I received many different messages from attending the lectures over the course of the month. One that really stood out to me was ethics in relation to social media. Social media has expanded so much in this generation, to now having so many people involved. This permits people now to share content and information easily and quickly. When there is information shared, a question is raised in how much information should be shared and how private is the information. One of the other points that stood out to be during the lecture was that you can get to your dream job or career from wherever you are at this point in time. Starting from a smaller and less important position should not discourage you from being able to work hard and achieving amounts of success. In the process of doing this, it is important to maintain ethical values.
Social Media in ethics is a very important issue now in recent times because of the involvement of a diverse public. In one scholarly article, “Sounding Off on Social Media,” PhD professors and students in the Association of American Medical Colleges discuss the ethical question of sharing patient care stories on social media. They discuss a relatively unexamined practice among some medical students around the country, “the disclosure of patient care stories on social media” being “technically compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, yet is ethically questionable.” In social media, I think it is very important to keep private information, private. Especially in relation to medical records and cases, it might be okay legally, but morally or ethically it is not. Social media is at an all-time high, with people and information being spread around the internet at astonishing speeds as we have discussed in class at points. Knowing what you are agreeing to, posting, or telling others should be a top priority in your mind before continuing onto platforms like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Secondly, maintaining ethical values when you are attempting to achieve greatness in job opportunities is equally important. In another scholarly article, “The Role of Ethics in Employee Behavior,” the author Jacqueline Kott discusses an experiment conducted where the employee was to read a hypothetical scenario and pretend they were the person in the story, and had to react to the situation accordingly. In one case, one employee saw another steal a company laptop and put it into his car. The employee was given to options to turn him in to a company supervisor, confront the employee or ignore the problem at hand. Two of these choices were ethical solutions to the problem. It is valuable to maintain ethical values in the workplace because even if you feel it might not be your place to intervene, stepping into the situation can possibly create a better environment around you. If you are planning to move up into other jobs in the future and create a successful life for yourself, maintaining ethics should always be a thought in your mind. In journalism this is applicable because your entire company could be subject to lawsuits or lose credibility, like we discussed in class, if you make an unethical decision or watch someone else make it, and not say anything.
Finally, I learned and picked up on many things in the lectures we attended but one thing I think really stuck with me. If you are ethical and place moral actions above others, you won’t be put in a position to have to remedy a past mistake. In the example I used, if the employee chose to ignore his peer and ended up getting caught, he would have to explain and remedy the situation because of his unethical choices. It is better off to make ethical decisions than to take your chances with unethical ones. It is still important to discuss these issues so that in the future you can spot them and act accordingly. We have read and heard about many stories of journalists acting unethically and it ending poorly, now that we have studied these, we have a better chance of stopping them before they happen, go any further, or cause any more significant damage.
Works Cited:
Kott, J. K. (2012). The Role of Ethics in Employee Behavior.
Wells, & M. L., M.D. (2015). Sounding Off on Social Media. Academic Medicine,90(8), 1015-1019.
