The concept of
pandemia can be understood in a biological
and an informational sense also called infodemia. There is a
correlation
between the harm viruses can do and digital misinformation or incorrect
information and disinformation or deliberate misleading information.
What
happens at a biological level has informational effects and vice versa.
People
have access or are exposed to different forms of harmful
disinformation. This
has an impact on the way they deal or not with biological pandemias. A
vaccine
is part of an immune system of organic causes and effects. Legal and
ethical
norms are part of social immune systems (Sloterdijk 2009). Both are
complex and
ambivalent. This is the reason why sustainable scientific research and
ethical
reflection dealing also with their interaction is needed. The
coronavirus has
lead to a situation in which the state of emergency in many countries
has
become the rule leading in some cases to the support of totalitarian
politics.
The relation between both phenomena, the biological and the
informational,
should not be misunderstood as just an analogy but as a form of
interaction.
This interaction can be analysed by reflecting on them as
different forms of messaging systems (Capurro & Holgate 2011). When
Dr Li
Wenliang of Wuhan (China) became aware of the coronavirus his discovery
did not
become accessible soon. Dr Li died from an infection with this virus on
April
30, 2020. The coronavirus caused the death of the messenger and of many
thousands of people world wide who did not got the information in due
time also
due to the political non-action in China and elsewhere. The coronavirus
knew
nothing, of course, about the harm it would cause. As society in China
and
worldwide reacted, it was too late. What does 'too late' mean? In a
globalized
world in which systems of production and exchange of goods as well as
all kinds
of human interconnected relations, particularly mass tourism but also
the
globalization of industry and business, the virus expanded
vertiginously. But,
in fact, it is not the virus that expanded by itself but through human
and
technical messengers who at the beginning knew nothing about being
such. It
became soon apparent that the process of concealment and un-concealment
or what
was known and unknown, was not only an issue of social access to
information
but concerned the way of being of the virus itself as something that
does what it
conceals to the organism leading in many cases its death. The media
system, on
the other hand, gives rise an many cases to informational tsunamis of
all kinds
in which it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between
truth and
falsity including also the question about the trustworthiness of the
(digital)
messengers.
All
this shows the negative forms of local and global life
of society today, biologically and informationally. We must learn to
understand
this crisis in such a way that looking at such negative forms we can
see what
positive forms of living they hinder. One lesson we can learn is that
biological and informational globalization interact with each other. An
organism does not exist separated from other organisms. This is also
true about
digital disinformation and misinformation. We must learn that not only
biological
but also moral and legal norms and values seen as symbolic immune
systems need
a critical review when a new situation arises in order to avoid that
they become
tools of oppression instead of liberation. This is evident in the case
of
biological immune systems but less evident when it comes to social
processes
and particularly to the access to trustworthy information based
particularly on
the political and economic ambitions of the ones who put such ambitions
on the
top of their agendas.
What
is the message of the coronavirus? No more and no less
that we can become aware of the fact that we live in a globalized and
interdependent social and biological world. But didn't we know this
already? Yes
and no. Yes, because this happened already in human history if we
think, for
instance, about other technical revolutions such as the printing press
that
helped societies to have universal access to information once the
political and
social changes necessary for it were provided. But there is a
difference
between the kind of informational globalization based on the printing
press and
the one based on the internet. One difference concerns the kind of time
regime
that is proper to each technology. In the case of the digital network
the
access to information goes beyond their physical accessibility for
instance in
libraries making possible a potential accessibility every time,
everywhere and
for everybody provided that people have the media and the education
needed for it.
This basic change concerning time and accessibility concerns also
physical
goods and service transformed by their digital form of existence and
also the
mobility of human beings: we all want to go everywhere and to have
access to
everything and to everyone all the time. This can turn into a dystopia
with
different forms of destruction of oneself and of others including the
digital pollution
of the environment (e-waste).
But
digital technology per se is
not the cause of all evil as an
anti-technological and often also anti-scientific critique suggests. It
is
because we have forgotten our capacity to question forms of life with
their
specific traditional immune systems that turn, also biologically, into
deadly
ones at the very moment in which we are not able to see what kind of
life they
hinder or what possibilities of death they make possible and even
protect. The
history of medicine and psychology is full of positive and negative
examples
about this.
The
coronavirus discloses the ecological crisis at the very
moment in which it is almost too late. The message of the coronavirus
is that
we have to create new forms of living together sharing a common world
beyond the
belief that we are the masters of nature as well as of ourselves and of
others.
The coronavirus has a message of life if we are able to interpret it in
this
way. Viruses belong to the world in which we live and die. We have to
learn to
live and die with them. They are not an enemy with which we are in war
but a
fundament of life and death. According to German virologist Karin
Mölling the
number of viruses in the world is something like 10 to the power of 32.
The
number of bacteria is about 10 to the power or 31. Human beings are
about 10 to
the power of 10 (Karin Mölling apud
Berndt 2020). Viruses and
bacteria are
basic for human comfort and discomfort. War rhetorics against
coronavirus is
part of the problem not of the solution. The challenge is to create
biological
and informational immunological systems in such a way that they do not
cause
the opposite of what they intend to protect, namely the health of a
living
organism and the biological and informational well being of people.
Critical
thinking on this issue is a main challenge of information ethics
nowadays.
References
Berndt,
Christina (2020). Die heimlichen Herrscher der Welt.
In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 2-3, 2020, Nr. 101, 30-31
Capurro,
Rafael & Holgate, John (Eds.) (2011). Messages
and Messengers - Angeletics as an Approach to the Phenomenology of
Communication.
Munich 2011.
Sloterdijk,
Peter (2009). You must change your life. Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press.
Policy
recommendations
Promote
local and global research in Information Ethics dealing
with the relation between informational and biological pandemias.
Develop
an international monitoring system on this issue.