Working in the marketing industry we often hear the phrase “the nature of” something when people are trying to answer difficult questions about things which simply “are”. I thought I’d see what the internet had to say, since that seemed only right given the nature of our business

Now I chose answers.com to provide me the information, and right there on the front page was “WikiAnswers – Ethics Questions including “Is man by nature good or evil“. Wow! I knew marketers and online marketers in particular sometimes get a bad rep but that seemed to be taking things a bit far! I dug a little further and found that, while there was a piece on ethics in marketing further down the page, when i followed the top link, to the good v evil debate, I came to the famous teacher/student debate often attributed to Albert Einstein as the student (obviously a proper little know-it-all even in school!). I am going to reproduce it here for no other reason than that I like it

The following is public knowledge and was said between a teacher and a student and it is partially quoted: TEACHER: Does cold exist? STUDENT: No sir. Physics – cold is the total and complete opposite of the warmth. TEACHER: There is darkness! STUDENT: No sir. Darkness is the total absence of light. You can study light and brightness, but not darkness. Light causes prisms to show color. TEACHER: Did God create evil? STUDENT: No sir, God did not create evil. Evil is the absence of God in people’s hearts. It is the absence of love, humanity and faith. Love and faith are like heat and light. They exist! Their absence led to evil!

Now, as to the results of my original search, having got side-tracked by that one, which caused various musings in the grey matter, I moved back and down and forward again. In the section on ethical issues in internet marketing, amongst a whole babble of technical jargon and philosophical mumbo–jumbo I found this little nugget…

World Wide Web versus the Wild Wild Web: To many, the utopian concept of the internet is that of a valueless zone-a free network that is outside the purview of human control and restrain. But we feel that line of reasoning is flawed. The internet is the progeny of civil society. This means that the World Wide Web is not the wild wild Web, but instead a place where values in the broadest sense should take a part in shaping content and services. This is recognition that the Internet is not something apart from civil society, but increasingly a fundamental component of it.

This just goes to reinforce what I already believed: Those of us that create any sort of content on the internet, especially content outside of the social networking arena (facebook, twitter etc) have a duty to ensure that the content is accurate, responsible and provides information to the reader. This post may seem to fly in the face of that but I can assure you that it is an accurate representation of what I found and believe, it is responsible in that it in no way tries to mislead, and the information it provides is an insight into the way I think and hopefully act in business. That said, you can hopefully see why I would also try to work with businesses who have an ethical base to their business. I don’t approve of “cowboys” in any line of work or field outside of cattle raising and ranching!