Our sense of right and wrong needs to keep up with the speed of our technologies.

This thoughtful piece about the Fort Hood shootings by Paul Carr yet again raises the issue that our biggest chalenge with new communications technologies is not the tools themselves but our ability to make appropriate and responsible use of them. I am confident that we will collectively work this out but in the short term mistakes will be made and we need to be ready for them and learn from them.

[Warning the piece contains a link to a video of the death of Neda Agha Soltan. I haven't watched it and believe linking it to it was a mistake. Knowing the video exists is enough]

Comments

[Cormac Heron]

Funny but I replied to a comment in my blog this morning agreeing with your point saying about how these tools are bringing about an evolution in our behaviours. Someone was talking about crowdwrath and questioning how long it'd be before there's a Twitter murder citing the recent case of the "Facebook murder". As I said to him, it's not the tools that are at fault - there are still nutjobs out there. I'm going away from your point now a bit but I agree with you that we will work it out. Though I do think that some peoples' right will of course be very wrong.

[Euan]

At least we can take comfort in the thought that our ability to work this out is speeded up too!

[John F]

This reminds me of what John Gray, the philosopher, says about our failure to progress ethically or politically in spite of the perpetual progress of technology. One of the many books I would love to get round to reading (but probably never will) is his "Gray's Anatomy". David Runciman sums it up nicely in this review: "We think we are making progress, but all we are ever doing is saying boo to our own ghosts."

[Euan]

Yes I have read several of Gray's books and enjoyed them and disagreed with them all at the same time!