If you're going to be anything, be ethical

Ethics, according to our friends at Wikipedia, is "a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality." That's more or less what I remember from reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics at various points in my past life as a Classicist.

Fast forward 2300 years. The fundamentals of ethics seem to have grown and spread with technology, reaching into realms Aristotle couldn't have explained even with the four causes. So, how does morality enter into blogging? I suppose if we're going to stay on the side of social media, morality in blogging would be transparency; blogging in such a way that your audience can easily see who you are and clearly understand your purpose. It would be amoral to deliberately mislead your audience.

I'll ask my faithful readers to recall my thoughts on Branding and the idea of online personalities for a moment. I still feel that there's no guarantee that anyone is who they say they are online with sites like Facebook, so how can transparency in blogging be measured, or, more importantly, monitored?

It seems to me you have to look at every blog with a grain of salt. Hope that the author is who they say they are but assume they aren't. Anticipate lies, even if they aren't intended to be malicious.

It's hard to say where the ethical line is in blogging and other popular social media outlets. Is it fair to say that the unethical guilt rests exclusively on the shoulders of the author? Or are we as blog readers involved in the "blogosphere" at fault for falling into lies; are we meant to discern innately who's real and who isn't? Is it really like Homer (Simpson) says: "It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen"?

Then again, aren't blogs meant to be an expression of the author, and any level of reality or truthfulness vs. dishonesty is for them to determine. I guess the issue lies more in prominent people who blog: politicians, CEO, celebrities (maybe). But then you'd think it in their best interest to be truthful and transparent...

I can't take an opinion, there seem to be too many variables when ethics are applied to blogging. Sure, I'd love to say that everyone should be open and honest all the time. If that were an inherent human trait I feel like a lot of things would be easier. At the same time, shouldn't we as readers look to sources a little more reliable than blogs for the bulk of our information?

Someone weigh in on this for me... at what point can you it be said that a blog is ethical or not, and how we possibly measure this?

Even I couldn't make a NASA link from this post, so instead I turned to my personal hero, Homer Simpson.