In the engineering ethics curriculum, risk and safety are treated as social constructs that are shaped by factors including voluntarism and control, available information, social and work-based context, and magnitude and proximity (Rowe 1977).
Risks are often framed in terms of physical safety (e.g. Exposure to asbestos), but technologies also have the potential to facilitate economic, social and psychological harms too.
This is particularly true for digital media, where images and texts can be sent rapidly to scores of people across digital networks; and teenagers frequently use the Internet and phones to send these types of messages to each other (Cassell and Cramer 2008).