Chapter 6. Public Discourse Ethics

While reading chapter 6, I could well understand and see the examples of  how is what the chapter is talking about applied to our real world nowadays. As technology develops, internet becomes a space where eveyone can access it and express their feelings and opinions without any restriction. In other words, Internet becomes our most popular public arena where tons of different ideas and perspectives can coexist. The textbook says, "The public arena is teh place that protects and promotes discernment among diverse ideas (103)." It should be good and one reason is because we are getting better opportunities to share the ideas from people who live in different countries and cultures and, therefore, we can broaden our perspective. However, sometimes it results in negative influences on us because we share too much of ours.

For example, let's think about Facebook. In my opinion, Facebook is one of the most popular social media where public discourse ehtics is lacked the most.  Despite of its many advantages, it even causes people to suicide due to its lack of limitations on posting and commenting. I saw one ariticle where a teenage group bullied a girl by posting her embarrassing pictures and commenting with sexual jokes under the picture and ultimately made her kill herself. This made me feel horrible and remind me of the analogy that our text book used. "When gardening, one must protect and promote healthy soil by seeking a diversity of crops and practicing crop rotation. Additionally, one must deccide what a weed is and what harvestable crops are, with knowledge that what we consider edible plants and what we consider a weed change over time (102)." When we use social media, including Facebook, we should be aware of which information should we regard as a weed and neglect and which one should we accept. We, as a citizen of this technology age, should be able to discern what is right and wrong and defnitely correct or get rid of it when we see the wrong, weed-like information. Whether we try to put the public discourse ehtics into practice and garden a beautiful place with diversity of healthy ideas and information or not will be the most important factors to make our world beauty.