Abstract
An issue that present or future professional communicators should take into consideration is deontology in the digital environment, particularly because online communication has become the main medium of information and persuasion, not only for digital natives.
Online communication is not a field of public communication, but a particular form, given the peculiarities of the environment in which information flows. A huge part of communication dynamics is currently taking place online, and the particularities of the environment give rise to various manifestations, as well as to specific deontological issues, thus we consider it appropriate to approach online communication distinctively.
Public communication in the online environment takes over all the deontological issues already existing in traditional communication media (natural communication: face-to-face, public communication, mass communication: mass media), in ways specific to this new field. However, further problems of an ethical nature arise, due to the characteristics of information technology. The speed at which information is spread, the ease with which it can be published and accessed in a globalized and decentralized environment, has led to very limited control of activities, compared to traditional communication environments.
Communication slippages such as plagiarism, intellectual piracy, fraud, harassment, disinformation, the proliferation of pornography and the macabre, the propagation of extremist ideologies, etc., also gained momentum since the Internet Age. In the academic field, this stimulated the problematization of some contemporary worrying phenomena, such as fake news, hate speech, cyberbullying, cyberpiracy, cyberterrorism, in parallel with the concerns for ethics in the digital environment. Deontology in online communication is usually addressed in the wider context of deontology in the digital environment.
At first sight, the perception of ethics in communicative practices is predominantly negative. However, the Internet is neither good, nor bad in itself - it all depends on what we use it for. Thus, we cannot attribute only reproaches and criticism to online communication, ignoring the informative and cultural benefits. |
