Ethics, search engines and video games

Ethics, search engines and video games

The Ethics and Politics of Search Engines

”And you have the problem which is much more recent because things like Google weren't around before, but where as you concentrate, and of course, we've seen this in the mass media much earlier, as you tend to concentrate, there is a narrowing of alternatives; a narrowing of views, because there is just one or a few places that you go to see things.”

”So I had a student who did an honors thesis in science, technology, and society at Stanford, a very astute sort of analysis of search engines. So this is from his bachelors' thesis, actually. "While the market mechanism is intended to most fully satisfy the pre-existing preferences of consumers," that's what gets liked gets seen more and therefore gets liked more.
"The deliberative ideal," so here we're talking about issues of democracy, about how people find and debate information in the world, "requires that individuals be also exposed to material that is contrary to those predispositions. What's good for consumers in other words, is not always what's good for citizens."”

”And what happens when that same company is taken over by different people or is put under different constraints by the government? That is, how much are you responsible in your conduct today to take steps that would prevent ethical problems in the future that you can't control?
And I think this is a big one.”

”I think that the whole Internet structure is being questioned by governments and I think these things like censorship.”

”Now here's, if I do democracy, which is one of those wonderful play words, if I do democracy on Google.com, I'll find 145 million hits in about 0.1 seconds. If I do that same search in Google China, I'll get 139 million hits. So there are six million hits different.”

Video Gaming: Playing with Ethics?

”The military has created a game developer, America's Army, which uses games to recruit and train people for our military.”