PsychBook Research

Collecting and analysing psychological research on the most popular social networking site in the world today.

RTE Radio 1, Sunday Forum

An email I sent in to the Sunday Forum on RTE Radio 1 got picked up by Myles Dungan. The show was discussing Facebook and internet privacy issues:

Sunday Forum May 30th and Sunday Forum May 30th – 2

The question was basically, can traditional ethics and morality keep pace with technology?

  To which I answered:

The short answer is no – not by a long shot! As Marshall McLuhan (1967) put it, we approach the new with the psychological responses of the old. The new environment demands new responses, which have yet to evolve, meaning that we there will inevitably be a period of significant social unrest with regard to cyberpsychological phenomena, of which privacy is only one.

It will be a long time yet before the next generation of morality and ethics emerges which is capable of not only understanding but also effectively articulating what these changes mean.

 

The whole show, which was very interesting overall, a really thorough discussion, is available here

Categories: Opinion