One comment on Fortuny and morality

I don't have much to say about the Fortuny (nsfw-related) story Nikolaj linked to last week, except: this is the first time in a while I've seen a strong consensus form online around the idea that a particular, new online behavior is immoral. The last example I can think of is the Kaycee Nicole story. Certainly people use the Internet to express moral outrage about real-world events (for instance, politics), and certainly there are uses of the Internet that people very broadly agree are immoral (child pornography being the most commonly-used example). Generally, though, new online behaviors -- new ways of using the medium that don't already exist offline -- enjoy broad moral support from the online community (e.g., Napster and online filesharing), or at worst are dismissed as annoying (e.g., trolling). I'm unused to firing up the RSS reader and seeing a ton of blogs arguing that a new online behavior is morally wrong.

This seems like a good thing to me.

Update: My friend Nelson points out that this isn't new at all for gay people. I'm embarassed not to have thought of that.