Week 10 Tutorial
Through the past few decades the
globe has seen the rapid rise and transformation from traditional media into
new media in which practically everyone can be seen online nowadays. It
encompasses digital, computerized and networked information and communication
often being in digital form. This however has raised concern over the ethical
concerns on the use of new media by organizations online. Social media
basically involves networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and also
web 2.0 concepts and examples of these today are websites such as Facebook,
Twitter, Blogs, Wordpress and so on.
According to Mahmoud and Ward (2009) ethics and social responsibility
are key fundamentals to the effective performance of new media and should go
hand in hand with freedom of the new media and also social networking sites in
use. Therefore, ethics in any organizations remains vital and should never be
ignored because of the potential side effects it will bring.
An example of unethical behavior on
new media is by an organization called Creative Assembly. Creative Assembly or
CA is a video game maker organization which is responsible in making the Total
war franchise of games. In its unethical move on the new media, it is shown through
their publicity and promotion of their game Rome Total war II on their social
media platform particularly facebook. Prior to the launch of the product much
promotion was done to promote the game product as the best strategy game of the
year with big leaps in advancements in many areas of the product. All these
seemed ethical initially with the hyped up promotion but all these promotion
became evidently unethical when the product was launched. Many complaints and
protests were launched by netizens against the organizations for not
deliverying what the organization promised through their new media platform.
There were countless crashes of the games, system failures, things that were
not operating as they should be and aspects which rendered many buyers of the
product frustrated. The unethical move here is viewed by the false promises and
hope the organization used initially to gain publicity and to market the
product which eventually turn out to be a disappointment. Credibility and trust
is a factor here in actually walking the talk. CA should not have acted
unethically in its new media platform and made many false promises to fans and
people which eventually cost the organization as they were heavily criticize by
people and lost many of its fan base supporters. Even though they have done
subsequent repairs and patches to the game however the beginning tarnish image
of the organization and its unethical behavior still remains.
