DigitalMediaLog.xlsx

On the internet, even on sites like Facebook where I am only in contact with my friends, I am a lurker. I never contribute to communities on Reddit, I never change my Facebook profile picture or post status updates, and I try to keep my identity mostly private on the internet for fear of saying things I will eventually regret. Recording my digital media usage makes me realize that I should use what I learn reading about interesting things to actually contribute to the internet, especially on programming forums, since employers look at those. 

One benefit of being a lurker on the internet is that you don't bother anybody, so I am able to achieve ethical excellence on the internet by treating it as a nasty carpet full of information for me to vacuum up. A downside of this is that any false conclusions I draw from what I read go unchecked by the rest of the community. By not contributing, I'm doing myself a disservice. 

To expand this idea further, if everyone contributed to the internet, there would be a lot more garbage content, but also a lot more people to call it out for what it is. So society as a whole might sober up and realize that they are not as smart as they think they are. 

Certainly my online life gets in the way of my offline life, I am glued to a computer screen from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. I think I would like to hire someone like myself, because I'm very dedicated to being at the cutting edge of computer science, but I would prefer to hire someone who contributes their ideas to online communities to github and online forums for peer review and exposure. These are people who have definitive evidence that they are good at what they do, apart from a scientific paper or two brought to an interview. It's on the web for everyone to see, praise, or even condemn as a failure if it's a miserable effort!

Ethical issues I see after taking this course are the mysoginistic "funny" Facebook posts which objectify women, or click-bait pictures of sexualized women in YouTube video thumbnail images, whose users are serving their own ends by deceiving their viewers in the spirit of consequentialism and egoism. I have noticed the ethically lacking policy for subreddits on reddit.com, which permits a dizzying amount of hate for all kinds of people. I have also noticed Donald Trump's morally reprehensible stances, especially on Muslims, and the media's focus on him as a candidate in their quest for ratings, ignoring their duty to report the real issues.