Media Ethics

 This week, our video task instructed us to watch five videos about media ethics.


The first video explaind that ethics were originally studied by philosophers and scholars, however now ethics can refer to personal morals or industrial codes of conduct. The video gives an example of how “ethics” and “morals” are interchangeable within the sentence “My morals/ethics prevent me from cheating.” The video concludes that, while ethics can mean a lot of things, it provides a basic framework for what is right and wrong in society. This helped me to better understand media ethics as I now knew what “ethics” in itself meant.


The second video discussed the phrase “The medium is the message,” which was originally coined by Marshall McLuhan in his book “Understanding Media.” The phrase basically means that the medium in which we consume content is oftentimes more impactful than the content itself. A few examples of this is how many people decide the layout of their common living areas based on the nearest electrical sockets and the placement of their television.. While I found the overall concept difficult to understand, I do think that the theory is really interesting! It links into media ethics as we need to be aware of the effect that our medium has on the audience's life.


The third video was an interview with a whistleblower from the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. CA was founded in 2014 by Alexander Nix. The company collected personal data in order to target advertisements to “change audience behavior”. Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge data professor, approached the company with a new way of obtaining personal data for analysis. When a single person allowed their app to see their personal data, it could also see the personal data of all of their friend groups, meaning they only had to reach out to a couple hundred thousand people before having the personal information of most of America, according to this whistleblower. All of this data was then used to promote propaganda to targeted voter groups in order to influence the result of the 2016 American presidential election. Facebook granted permission for CA to obtain data this way, however it claimed that the way the data was used was unacceptable and against their policies.This links into media ethics as people didn’t give consent to have their own information accessed, never mind their friends. 


The fourth video explained what a dark pattern is, it’s a part of a user interface that’s designed to have the user do something that they didn’t really want to do. One example is the game “Two Dots” The game uses the colour green for it’s buttons to help users progress in the game, such as for starting a level. However, it then uses the colour green for its “buy more moves” button, which could very easily lead users to accidentally buying more moves when they didn’t want to. The video also discusses the term “Roach motel,” which is when a situation is very easy for a user to get into, but very hard to get out of. For example, setting up an amazon is easy, fast and straightforward. However, if you want to close your amazon account, you have to go through several unrelated “help” pages until you can talk to an amazon associate who will close your account for you. This links into media ethics as it actively works against those consuming media, consumers are used as a marketing tool or forced to stay on a service they don’t want to be with.


The final video we had to watch told the story of Edward Bernays, an advertiser who managed to get the women of America to start smoking after World War 1 by saying that cigarettes would help them stay thin. Bernays was able to accomplish this with the help of being “thin” being in fashion at the time. He also paid doctors to advertise smoking as a healthy way to stay thin. He also used the cigarette as a symbol of power and freedom from men, as women smoking was still taboo. To reinforce this symbol, he hired suffragettes to smoke during a parade to advertise smoking as a liberating addiction. Due to his work, women smoking went from taboo to something we don’t even think twice about. This links in with media ethics due to women becoming addicted to tobacco through Bernay’s advertising. How many people died later in life from seeing his ads?


Two arrows pointing in different directions, one labeled "wrong way" and the other labeled "right way"
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Reference list:

Video 1: “Ethics | Ethics defined” by McCombs school of business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWXpzlL7Mo

Video 2: “Minisode - The Medium is the Message” by Folding Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OseOb_wBsi4

Video 3: “What is the Cambridge Analytica scandal?” by The Guardian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q91nvbJSmS4

Video 4: “How Dark Pattern trick you online” by Nerdwriter1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkrdLI6e6M

Video 5: “How One man Manipulated all of America” by Freedom in Thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj_UWbifM2U

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