Digital Media Ethics: Benefits and Challenges in School Education

Introduction

One of the most prominent societal changes in modern times is, without doubt, digitalization. Technology connected to the Internet facilitates communication and is used in activities like work, learning, shopping, social interaction, and leisure. Children today grow up in a mobile digital world and teenagers spend much of their time online. The Internet is where young adults live, work, relax, make friends, and meet their future partners. However, the emergence of the Internet and the transformation of social interaction through online communication has also brought about new challenges for our moral understanding. When human activities and interaction move online, so do all the moral and ethical issues in social interaction (Dyson et al., 2013). New ethical problems have emerged that are distinctive of online behaviour such as: hacking, Internet trolls; “catfishing”; prank videos; cyber bullying; grooming; revenge porn; online shaming; and fake news.

Digital media ethics has emerged as a part of the applied ethics area that aims to critically and systematically study ethical issues that in some way or another are related to digital media. This area of research has been explored by authors such as Langford (2000), Spinello and Tavani (2004), Tavani (2015), Spinello (2016), and Cocking and Van den Hoven (2018). School environments are one of the arenas where these problems occur. Adolescents spend much of their time on the internet. Children and teenagers in the age between 11-19 years spend much time on the Internet. 77% of them go online every day. For girls, social media is what they mainly engage in. For boys, watching YouTube is the most common activity online. However, the use of social media is also frequent among boys (Alexanderson et al., 2018). Children and teenagers therefore appear to be users at risk of becoming victims of the online environment (Ansary, 2020). Despite the apparent need for guidance in ethical issues regarding the Internet, digital media ethics has been somewhat underexplored in educational research. From a scientific perspective it is of interest to study our attitudes towards digital media and our online behaviour. Moreover, it is also relevant to discuss ethical perspectives on particular issues from a normative perspective. For instance, whether sharing of copyrighted material is something that is morally blameworthy (Ess, 2020).

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss the role of digital media ethics in modern school education. Drawing on recent research in the field this paper reviews and discusses some potential benefits and challenges related to teaching digital media ethics in schools. When studying digital media ethics, learning with connected and mobile technology in schools provides illustrative examples to study. Many of the issues hindering mobile learning to be accepted in formal school settings involve stakeholders’ e.g., teachers, school leaders, policymakers, parents, and students (Parsons, 2017) perceptions of what is ethically and morally right or wrong in the intersection of mobile phones, Internet, and school (Wishart, 2017). In this paper, managing mobile phones in Swedish schools is used as an example to connect to school practice. In Sweden many schools ban mobile phones (Kessel et al., 2020). Since banning mobile phones from school is an international trend (Selwyn & Aagaard, 2021), the discussion and the results are also applicable at a larger scale. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, the argument is made that digital media ethics is a crucial dimension of digital competence more generally and that it therefore also becomes something essential to address for stakeholders in school education. The section following presents some potential benefits of teaching digital media ethics in schools. Then, some challenges to teaching digital media ethics in schools are introduced and discussed. The final section presents some concluding remarks.