humanity.


Twitter?