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?

Robert Nozick

Urgh This is Robert Nozick. Is this really what a philosopher looks like these days? What happened to the big shaggy beards and knowledge-laden frowns of ages past? Just looking at his face makes me want to punch him over and over again.

He tried to solve the problem which Gettier found with the 'justified true belief' theory of knowledge. Justified-true-belief was the accepted theory of knowledge for thousands of years. Basically, for something to count as knowledge it had to be true, you had to believe that it was true and you had to be justified in believing that it was true. Nobody ever thought to argue with it until one day (pretty recently) a man called Edmund Gettier wrote a slim little paper which ruined everything. Basically his counter example was along these lines:

On Wedneday, my watch stops at 3pm. On Thursday at 3 pm, I wonder what time it is, I look at my watch and it says 3pm, so I conclude that I know that it is 3pm. It is true that it's 3pm, I believe that it is, and I am justified in believing so (because I looked at my watch and it told me the right time). Of course I don't really know that it is 3pm, because I received my information from a stopped watch.

It's quite an interesting little counter example, and quite a good example of how you can get pretty famous within philosophy for finding something that we are definitely certain about and then fucking it up for everyone.

Honestly, I could tell you what Robert Nozick thinks about the whole thing, but I refuse to humour him until he removes that ridiculous tan and grows a big bushy beard.