Researchers want to know how teens in Sweden develop their morals and social norms through websites like MySpace and ThePirateBay.
Over the years, ThePirateBay developers have gone from having a single BitTorrent website to a multi-purpose website that has been subject to anything from overall praise to illegal attacks from anti-piracy organizations. Now, it’s drawing interest from researchers who appear to be in the field of sociology.
“We’re going to try to see if there are social patterns which legislation and state powers normally don’t see and don’t address,” said Måns Svensson from Lund University’s department of sociology of law to the Sydsvenskan newspaper.
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“We have a theory that there are processes for building norms on the internet which look different than those which take place in traditional society and that they are moving in a different direction than where the majority of society and legislation are headed,” said Svensson.
Specifically, Svensson suspects that the internet affects how young people develop their views on ownership rights, privacy, and the handling of money.
“This can be a problem for the law when you have a young, growing generation which creates its morals and norms through contact with these types of activities on the internet and a set of laws which doesn’t really comprehend what’s new and which risks heading off course in its attempt to regulate them” said Svensson.
Very few would argue that the internet in general has little to no effect on how society operates. One might hypothesize that little has changed in terms of how one develops their social norms, but there is a major difference between the perceived norms of the average user and the major copyright industry mainly because legacy corporations have been a perceived threat to newer social norms. As a result, the differential can be attributed to a reaction to what legacy companies are trying to do in the first place, control an otherwise very open, fast and unregulated medium for communication.
The interesting part might be in the gathering of data because on sites such as MySpace, users are generally more likely to give out personal information online while users on ThePirateBay might be more likely to be privacy conscious not necessarily because there is a perception in existence that what they are doing might land them in legal trouble, but because they are generally more aware of marketing tactics by companies and how personal information can be used against an individual generally speaking – though that’s just one theory.
Building off that theory, it might be reasonable to hypothesize that different users who go to different websites will have different ways of building social norms online because different websites tend to build their own social systems. One website might have the general idea that, for instance, say that swearing online has a negative stigma, whereas other sites, it’s perfectly normal to have cussing in every five sentences.
It’s interesting to see fields of sociology and psychology attempting to understand file-sharing communities give that only about 10 years ago, the internet was considered something that only had promise when it comes to sending messages instantly rather than sending a letter in the mail and it taking anywhere between days and weeks to arrive at the intended destination. Not only sites in general, but in file-sharing communities as well.
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