14
NOWHERE TO HIDE?
ETHICAL SOCIAL MEDIA USE
IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS
Jeanette C. Botha14.1 The Social Media Context in South Africa
Social media is firmly established as part of our lives and social
fabric. While debates on ethics continue to contest conceptual
distinctions between our personal and professional lives and conduct,
social media such as Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram,
Snapchat and Twitter make no such distinction and have crossed these
divides to embrace and integrate our personal, professional and social
lives for the world to see and respond to in whichever way they choose.
Social media are not private and as such they render the personal,
professional, ethical and social distinctions untenable. Any so-called
‘privacy settings’ are implemented only after the user has relinquished
to the owners of the social networking services or search engines,
authority and control over certain personal information, as well as a host
of other (mainly tracking and marketing) rights: a prerequisite for
accessing and using the platform or website. Social media also equalize
participants through what Marwick and Boyd (2011) call “context
collapse”, in which sites group different social networks and histories of