Dude, where is my moral responsibility?

Moral Maze presented a diverse set of viewpoints this week, highlighting our moral ambiguity on prostitution. This led Howard and I to re-think our position. I have blogged on Belle de Jour earlier and argued that my problem with the Belle de Jour case wasn’t about the individual actions themselves but rather their implications and influence on society as a whole. I do accept (don’t have a reason not to accept) as Dr Magnanti expresses; that there are individuals who are willingly go into prostitution. Therefore, I thought that as long as one exercises self governance over their actions and take responsibility for them, then, we should respect his/her decision even if it is conventionally regarded as socially not acceptable. However, discussing it over with Howard, I found a flaw in my argument. The problem should not be about whether she decided to normalize and glamorize prostitution by publishing her account, as I have argued in my previous blog, but what should be questioned is; the action itself, further, this should be examined from a social network perspective. This means that 'I' as an individual may consider as a private action may not necessarily be private, as it takes place within the wider context of being, belonging to, a social world, that is, I am not separated out from it. I think my view on the remit of individual’s moral responsibility was too narrow and limited.

Upon another note, I found the argument put forward by Dr Belinda Brooks Gordon in this programmed was very interesting and certainly provocative. She rejected the idea that a large number of people who go into prostitution belong to the socially vulnerable section of society (75% was presented by other guest in the programme) consequently, the claim is that they are forced into their actions and exploited. She dismissed such arguments on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence to support that position. She then presented some statistics to support her argument. So what is troubling, she dismissed someone else’s statistic and presented her own statistic as a fact in-order to draw an inference and to argue that our view on prostitution is stigmatized. Listening both sides, the conclusion I can draw is whether we are seeing what we only want to see. This may apply to all of us, including Dr Gordon. I think we can only be able to make our minds up when we are presented with the research work itself and not just the numbers so that we can judge ourselves the validity of these studies.

Social media – Twitter – Fry, Stone & Hoffman

At NESTA event, Fry, Stone and Hoffman discussed the future impact of social media on the 19th November 2009.

www.nesta.org.uk

The panellists were Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter, Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn and Stephen Fry.

Discussed the many aspects of Twitter, in particular. Fascinating interchange of ideas. Fry talks about losing his faith after being bombarded by critical comments. Biz talks about a start-up philosophies of web 2.0 companies having an open usage policy and then building a business plan out of the patterns that emerge.

The Myth of Loss of Individuality

Josh Harris was on Digital Planet. It caught my attention when he said, "The new big problem is loss of self, or loss of individuality." I wished the presenter had quizzed him further on this remark. Anyhow, what I can gather from his remark is that the penetration of digitalization in our every day lives is challenging our individuality as we are exposed publicly by various digital technologies.

There are two problems for me in his argument. One, the connections he makes between the words, ‘loss’ and ‘individuality’. He is implying that ‘individuality’ is something that is expendable and denying the fact that we, the individuals are inherently unique and individualistic. Two, for him to say that there is a problem of ‘loss of self, or loss of individuality’, he is also implying that we had individuality before the digitalization. Obviously, we can only lose something that we had in the first place, in this case, before the digitalization. However, individuality has been a subject of social enquiry even before the digitalization and Weber, as a critique of modern society, argued that modern rationality has acted as a constraint to individuality.

Social network and our moral responsibility

What worries me is that I may come across as just another morally righteous preacher as this blog is about ‘Belle de Jour’ and my problem with it. Throughout my studies, I have learnt not to assume anything. Things have to be critically examined and we should look into their supporting evidence and theoretical foundation. In life, I also try not to assume too much so that I am not judgemental. I do not want to judge her and whether it was right or wrong for her to decide to go into prostitution for the reasons she has given, as I can never be her. For me, it is not about her decision to prostitute to get what she wants, in this case, PhD. The problem I have here is the fact that she was morally irresponsible to glamorise such a serious social problem using a social network tool.

When the author was anonymous, there was a possibility of the story being fictitious. Now that the author is revealed, I feel unease about her misusing social network tools to glamorise the real social problem. There is a dark side of prostitution that woman (and possibly man) are forced into it, resulting in physical and mental abuse. I don’t think I need to explain the seriousness of the problem.

The social network tool has given everyone a platform to voice and express themselves but there is also responsibility that comes with it. The individuals have to think about how it is used and the implications that follow. The experience of prostitution may have been suited for her but, by and large, there is a real social problem in prostitution hence glamorising and normalising it, can seriously hamper the effort of many people who are trying to save lives that are threatened in prostitution.

Observing future of Mobile TV cautiously

The most interesting aspect of mobile TV for me is that how slow the take off it has been in spite of its seemingly obvious technological attractiveness. The combination of TV and mobile phone seemed to be a perfect match and must-have technology for 21st century consumers. Yet, it has faced with international politics over standards (there are three main mobile TV standards; DVB-H, DMB and MediaFLO) and technological limitations.

However, the BBC dot.life blog explains some recent changes in the market, prompting some hopes on the future of mobile TV in the UK. It points out that 'the proliferation of smartphones with bigger screens’ is one of the possible driving factors for a long waited take off of mobile TV. Even though in my previous research founded that the size of screen was not an inhibitor for the adoption of mobile TV, the advanced technology with viewing friendly feature should certainly enhance the quality of the mobile TV experience. Mobile TV has failed to live up to its initial expectations but it will be interesting to see how it progresses in this ever changing marketplace.

The Death of Taxonomies

Interesting thought provoking article (Clipped below). The point with which I agree; the disposal of traditional hierarchical taxonomies. The call is for meta structures, recognising that the one size fits all just doesn't work. The semantics used, should be syntax independent. Applicable in a variety of contexts yet are capable of technological translation and mapping onto local contextual situations.

 

clipped from: www.cmswatch.com

predicted the death of traditional, monolithic, and single-hierarchy taxonomies, as well as the death of what I’d call the typical turn-of-the-21st-century taxonomy project

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Metadata continues to be vital, but technology is constantly getting better at mining and organizing it.

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entity extraction and semantic analysis create multi-faceted categorizations by people, country, city, language, companies, and other topics. Most of the content was unstructured; no taxonomy or tagging projects were undertaken.

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taxonomists need to adapt and work with technology to improve the results of what they can achieve for enterprises.

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the title “taxonomist” should die

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it pushes people into the mindset of fixed hierarchies and navigations

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Metadata architects can no longer get away with being topic generalists, they must be specialists in the industry content they’re refining and understand the end-user

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I propose embracing a new era of metadata architects, ones that work with technology

The project failure list is getting longer and longer

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Plans for the £234m National Offender Management Information System system, known as C-NOMIS, began in 2004 with the aim of allowing the prison and probation services in England and Wales to follow offenders "end-to-end" through the criminal justice system. But by July 2007 the project was two years behind schedule and its estimated costs had increased to £690m. It was later abandoned. The committee's report finds that staff "grossly underestimated" the likely cost and neither ministers nor senior management at the Home Office, nor even the project board, were aware of problems until May 2007. "There was not even a minimum level of competence in the planning and execution of this project. "This project has been a shambles."