Journal of Social Sciences
Publication Date
2014-01-01
Abstract
Except for very poor economies, societies around the world are aging rapidly. The use of the Internet and social networking sites is also widespread in these areas. This raises an interesting questions about how the increasingly aging population in these societies is using the social media and how the latter contribute to the well-being of the former. This paper argues that in order to fully understand the implications behind the phenomenon, a theoretical and ethical approach is needed to pay a particular attention to the concrete realities of the elderly in society and base its conclusions on what constitutes the nature of the elderly either across nationalities and cultures or within them. It is this nature when considered with an eye toward how the elderly could realize their fullest potential as a human being that is their ethical life. It is found that an ethical approach based on Aristotle's virtue ethics theory, Buddhism and Spinoza's theory. Both of the latter are roughly similar to Aristotle's in that they emphasize human flourishing and ethical naturalism; however, Aristotle's appears to do better than its main competitors in accounting for an effective normative standards for social media used by the elderly. The paper also gives an outline of how such normative standards might look like.
First Page
7
Last Page
22
Recommended Citation
Hongladarom, Soraj
(2014)
"Social Networking, the Elderly, and the Ethical Life เครือข่ายทางสังคม ผู้สูงวัย และชีวิตจริยะ,"
Journal of Social Sciences: Vol. 44:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://digital.car.chula.ac.th/cujss/vol44/iss1/2