First, in order to explain how ethics is important in technical communication, I must first define what ethics is in technical communication sense. I would say that ethics, in a technical communications standpoint, is being able to communicate truthful information concisely in a way that the target audience could fully understand.

In our readings, for chapter two of Introduction to Technical Communication, it talked a lot about how ethical communication is heavily involved with technical communication. In that chapter it also gave several examples of ethical dilemmas that could happen when creating a technical document. It had also mentioned the Challenger disaster and how the NASA engineers could have, and should have, given a better explanation as to how important the O rings were and that if they would have targeted the audience of the memo report to “non-technical managers”, the O ring problem would have seemed to be a much larger problem to them, and they could have changed their decision to launch the Challenger. One other thing I had noticed that the chapter talked about was on whether to include information that goes against the topic of the technical document being written and what information should and should not go into that document. It also said that when showing information in graphs or other visuals, you should not make the data look skewered and or misleading. It mentioned that one should always tell the audience when they are giving them their own information or information from another source and that sources should be sourced from different areas, such as scholarly articles, libraries, and news and not all from just one of these areas.

On Wednesday, in class, we talked about the Challenger disaster and the O ring failure. We watched an interview with one of the NASA guys that was in on the decision to launch. He was very against the idea of launching and wanted a signature from an actual engineer saying it would be completely safe for them to launch the Challenger. The managers asked if it could be proven that the O rings would fail, which is the wrong question to ask. They were told that the O rings have not been tested at a temperature that low before, so they couldn’t guarantee a safe launch, but they couldn’t prove failure either. They never ended up getting that signature from the engineers. The engineers could not get proof that the O rings would fail, so some non-engineering manager decided to sign off on the launch anyways because with the information they had, the O rings didn’t seem like a big enough deal to postpone the launch that they were already hesitant of pushing back again and it wasn’t proven that the O rings would fail. It was explained in Chapter two that this miscommunication put in the notes by the engineers is an example of unethical technical writing because they de-emphasized the importance of the O rings by listing them in the middle of the notes instead of at the beginning, end, or trying to over-emphasize this critical point. I believe that in ethics, the risk of a human life should come before anything else and that it was unethical for them to decide to launch when a chance of failure could have been avoided by just waiting a little longer for better weather.

On Friday, in class, we talked about non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Essentially, NFTs are digital works that are stored on a blockchain like cryptocurrency. there is a significant difference here though, because each NFT is unique, unlike cryptocurrencies. Some concerns that people have for NFTs can be listed as follows. NFTs being on the blockchain means that it takes a very large amount of energy to create and exchange them, which, in turn, may not be the best thing for the environment. Also, owning an NFT doesn’t give the owner the right/ownership to the actual work, but rather gives ownership of a link that points to the NFT. A reason why NFTs could be considered unethical is because of the massive amount of power they take to create, exchange, and to just exist. A reason for NFTs that was explained well in “the Ethics of NFTs” article was that NFTs sell for a lot more money than an actual, physical picture/drawing/painting can sell for, so creating and selling a single NFT could be better for the environment than selling, (printing), and shipping fifty copies of a physical version with all the ink and or gas that would be used to do so. Of course, it is a much bigger waste if the NFT never sells at all. You can sell, then print a photo, but it is much harder to do the same for an NFT. Later, in class, we had to create presentations for ‘investors’, who knew nothing about NFTs and who were told to invest in a certain NFT project. The presentation would be made to inform them about what NFTs are and to help inform their decisions on buying them. There was a catch though. We had to do so as a part of a given NFT-related community. We had to stick to that group’s moral codes, values, and beliefs when creating the presentation. This activity showed me that ethics is relative/subjective. Ethical views on a subject can change based upon beliefs, opinions, and ideals. It also tells us that when viewing a technical document, we should consider who is presenting this information to us, why are they presenting this information to us, and what were the moral codes that were followed by these presenters when creating the technical document.

I learned that ethics is an important part of technical communication. Ethics is especially important in technical communication because communicating information truthfully, in a concise and clear way, can make a writer seem more trustworthy. Ethical communication can also prevent miscommunications and convey importance of certain material, so situations like the Challenger exploding would not have happened. I also saw that our readings said that plagiarizing is not only unethical but can create distrust towards the author.