CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Ethical
Issues in
Information Society
II. The
Challenge of
Internet Morality and the Task
of Ethics
III. Digital
Cosmopolitanism and the Art of Living
IV. Conclusion
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
January
11, 2000: The International Federation of Journalists (IJF) warns that
democratic values and free speech will be threatened by the merger
between
AOL and Time Warner. According to the IJF’s General Secretary, Aidan
White,
"this merger may redefine the worlds of entertainment, communication
and
commerce, but it may also threaten democracy, plurality and quality in
media". And he added: "We are now seeing the dominance of a handful of
companies controlling information and how that information reaches
people.
Unless action is taken to ensure journalistic independence we face a
dangerous
threat to media diversity." (Aidan White 2000) Is the Internet a threat
to democracy and/or to the information monopoly of 20th century mass
media?
At
the beginning of the 21st century, the production, selection, design,
storage,
transmission, retrieval and use of information in society is changing
dramatically
from a hierarchical top-down mass media society into an interactive
bottom-up
networked society. The freedom of information, at the core of every
free
human society, is an important ethical, legal and political question
with
a worldwide impact. Information ethics is not a peripheral social
discourse
but a hot topic at the networked intersection of cultures and political
regimes. This paradigm shift is no less important than the shift from
the
Gutenberg technology to the electric and electronic mass media of the
19th
and 20th centuries or from an oral society to a written one. In a
networked
world the place of morality seems to be paradoxically more basic than
the
role of legal norms. Of course, the Internet does not exist in a legal
vacuum, but legal regulations based on different political systems and
cultural traditions and limited to geographical boundaries give rise to
all kinds of challenges within a global medium. Now the question is:
will
this diversity of systems and traditions lead to a world information
ethos
based on the principles or minima moralia of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, and if so, how quickly. One necessary, although not
sufficient,
condition for this is an intercultural ethical discourse. In the second
part of this paper I will discuss the challenge of Internet morality
and
the task of ethics. The third part of the paper deals with our
understanding
of ourselves as digital cosmopolitans.
The
Internet is not only changing the social structures of single societies
and the interactions between them but also, more basically, the self
perception
of what it means to be a human being today — and tomorrow. It seems
that
after the bankruptcy of the social utopias and dystopias of the 19th
and
20th centuries a new kind of universality based on the worldwide
digital
network is rapidly emerging that may be different in kind from the one
dreamt of by the Enlightenment and propagated in the second half of the
20th century by German philosophers such as Karl-Otto Apel and
Jürgen
Habermas with their theories of "unlimited communication society". It
is
interesting to remark that even Vilém Flusser could not foresee
in his "Communicology" the rise of such a complex form of universality
as the one created by the Internet and its merging with the mass media
into a new information culture (Flusser 1996). The core questions
of information ethics in this new century are the growth, speed, and
the
complexity of this system and its impact on the everyday lives of
millions
of people along with the dangers of a digital divide.
As
the Ancients said, modus operandi sequitur modum essendi —
Action
follows being. Who are we? What is the mold or the casting by which we
define what we would like to be as individuals and as a world society?
What are the procedures through which we manage to define as
individuals
and as a global society what we think to be unacceptable and desirable?
What kinds of interactions do we wish to have inside and between our
political
and economic systems in all their diversity? What is the role of net
communities
and the impact of traditional organizations such as the NGOs
(Non-Governmental
Organizations), in working on a networked basis in matters affecting
the
natural, cultural and economic conditions of millions of people? How do
these communities and organizations interact with national and
international
political bodies? And finally, how do we re-interpret our ethical
traditions
within this new digital environment? This last question is, of course,
of such a magnitude that it can only be discussed within a broad and
long-term
intercultural dialogue. In other words, ethics is not just a matter of
norms but concerns our art of living as a whole. I will introduce this
subject in the third part of this lecture. But let me first point to
the
ethical issues of information society following the paths opened up by
UNESCO in recent years.
I.
ETHICAL ISSUES IN INFORMATION SOCIETY
From
October
1997 to April 1998 UNESCO started a worldwide virtual forum on
information
ethics (UNESCO: VF-INFOethics 1998). This forum was organized by Rainer
Kuhlen (University of Constance, Germany). It was structured in two
rounds.
In the first round the following topics were discussed:
1.
The concept of information ethics and the role of UNESCO
2.
Societal/political aspects of information ethics. This topic included:
Information rich and information poor; information as a public and/or
private
good.
3.
Ethical aspects of global information markets. This topic included:
trust,
ownership, and validity of information; privacy, confidentiality,
security,
hate, violence on the Internet.
The
second round was focused on privacy, information gap,
science/education,
and information market/public role. I served as chair of the topic
'Information
rich and information poor'. Each chair presented a summary of
recommendations
that were reported at the Second UNESCO International Congress on the
Ethical,
Legal and Societal Challenges of Cyberspace from 1-3 October 1998 in
Monte-Carlo
(UNESCO INFOethics'98). The first one on Ethical, Legal, and
Societal
Aspects of Digital Information took place in March 1997, also in
Monte-Carlo.
As
an example of the recommendations that came out of the discussions I
will
mention only those from the group I had the pleasure and the honor to
chair,
namely: Rich and Poor Countries.
UNESCO
should work:
1.
To bring net access to poor countries by putting existing resources to
sensible use in order to promote the development of global and local
information
cultures and economies.
2.
To support the development of a World Information Ethos.
3.
To create country-specific information centers in information
poor
countries.
4.
To promote public awareness on these matters through virtual forums,
publications,
and conferences.
5.
To provide permanent, specific, and detailed knowledge of existing
information
activities in information poor countries.
6.
To promote the rights of non-English-speaking-countries and their
economic
interests.
7.
To include topics in information ethics in curricula at all levels.
8.
To encourage grassroots efforts, decentralized, as well as coordinated
activities through international organizations.
The
UNESCO INFOethics '98 Congress was attended by 160 participants from 66
countries and representatives from twelve international
intergovernmental
and non-governmental organizations. There were six roundtables with a
total
of 28 speakers from 23 countries. Allow me to summarize the topics:
-
Roundtable
1 was devoted to information in the public domain. The question of how
to provide freedom of access was discussed with regard to state
intervention
and responsibility. The role of free software to counter the influence
of commercial interests was also underlined. Besides the problem of
inequality
of access, there is the problem of abuse for criminal purposes.
-
Roundtable
2 discussed multilingualism, embracing questions such as developing
intelligent
linguistic systems, encouraging the diffusion of cultural heritage, and
the discrimination of populations created by the dominance of
English.
-
Roundtable
3 was concerned with privacy and confidentiality rights. There is a
need
to increase trust and reliability in information networks, especially
by
applying Article 12 of the UDHR to project privacy issues onto the
international
agenda.
-
Proprietary
and security rights were the topic of roundtable 4. There is a tension
between proprietary rights and using this right to reduce public
access,
especially for the benefit of institutions concerned with education,
science
and culture. The role of collective proprietary rights of indigenous
peoples
was stressed as well as the role of libraries in supporting
user-orientation.
-
Roundtable
5 dealt with information literacy. There is an urgent need for
educating
users, particularly teachers, in using new technologies. One segment of
the population that should be given priority are children. The role of
distance learning was highlighted. Some mechanisms and actions were
suggested
such as launching a series of studies, developing an observatory of
best
practice, and continuing the dialogue initiated in this conference
through
different kind of forums.
-
Finally,
roundtable 6 was devoted to social, economic and multicultural
responsibilities.
Issues such as the question of global governance, social exclusion
(digital
divide) and the ideological use of filtering systems were discussed.
Roundtable
members suggested that the key players — community leaders, information
professionals, industry representatives as well as political leaders
and
regulators — should be brought to the same table in order to debate
this
critical field.
At
the end of its work, the Congress issued a statement to emphasize the
role
of UNESCO for (1) the promotion of information in the public domain and
(2) multilingualism, (3) the protection of privacy and confidentiality,
and (4) the security issue. These concerns are founded on the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, specifically on Articles 19 (freedom of
opinion
and expression) and Article 12 (privacy).
In
the meantime UNESCO has created an Observatory
on the Information Society, managed by Victor Montviloff. Its main
objectives are to:
(1)
raise awareness on the constant evolution of ethical, legal and
societal
challenges brought about by new technologies;
(2)
provide up-to-date information on the evolution of Information Society
at the national and international levels; and
(3)
foster debates on related issues.
The
web-site is structured as follows:
-
Globalization: Action Plans, Policies
-
Privacy & Confidentiality (includes: cryptography, global
e-commerce
and trans-border privacy)
-
Content Regulation (includes: intellectual property rights, copyrights,
freedom of expression)
-
Universal Access (includes: on-line governance, accessibility for all,
virtual libraries, and multilingualism)
For
each of these entry points there is up-to-date information in the form
of News Briefs in English, French and Spanish along with a selection of
links and documents.
All
these technical and socio-cultural issues of information society are at
the same time ethical issues in the sense that they are at least
implicitly
founded in ethical theory. Let me try to summarize some of the main
ethical
issues of information society in the 21st century by using the labels
of
the Observatory as orientation:
1) Globalization:
the digital divide inside a
community
and/or country
as well as between countries, regions and whole continents is the major
issue in this field. The danger of digital colonialism through global
players
in the name of free market principles and entrepreneurship cannot be
ethically
and even legally taken for granted as the Microsoft case clearly shows.
Free software, such as Linux or CD-ISIS, provide compensation in the
sense
of iustitia distributiva, giving everybody an equal opportunity
for digital development. But there is also a need for deliberate
balancing
or compensation (iustitia commutativa), particularly with regard
to groups or societies which are not even able to profit from a fair
use
situation. This is the situation, for instance, in many countries in
Africa,
Latin America and Asia, but also for minorities within a society. Think
for instance about the children in Brazil's favelas, geographically
isolated
groups in rural societies and the disabled in all societies. There is
an
urgent need for action plans and policies at both governemental and
non-governmental
levels. Public institutions such as libraries, schools, museums, etc.
have
a special responsibility for promoting a digital culture in accordance
with local needs and traditions.
2) Privacy
and Confidentiality: These are big
issues,
particularly
with regard to a world market that, as eBay and Amazon show, has
basically
different coordinates from political and geographical ones. There is a
basic dynamic interaction between a culture of information-sharing and
one of information protection. This creates an ethical tension between
confidence and control or between methods of information distribution
and
information encryption. The dangers of misusing software for criminal
purposes
or, as in the case of some hackers' activities, 'just for fun', are
obvious.
But there is also the at least prima facie legal use of data for market
manipulation, such as Amazon's readers' list, that gives rise to
reflection
with regard to moral rules of self-regulation and fair play. Confidence
is an ethical virtue that seems vital for a world society based on a
decentralized
balance of powers. The ethical challenge is how to create institutions
and procedures that foster this virtue as an individual and social one
without falling into Big Brother nightmares.
3) Content
Regulation: This is one of the most
tricky
issues because
of the specific qualities of the kind of good we call information, such
as its volatility, its easy worldwide distribution and its
non-consumption
after its use. A whole economy that was based on the property rights of
material objects has to shift into this new situation. Not all
cultures
are rooted in European modernity with its sense of individual rights
and
duties. Cultures that are basically oriented toward community rights
and
sharing processes, or in which the traditions of producing through
imitation
play a fundamental positive role, may be in ethical contradiction in a
world wide medium such as the Internet. This does not necessarily mean
some kind of digital clash of civilizations such as Samuel Huntington
suggests.
There is a huge potential of hybridization between different kinds of
creative
potentialities. We need a Comparative Digital Cultural Research that
may
start with Comparative Cultural Website Research and lead to synergies
between different cultural interpretations of the freedom of
expression.
The case of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" being digitally availabile under
Bertelsmann's
control, child pornography and terrorist groups misusing the Internet
make
clear how necessary global agreements are and how difficult it is to
achieve
this within our present legal and cultural diversity. Action in these
fields
should be preceded and followed by global and local intercultural
ethical
reflection.
4) Universal
Access: This issue concerns the
question of
growth and
coordination of a decentralized and interactive system that is being
monitored
and influenced by various actors and global players such as the
hardware
and software industry, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the
Internet
Society (ISOC), the W3-Constorium, various UN Agencies and NGOs,
private
groups of all kinds, etc. This 'chaotic' management offers
opportunities
for creativity and balance, but also the potential for disorder and
vandalism.
The huge amount of all kinds of information on the web gave rise to
orientation
systems such as search engines and portals that may guide but also
manipulate
their users in various ways. The challenge of multilingualism is
an
as yet unmet challenge and will be an essential indicator of cultural
pluralism,
one of the basic human rights. The question of access cannot be
separated
from the question of sustainability. This is a big technical and
ethical
issue, particularly for the emerging digital libraries and archives
that
are committed to the preservation of cultural heritages in digital
form.
Who
has done and is doing research in this field? What and where are the
results?
As I tried to answer these questions last year I was confronted with
chaos.
This unpleasant situation led me to create the International
Center for Information Ethics (ICIE 2000). I received strong
support
for this from my colleagues Wolfgang von Keitz (FH Stuttgart), Tom
Froehlich
(Kent State University), Marti Smith (Long Island University) and
Barbara
Rockenbach (Yale University) who had designed the information ethics
website
at University of Pittsburgh and who now provides the mirror site of
ICIE
in Yale. Creating this virtual center was of course primarily an
information
management challenge but, more basically, it was and is an effort to
create
a community of people who think together and communicate with each
other
about their projects in this field.
Finally
I would like to mention UNESCO's World Communication and Information
Report
1999-2000 which provides statistical data as well as reports on the
socio-cultural
impact of communication and information technologies (UNESCO 1999-2000).
Let
me now turn to the challenge of information society for ethical theory.
II.
THE CHALLENGE OF INTERNET-MORALITY AND THE TASK OF ETHICS
The
relation
'face to face' is, according to Emmanuel Lévinas, the basic
ethical
relation (Lévinas 1968). Information society is based on the
interface.
Therefore we live in an non-ethical society. Is this valid reasoning?
Another
kind of reasoning could be: new media and global networking have
created
a kind of universal dialogue that is different from the one dreamt of
and
demanded by the Enlightenment and goes beyond Habermas' criticisms of
the
mass media society "as a degenerated public space, filled up with
images
and virtual realities" (Habermas 1995). But, in fact, the interface
does
not make Lévinas' insight about the interfacial relation as the
ethical medium par excellence obsolete, but rather, mass media and
particularly
the Internet have created new conditions of human interaction that
force
us to restate the question of the medium as a core ethical question. I
will now contrast briefly three information ethics paradigms, namely
the
freedom of speech in ancient Greece, modernity's freedom of the press
and
the question of freedom of access in our present and future information
society.
In
the Western tradition, particularly in Plato's dialogues, the question
of knowledge mediation through living speech instead of the surrogate
of
writing plays a key role. This is already a transformation of the
ancient
pre-Socratic ethos where messages (Greek: angelía)
were vertically transmitted from the centers of power such as gods or
kings,
poets being the mediators, i.e. announcers and interpreters (Greek: hermeneus),
of such an angeletic process. The basis of such a 'mytho-logical'
information
ethics is radically questioned by the new Socratic-Platonic paradigm of
knowledge-sharing on the basis of a horizontal discourse called
philosophia
(Capurro 1996). The controversy between oral and written language and
the
thesis of what we call after Derrida, logocentrism is much less
important
for Aristotle. His prosaic style as well as the difference between
esoteric
and exoteric writings give account of a transformation of the premises
of information ethics coming from the Socratic-Platonic tradition.
There
is a shift from an ethics of information-concealing to an ethics of
information-sharing.
A classic example of the first one is Pythagoras. Paradoxically it was
Pythagoras who called himself a philosophos for the first time.
Raffael of Urbino has portrayed both paradigms in his "School of
Athens"
(Capurro 1999). The information ethos of Greek society was based on the
principle of freedom of speech, a prerogative that was limited to male
adult Athenian citizens. The Kynical school propagated a radical view
of
this freedom and used for it the word parrhesia.
The
invention of printing and the process of what came to be called
secularization
offer some parallels to the information ethics controversy in
antiquity.
Again there is the power of a hierarchical and dogmatic angeletic
structure that is being questioned not only by the basic assumption
that
everybody can interpret by her/himself the holy message, but also by
the
fact that, thanks to its translation into vernacular languages and its
generalized printed distribution, everybody is able to obtain the Book
and become an interpreter of a text and not just a viewer of images
represented
on the walls and windows of medieval cathedrals. Immanuel Kant
formulated
the demand for a free public space in his writings Beantwortung der
Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? and Was heißt: Sich in
Denken
orientiren? (Kant 1968). Kant distinguishes between a private and a
public use of reason. This distinction is counterintuitive with regard
to our present understanding of these terms. For Kant the private
use of reason was its use under political or religious constraints
which
was mostly of an oral kind, for instance face-to-face with a religious
community. The public use of reason is the use we make of it without
any
kind of pre-established frames and duties with regard to a particular
societal
group but when we publish our thoughts and make them available to a
universal
"world of readers" ("Leserwelt"). Kant had the readers of the
scientific
community especially in mind. This is a reversal of the concepts of
public
sphere and publication in Antiquity. It is, as Kant says, a
"reformation
of the paradigm of thinking " ("Reform der Denkungsart") because it
introduces
a universal censorship-free sphere, which he calls the "society of
cosmopolitans"
("Weltbürgergesellschaft"). Printing as the medium for this sphere
provides a potential universal availability of thought. The question of
a universal medium was for Kant not just something additional to
knowledge.
The freedom of speech and writing cannot be separated from the freedom
of thinking. He writes: "How and how rightly would we think if we would
not think together with others, to whom we can communicate our thoughts
and they theirs!" (Kant, AA, VIII, p. 144) In other words, it is not
enough
for authorities to say: 'You are free to think what you want, but not
to
communicate it!' Thinking is a social process that cannot be
disconnected
from the medium through which it is shared. Kant's medium of free
public
thinking was printing.
Kant's
information ethics is based on several dualisms: private vs. public use
of reason, scientific freedom vs. citizen's duties, orality vs.
printing,
freedom of thinking vs. freedom of acting, author vs. publisher,
freedom
vs. Censorship, etc. Jürgen Habermas has revisited this paradigm
"from
the historical distance of two hundred years" (Habermas 1995).
According
to Habermas, Kant counted on the possibility of a free public
discussion
about the relation between the constitutional principles and the
"light-shunning"
(Kant) intentions of governments. He counted on a transparent public
sphere
open to arguments and on the relatively small size of the group of
educated
citizens, his "republic of scholars" ("Gelehrtenrepublik"). But this
public
sphere has changed radically today. Kant could not foresee today's
media
revolutions. The world of printing has developed into the opaque and
chaotic
"Gutenberg galaxy". The public sphere was occupied later on by
electronic
media that, according to Habermas, dominate and distort it with their
images
and virtual realities. Habermas makes no difference between the
hierarchical
one-to-many structure of the mass media of the 20th century and the
decentralized
structure of the Internet, even though this text was published in 1995,
after the Internet had already entered its phase of expansion.
It
was a different situation for Vilém Flusser who, in his Communicology,
distinguishes between dialogical and discursive media. Since he died in
1991, however, he could not take into account what came upon the scene
a few years later (Flusser 1996). Dialogical media have the structure
of
circles or networks and are used to produce new information. Discursive
media have a pyramidal structure and are used to distribute
information.
Flusser criticizes the mass media society as a society in which the
dialogical
media are inserted into and dominated by the pyramidal structure of TV
and broadcasting. He did not foresee a hybrid medium such as the
Internet,
where dialogical structures may become also a universal medium of
information
production and distribution. Although prima facie a written medium,
Internet
services such as virtual forums and mailing lists have some qualities
of
oral exchange. The freedom of the press is not threatened because AOL
and
Timer Warner merge. What is threatened is the dual system of modernity
with its separation of individual and mass media. We are not facing "a
dangerous threat to media diversity", but a historic opportunity for
overcoming
20th century media monopoly, mediocracy and its mediocrity — exceptions
confirm the rule — as criticized by Flusser.
But,
of course, the Internet is not the kind of super-medium its prophets
proclaim
it to be, mostly in the name of profit! Its universality is paradoxical
since it makes explicit in an 'uncommon' place the differences and
contradictions
between moral and legal information and communication norms in
different
states, regions and cultures. There is a tension between Internet
moralities
on the one hand, and what we could call a World Information Ethos on
the
basis of the minima moralia of the UDHR, on the other. This tension at
the practical level is reproduced at the theoretical level. We are
facing
an inverted situation compared to the one we had in the last two
hundred
years. Since modernity, freedom of information meant restricting state
power on information and communication through the creation of a
censorship-free
space within a state or a group of states. At the end of modernity a
universal
medium may grant states and cultures their own particular rules. This
is
the key moral and ethical challenge to information society in the 21st
century.
Freedom
of information in a networked world does not necessarily mean anarchy
or
anomy. A minimum of political and legal consensus in specific
questions,
for instance, in the field of children pornography or terrorism, may
leave
enough freedom for an autonomous development of the Internet.
Self-regulation
is also in this case the elixir for creativity. At the same time, the
institutionalization
of the ethical, political and legal discourse in international
governmental
organizations such the UN is necessary. Kant considered two conditions
for the process of enlightenment: its institutionalization as a
"permanent
congress of states", and the free distribution of printed works.
Practical
political consensus should be open to criticism and dissent coming from
the non-governmental side. Free press and the abolition of censorship
were
the responses of modernity to the challenge of printing. This changed
with
the rise of broadcasting and TV and is changing now at the beginning of
the 21st century with the Internet. The name of this change is 'freedom
of access' which includes not just freedom of obtaining information
from
an independent or 'neutral' sender, but freedom of sending oneself as
an
individual and as a community. Economic, technical and physical
barriers
restricted this possibility up until now. The Internet may reduce these
barriers but it may also create new ones through a world wide digital
divide.
The ethical ideal of an "unlimited community of communication"
propagated
by the philosophers Karl-Otto Apel (K.-O. Apel 1976) and Jürgen
Habermas
(Habermas 1988) could be identified prima facie with a medium where
bodily
experience plays a secondary role. But the Internet is not a kind of
ideal
universal medium where pure minds may exchange rational arguments
in a domination-free sphere. All kinds of mythologies about nature and
the social impact of cyberspace make it often appear as a surrogate for
religious ideals in the form of techno-theology. But cyberspace is not
a preliminary stage to a kind of cyber-religion of pure digital beings
nor it is a place where humankind may necessarily reach a higher degree
of rationality, although it allows all kinds of social synergies and
makes
possible knowledge exchange in hitherto unknown ways.
The
moral challenge of the complex non-hierarchical information society of
the 21st century may be internationally engaged on the basis of the
UDHR.
But the conflicts between the legal, ethical and moral dimensions have
to be solved at the level of the individual, institutions and society
as
a whole without the possibility of giving primacy a priori to the legal
over the ethical and the moral dimensions (legalism), or to the moral
over
the legal and the ethical dimensions (fundamentalism) or to the ethical
over the legal and the moral dimensions (ethical rigorism). In the Nicomachean
Ethics Aristotle writes that "we should not strive for the same
kind
of accuracy (akribés) in the same way in all kinds of
investigations"
(Arist. NE 1094 b 12). This is particularly the case with questions
concerning
what is good or appropriate for human beings already within the global
framework of the state (polis) with its "oppositions" (diaphorán)
and "instabilities" (plánen). Our "differing" and
"unstable"
human nature is looking for a home on the Internet. Through the
transparent
accuracy of the digital, the twilight and disturbing fuzziness of human
existence shines forth. The result is an uncanny medium, a global
network,
where homepages provide only an awkward dwelling place.
III.
DIGITAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE ART OF LIVING
Sinope
is a small town on the Black Sea. When Diogenes of Sinope was asked in
the metropolis Athens where he came from, he answered: "I am a citizen
of the world" (kosmopolítes) (Busch/Horstmann 1976). Who
are we today? We are digital cosmopolitans or netizens — from Sinope.
Diogenes
was telling the Athenians that to be a citizen of the world means more
than to be born in Athens. The Athenians wanted him to
acknowledge
that he came from a small provincial town. We live in the digital
cosmos
but this is not the opposite of a metropolis nor of a provincial town.
Roland Robertson calls this hybridization between the local and the
global
'glocalization' (Robertson 1995). The debate between universalists and
particularists is more subtle today than in the times of the
Enlightenment.
The following three hundred years of European history have been
dominated
by the contradiction between cosmopolitanism and national state. Today
we are confronted with different kinds of cultural hybridization.
Japanese
society is an interesting example of what we could call a non-European
modernity. In other words, modern technology does not add up to Western
society, homogenization and domination by Western technological
civilization.
There is not the one, unique modernity nor the one, unique project of
modernity.
Modifying Heidegger's formula we could say that our being is a
being-in-the-networked-world.
But what is a net?
Although
this concept pervades our lives and our scientific paradigms there are
only few literary and philosophical investigations on this subject. Let
me recall some classical texts. In the New Testament (Matthew 4, 20) we
read: "Soon they abandoned their nets and followed him". After the
resurrection,
Jesus appeared at Lake Tiberias and said to Peter and others: "Throw
your
nets to the right of the ship and you will find fish." (John 21, 6).
Nets,
particularly fisher's nets, are useful for living but we can also
become
entangled in them and become ensnared like prey. When Odysseus killed
the
suitors, they laid down "like fish fishermen pulled out of the bluish
sea
in the different meshes of their nets into the hollow cliffs" (Od. 24,
386). The meaning of 'net' was ambivalent for thousands of years.
Building
a net, i.e. the art of spinning is a common metaphor for thinking and
living.
Sometimes we follow the thread of an argument or we lose the thread of
what someone was saying.
At
other times we try to gather up the thread
of our life, we weave a web of lies or we just thread our way through
the
crowd. Today the net concept is used less in an agrarian than in a
technical
non-ambivalent context like the networks of streets and rails,
telephones
and air routes, electricity and media. Computer networks are used to
simulate
neural ones and vice versa. Due to these mainly positive connotations
we
have high expectations with regard to computer networks. They promise
us,
as the Austrian philosopher Gerhard Fröhlich remarks, a free flow
of information, the elimination of spatial inequalities, and easy
learning
(Fröhlich 1996). In the social field networks suggest an even
structure
of threads, meshes and knots. But, in fact, spinning our lives is a
highly
differentiated and creative activity and there is no thread of Ariadne
to help us out of the labyrinth of life.
The
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has remarked that since the 19th
century,
philosophy has been dominated by the engine metaphor (Vattimo 1997).
The
diametrically opposed figures, Heidegger and Adorno, were afraid that
because
of the dominance of deterministic mechanism we would lose the
dimensions
of the unexpected and freedom. According to Vattimo, postmodernity
means
saying goodbye to the engine metaphor and welcoming the net metaphor.
This
metaphor implies giving up the idea of a center as well as of a final
knot,
the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum. Under these premises philosophy
has to rethink the concepts of freedom and history and also the concept
of the Self. The Self is no longer the identical Ego but emerges
dynamically
not only out of the neuron web of our brains but, as Hannah Arendt
remarks,
out of the "'web' of human relationships" we call our lives (Arendt
1958:
183).
Our
lives are what are in-between, our 'inter-ests', which
include
not only the disclosure of some worldly reality but also of ourselves
to
each other. This second subjective in-between is, as Arendt remarks,
"not
tangible", but "no less real than the world of things we visibly have
in
common. We call this reality the "web" of human relationships,
indicating
by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality" (ibid.). We have now
begun
to weave, in the digital medium, a world wide web. The 21st century
will
produce a digital culture whose morality or art of living is already
emerging.
Sherry Turkle and Esther Dyson tell us some of the stories of how "Life
on the Screen" and "A Design for Living in the Digital Age" is
shining
through already (Turkle 1995; Dyson 1997).
Information
ethics is confronted with the challenge of thinking about the
conditions
of possibility of living projected by the digital casting of being. As
the scholastic said: modus operandi sequitur modum essendi. Action
follows
being. We live in the information age. But what is information? It is
one
of the most controversial concepts of the 20th century
(Capurro/Fleissner/Hofkirchner
1999). This complexity can be reduced, in a first step, to two
controversial
interpretations: for the first, information is a specific human
phenomenon,
inseparable from human culture, for the second interpretation it is
something
pervading all reality that can be equated, as the word itself suggests
(Capurro 1978), with the concept of form or structure. There is a gulf
separating the culturalists from the naturalists (Capurro 2000a). One
solution
to this dilemma are the paths of thinking opened up by the physicist
Carl-Friedrich
von Weizsäcker. He connects the concept of information with such
traditional
concepts as 'idea' and 'morphé' as coined by Plato and
Aristotle.
According
to Weizsäcker "information is only what can be
understood",
i.e. it is related to human language, but, and this is an ontological
thesis,
"information is only that which produces information" (Weizsäcker
1973: 351-352). To put it in other words: information is the "known
form"
and the form or structure of things that reproduce themselves. This
last
dimension is called by Weizsäcker "objectivized semantics". Being
part of the evolutionary process where 'in-formation' is produced and
known,
we cannot take a position outside of it. This is the reason why,
according
to Weizsäcker, human language is of a fuzzy nature and our efforts
to create unambiguous concepts, i.e. information, are limited. This
situation,
similar to the principle of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics, is,
depending
on the point of view, a danger or an opportunity (Weizsäcker 1992:
344). What follows from this for an ethical theory of information in
general
and for an ethics of information society in particular? We could
tentatively
try to formulate an imperative like: 'Thou shalt not damage
in-formation'
or, positively said: 'Thou shalt produce in-formation'.
The
Oxford philosopher Luciano Floridi puts it this way:
"0.
entropy ought not to be caused in the infosphere (null law)
1.
entropy ought to be prevented in the infosphere
2.
entropy ought to be removed from the infosphere
3.
information welfare ought to be promoted by extending (information
quantity),
improving (information quality) and enriching (information variety) the
infosphere." (Floridi 1999)
But
do we not have more than enough information in information society? It
seems that this imperative would make the situation even worse than it
is! Information society produces and deletes myriads of bits every day.
The information ethical imperative makes sense when it is understood
under
the ontological premise that being should be preserved and improved or
that being is better than non-being. In information society the
question
of being is stated in terms of digitization. According to the famous
dictum
of Bishop Berkeley: "Their esse is percipi" (Berkeley
1965:
62). Nothing can be real without a mind perceiving things. Kant and
Berkeley
are constructivists. Kant leaves our knowledge about the activity of
the
divine architect void and splits the real into given data and the human
constructors' rules. Today we live in the age of digital
constructivism.
What cannot be digitized is not (real). To be, is to be digital. Esse
est computari. This thesis does not simply deny the existence
of matter. It is at the same time an epistemological and an ontological
thesis: we believe that we have understood something in it’s being when
we are able to make it or to re-make it digitally. Digital beings are
not
just the sum of their bits. They must have a form or structure. Being
is
in-formation. Esse est informari. The old dichotomy matter/form
is substituted by a new one: electromagnetic medium/digital forms. But,
following Weizsäcker, there is a circularity between knowing and
producing
forms that seems basic to any kind of information process, not just to
the digital information process. Nevertheless the digital casting of
being
seems to have hegemony in the 21st century.
What
is the impact of digital ontology on human affairs? In the human sphere
the general digital imperative can be formulated as follows: 'Thou
shalt
not damage other people's digital data'. This human digital imperative
— a modified form of classic ethical imperatives such as 'Thou shalt
not
kill' or 'Thou shalt not lie' — seems to me necessary since our private
and public lives are becoming more and more conditioned by their
digitization.
Digital vandalism may damage a whole economy and ruin the lives and
affairs
of millions of people. Although humanism, i.e. the primacy of the
perpetuation
of human 'in-formation', underlies this imperative, it would be
ethically
unwise to restrict this imperative to human data since our lives are
immersed
or networked in an 'in-formation' process that was not initiated by us
and whose potentialities and scope remain partially veiled. Our
unveiling
processes through different ontological castings are always tentative.
It would be a terrible misunderstanding to conceive today's digital
ontology
as a metaphysical dogma denying all other castings of being their own
unveiling
properties. This digital casting also does not necessarily mean
reducing
all beings to their computability, but it can be conceived as a medium
for creative 'in-formation'.
What
does it mean to live in a networked world? Following Habermas (Foucault
1981), Michel Foucault distinguishes, between three types of
technology,
namely:
-
"technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or
manipulate things",
-
"technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings,
symbols, or significations",
-
"technologies of power which determine the conduct of individuals and
submit
them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject"
(Foucault
1988: 18)
But
he adds to them a fourth and decisive one, namely:
-
"technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their
own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on
their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as
to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of
happiness,
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." (ibid.)
These
four types of technology interact with each other. According to
Foucault,
who adheres to Pierre Hadot's views on the nature of Greek and Roman
philosophy
(Hadot 1993 and 1995), the most important moral principle in ancient
philosophy
was: "Take care of oneself". Modern information technologies are, no
less
than ancient technologies of writing, non-neutral (Froehlich 1990),
i.e.
they have to be conceived and used, individually and socially, as
practices
of self-regulation (Capurro 1995 and 1996). Western ethics has been
dominated
since the Enlightenment by the ideal of universal norms or 'oughts'
that,
although within the individual, operate in a heterotopian or absolute
manner.
This kind of "code-oriented" morality (Foucault) leaves aside the older
tradition of "self-oriented" morality. We need neither an apparent
harmonic
integration nor the discrimination of one from the other, but a
productive
tension between both (Krämer 1992). This is also the case with
regard
to information ethics. While the ethical categorical imperative allows
the moral limits of actions ('Thou shalt not....') to appear, the
ethical
hypothetical indicative, as we could call it, looks for successful
forms
of life in the sense that they are the product of a common and fair
process
of deliberation, where 'We need...', 'We wish...', 'May we...', 'Would
you like...', 'Do you prefer...' indicate different kinds of life
projects
and castings within the framework of mutual respect, care for each
other,
and creativity. Thus the cyberspace may become a medium for mutual
development
and help, within and between communities world wide. Due to its
interactive
and decentralized nature the Internet can provide the framework for a
new
kind of world society different from the one created by the mass media
in the 20th century.
CONCLUSION
Who
are
we as an information society at the beginning of the new century? I
would
like to come back to the tension I mentioned at the beginning between
the
vertical and the horizontal structures of proclaiming, distributing and
interpreting messages. We are in a stage of transition between, as
Flusser
would say, a pyramidal structure of message distribution through
"discursive
media" into a more horizontal structure of message production through
"dialogical
media". The modern separation between mass media and individual media,
and also the conception of the individual as an atomic entity or as a
mass,
is being replaced by the conception of networked selves and societies
where
dynamic horizontal processes of information production and distribution
do not replace, but at least displace, some of the hierarchies of 20th
century information society.
Of
course questions of power and truth remain open and new monopolies and
divisions emerge that may lead to degeneration and chaos due to the
extreme
complexity of a networked world where media diversity cannot be
governed
by a single central power. Rather, media diversity has to be shaped
with
caution on various levels. This makes future societies and world
society
as a whole more vulnerable but also more free, i.e. more able to define
by themselves what degree or what kind of freedom they can guarantee
within
the framework of their history, traditions, hopes and fears. This
should
not be seen as being in contradiction with some other basic norms that
all nations following the UDHR may agree upon. The right to freely
produce
and distribute information, and this is the moral and ethical
challenge,
must be made to conform with other human rights, such as the right to
privacy
or the right to self determination. Codes of morals should not be seen
as a rigid demarcation of 'oughts' but within the perspective of
different
forms of living and subject therefore to ethical criticism. Ethical
questions
cannot be solved a priori, but have to be patiently discussed at an
international
and intercultural level. The activities of the International Center for
Information Ethics (ICIE) may provide a framework for information and
communication
in this field, particularly for the academic community.
The
coming information society will be characterized by an incredible
diversity
of message production and distribution. We need, I think, a new science
of messages, an angeletics as we may call it, that could study at
different levels (psychological, sociological, economic, esthetic,
religious,
etc.) the power structures, technologies, histories, and ways of life
of
information societies, describing their information moralities as well
as the ethical discourses that founded the practices of message
production,
distribution and use.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
would
like to thank Martha M. Smith (Long Island University, USA), Barbara
Rockenbach
(Yale University, USA), Thomas Mendina (University of Memphis, USA) and
Michael Eldred (Cologne, Germany) for criticisms, helpful comments and
polishing up this text.