Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

The Recommendations from the AolR Ethics Working Committee maps out the pitfall and limits, both explicitly and implicitly, in the internet research, a field site that is sharply different from existing physical fields. It articulates the consequence of ethical issues in processes of conceptualizing and accessing the context, as well as approaching subjects and data. It provides a set of questions for consideration in terms of the potential “harm” and vulnerability for certain subjects.

Across various field sites including England, Chile, China, and Turkey, “Work and Commerce” depicts impacts of social media upon commerce, and vice versa. It first discusses how internet plays a role in transforming the relationship between workplace and home, that the internet “undermines the separation of work from non-work”. Social media could be a platform of exchanging useful working information as well as a mere tool to kill boredom at work, like mining workers in Chile. Social media also impacts women’s relationship with families when they join the social labor market. Then it discusses, by referring to professional sites like linkedin or facebook, how social media is used to post job information or to find jobs. When comes to how social media boosts e-commerce, it articulates that such phenomena highly depends on the particular context, the example in China shows a situation in a highly monopolistic state where the flow of information is highly controlled by the state and the social media platforms are also owned by a single company. The chapter goes on to show the limitation of using social media in commerce in certain field sites, drawing the conclusion that albeit the homogeneity in evaluating the impact of using social media across field sites in terms of commerce, the role social media plays is highly depended on local factors, like how commerce is situated in the society.  

In terms of evaluating social media in e-commerce, it’s interesting to see how social media companies expand its functions to gain profit on the one hand, and how companies in other fields social medialize its products in order to join the business around social media. The example from China is the competition between Tencent and Alibaba, when Tencent develops new functions for WeChat, including using it as payment site, Alibaba tries to transform its Alipay, a PayPal-like payment platform into a social media site. At the same time, e-commerce sites like JD.com (an Amazon-like shopping site) collaborates with WeChat to attract customers to compete Taobao.com (a EBay-like site owned by Alibaba)