Week 12: "New Media ethics" Tutorial

 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.