Social networks, socialization, and values of contemporary society: a challenge for e-learning and the internet's ethics

The educational potential of social networks and the need for an "etiquette" that can control, prevent, and guide human behaviour in the era of digital communication so that the social values can be preserved and spread through the network and the new tools that promote digital socialization is a challenge for e-learning. The task of this preservation falls to ethics and education as instruments of preservation and transmission of human and social values to new generations. Ethics as a science of reflection on values and the implications of their transmission through education has the task of monitoring the proper use of social networks and social media to prevent them from being used as tools for actions and behaviours that violate the dignity of the human person. Social networks can be transformed into educational tools if anchored to values and come out from a mere instrumentality. To better explain, in the case of e-learning and digital education, with the intentional aim of promoting educational values in a perspective that improves the human being. Social networks and social media can become tools for positive and efficacious educational socialization if used in a socialization perspective aimed at sharing values and anchored in the common interest and the good. Starting from this hypothesis, the researchers who participated in this study administered a questionnaire and carried out interviews with a group of 87 Italian secondary school teachers selected from different schools in the city of Rome who, during the lockdown caused by COVID 19, attended specific courses for the enhancement of skills in digital teaching and became e-learning experts. The objective was to collect their reflections on the educational potential of social networks and the pros and cons of their use in digital teaching in secondary schools. In conducting the research, the methods of qualitative-quantitative research were used. Data from the questionnaires and interviews were collected, interpreted, and discussed. In conclusion, this study has identified the ethical and educational principles that transform a social network into a tool for socialization and lifelong learning within the Internet.