| Abstract [eng] |
The Thesis presents an analysis of the pecularities and spread of an electronic correspondence, and purports to offer the strategic guidelines for the ethics of electronic correspondence. The rapid growth of e-correspondence is mostly determined by the development of electronic commerce and the internet. Digitalization of correspondence substantially changed the quality and the quantity of personal mail communication, enabled the new forms of communication (such as the newsgroups); it rapidly penetrates the field of public administration and made a significant impact on contemporary forms of marketing. Electronics messages are effectively delivered, e-mail is quick and available day and night, it enables the transfere of a huge quantity of information in a due time – these are the most important advantages of electronic mail. However, often the internet users abuse the new technologies. That prompted the virtual community to raise ethical questions and to give an outline a so called nethiquette – rules, regulating human behaviour in a cyberspace. Nethiquette covers rules for personal correspondence, chats and discussion forums. Although there is no particular institution monitoring nettiquette, every internet user is expected to learn and follow those rules. Good manners are of the same value in the cyberspace as in the more conservative channels of communication. One of the most disgraceful evils in e-correspondence is spam – unsolicitated e-messages, flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, very often using a get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. Spam decreases the speed even of the most powerful servers, webpages become slower etc. There are several kinds of spam: unsolicited advertising letters, chain letters, lotteries, humor. Sociological research showed that spam is irritating for most of the participants of e-correspondence and most of them consider it as an outrage. Therefore in any set of nettiquette rules one says: don‘t send spam! The Thesis overwiews the main antispam activities and instruments: on an organizational level there is a range of instruments used by the internet providers, on an individual level we talk about the duty of the internet user to protect his e-mail address and to ignore the spam messages. Although the internet providers are looking for the new antispam instruments and new technological solutions, spammers find ways how to get around them. Therefore spam continues to be a hot issue in the field of e-correspondence. The main conclusion of the Thesis is the following: the main imperative of electronic correspondence is to preserve correspondents time and digital resources, to avoid informational noise. |
