[Originally published on DIP's Dispatches from the Imagination Age.]

By Rita J. King

At the #140conf in NYC yesterday I served on a panel moderated by Joshua Fouts, Digital Diplomacy and Cultural Collaboration. 44 tweets and retweets were generated by the comments, and I received several requests for fielding ethical questions related to the use of Twitter as well as the publication of Twitter names in a major publication. I wrote a statement prior to the panel, and while I didn’t deliver directly from the written comments, that statement, which sums up my position, is pasted below:

Twitter’s #iranelection demonstrates that the digital culture is tied irrevocably to the physical world. The digital is real.

The developing ethics of cultural collaboration can help us avoid turning this magnificent tool for greater understanding into an instrument of further destruction through misinformation, a tragedy made all the more ironic for its motivation: the desire to meaningfully connect with others or, in the case of #iranelection, to participate in the world’s first digitized revolution.

Understanding issues related to anonymity and the creative construction of digital identities is critical. In 2001 I wrote a cover story for the Village Voice, “Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from the Life of an AOL Censor.”

“Just as playing Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t turn a kid into a wizard, pretending to be a homicidal maniac on line doesn’t make a man a killer. But what it does make him is one of the greatest ethical dilemmas facing modern society.”

Last night one of my friends called after midnight because she needed to know how to use Twitter so she could follow #iranelection. “What is RT?” she asked. “What is RT?”

“It means retweet,” I said. Then I explained the hashtag, and the etiquette of including handles in a retweet, and editing to stay within the 140 character limit.

“People are switching their locations to Tehran,” she said, “to protect protesters.”

I’ve been hearing people suggest this constantly in the last day, but is it the right thing to do? It might serve a purpose, but won’t it also deliberately obscure the ability of Iranians to communicate with one another? And won’t it give the impression that more Iranians are tweeting at a time when many people have reported that Iranians they follow have stopped?

Is switching your location to Tehran if you’re really not in Tehran ethical?

“But people are dying,” my friend said. “Look, is it unethical for a person in Second Life to create an avatar that can walk if that person is really in a wheelchair in the physical world? In that case, lying serves a purpose, to transcend limitations.”

I do not believe that creating an environment in which a paraplegic’s avatar can walk is the same as listing one’s location as Tehran. Human beings are well capable of suspension of disbelief, which amounts to trusting one another to create a collaborate narrative that highlights the most authentic aspects of how we see ourselves and one another, to explore, to push the boundaries of what it means to co-create the mixed-media, mixed-reality world in which we live.

Twitter is important. Clay Shirky just gave a TED talk to the State Department, and the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a shutdown to keep more Iranians communicating.

TED founder Chris Anderson said,”Spend half an hour looking at the #iranelection stream on twitter and browse some of the vivid individual accounts of what’s happening on the ground. Then see how a massive number of non-Iranians have begun declaring their solidarity. Feel nothing? (Are you human?!)”

We will move from here toward augmented realities and telepresence. We cannot go backward from this evolution in human consciousness, but the road ahead will be dangerous as the shift occurs. We are forming a sense of global ethics that sits like an overlay map on a three-dimensional framework of different rituals, customs and systems of belief. We are doing this together.