Shapes of Human Interplay in the Digital Age

1
Shapes of Human Interplayin the Digital Age

• Rafael Capurro
• International Center for Information Ethics
  (ICIE)
• Tehran University, 29th of September 2014

2
Introduction

• The following presentation is based on the text
  of a keynote at the International Symposium on
  Philosophy of Library and Information Science
  Ethics Theory and Practice, Kastamonu, Turkey,
  September 3, 2014.
• The full text is available at http//www.capurro.
  de/kastamonu.html

3
Introduction

• UNESCO report Renewing the Knowledge Societies
  Vision for Peace and Sustainable Development
  (Mansell and Trembley, 2013

4
Introduction

• The conceptual difference between information
  understood as signals measured in bits and their
  interpretation upon which knowledge is built, has
  social and political consequences.

5
Introduction

• A knowledge society cannot be reduced to the
  creation of a technological infrastructure but
  implies learning processes ingrained in specific
  cultural contexts aiming at creating inclusive
  societies based on equality of opportunity as
  well as on a balance between a commercial and
  community oriented perspectives.

6
Introduction

• Tragedy of the commons (James Garret Hardin,
  1915-2003) excessive and negative use of a
  common good (communty model)
• Tragedy of the anti-commons (Michael Heller)
  blocking creativity via intellectual property
  measures (commercial model)

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Introduction

• knowledge and information societies The plural
  form is a mark of human freedom.

8
On Ethics and Information Ethics

• Ethics as a philosophical discipline achieves a
  culmination in the Western tradition after a
  complex evolution in the so-called Presocratics
  as well as in Plato, the Sophists, and the Stoa
  to mention just a few schools of thought in
  Aristotles practical philosophy (philosophia
  praktiké)

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On Ethics and Information Ethics

• that includes
• ethics (ethiké) as a reflection on the moulding
  or in-forming the individual character (ethos)
• economics (oikonomiké), i.e. everything related
  with the rules of good life (eu zen) within the
  family (oikos),
• and politics (politiké) as a reflexion about the
  rules of the city-state (polis).

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On Ethics and Information Ethics

• The difference between ethics or practical
  philosophy and morality or social customs and
  values is crucial because it allows us to
  problematize a given implicit or explicit
  morality that includes, as Michel Foucault
  remarked, all possible forms of self-conception
  as a subject in a society.

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On Ethics and Information Ethics

• Information ethics deals with norms and values
  at stake in information and knowledge societies
  dealing, for instance, with ethical issues of
• the Internet (cyberethics information ethics in
  a narrower sense),
• computer science (computer ethics),
• biological and medical sciences (bioinformation
  ethics),
• mass media (media ethics)
• library and information science field (library
  ethics)
• business field (business information ethics) 

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On Ethics and Information Ethics

• IE as a descriptive and emancipatory theory
• Information ethics understood as a
  problematization of norms and values on which
  communicational processes are based has a long
  tradition whose origins go back, in the Western
  tradition, to, for instance, the Platonic
  criticism of writing with regard to oral speech
  (logos).
• They culminate in the past century with the
  critical discourse about the Gutenberg Galaxy
  (McLuhan) and the cyberspace by authors such as
  Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Vilém Flusser. I

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• Information and communication professionals have
  dealt for centuries with the task of social
  regulation not only as they created systems and
  instruments for the classification, storage and
  retrieval of knowledge based on different media.

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• Our actions in the cyberworld are subject to
  digital codes that influence also our life in the
  physical world in such a way that who has only a
  limited access to the cyberworld experiences such
  limits negatively in her daily life. 

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• The cyberworld hybridizes with cultures and
  different individual and social ways of living.
  We are at the beginning of an interdisciplinary
  and intercultural reflection dealing with digital
  information and communication from the
  perspectives of practical philosophy, political
  science, sociology, jurisprudence and cultural
  anthropology.

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• This interdisciplinary discourse should learn how
  to evaluate the gains and losses of different
  social interplays in information and knowledge
  societies,

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• particularly analyzing who is excluded from what
  benefits and what are the negatives and positives
  ways, with a lot of possibilities in-between, of
  appropriation of such possibilities or, what is
  more common, of becoming appropriated by them.

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II. Ethical Issues of Information and Knowledge
Societies in the Digital Age

• What is a smart phone?
• At a personal level it gives a lot of freedom of
  communication and exchange of information.
• Within the context of the cyberworld and together
  with other digital devices it is a tool for
  physical and digital control and surveillance

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III. The Ethical Challenge of Global Surveillance

• Different societal groups have reacted with open
  letters and declarations that are worth being
  documented.

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III. The Ethical Challenge of Global Surveillance

• 2013 AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn,
  Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo
• 2013 Privacy International, Access, and the
  Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-signed by
  over three hundred and sixty organizations from
  more than seventy countries
• 2013 Access, Amnesty International, Electronic
  Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Privacy
  International.

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III. The Ethical Challenge of Global Surveillance

• On December 10, 2013, at the International Human
  Rights Day, 562 authors, including 5 Nobel Prize
  laureates (Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Elfride
  Jelinek, Günter Grass, Thomas Tranströmer), from
  over 80 countries launched the following appeal
  in defense of civil liberties.

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III. The Ethical Challenge of Global Surveillance

• January 2014 a great number of academics from
  all over the world have signed a declaration
  Academics Against Mass Surveillance following
  the initiative by Nico van Eijk, Beate Roessler,
  Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius and Manon Oostveen
  from the University of Amsterdam.

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Conclusion

• These letters and declarations are a clear
  testimony that when dealing with the issue of
  privacy we are dealing with the future of freedom
  in the digital age.

24
Conclusion

• Information ethics should make critically
  explicit new realities and possibilities of human
  interplay generated by new tools in the physical
  as well as in the digital world.

25
Conclusion

• The cyberworld creates new forms of authenticity
  as well as of deformation and even annihilation
  of the human interplay with a lot of
  possibilities in between.

26
Conclusion

• It is about empowering citizens to manage better
  their lives as well as about creating structures
  of local and global social cooperation and
  support

27
Conclusion

• without using such structures as instruments of
  control and surveillance that transform
  individuals and societies into puppets of state
  power or of big commercial enterprises that
  follow paradoxically the paths of 20th century
  mass media transforming the early dreams of the
  internet into a nightmare.

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Conclusion

• Information and communication commercial and
  state monopolists exert a sometimes hidden
  sometimes explicit control on individuals by
  bypassing not only their privacy, i.e., their own
  decision about concealing and revealing who they
  are, but also legal and political agreements at
  national and international level.

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Conclusion

• By doing so they undermine the foundation upon
  which they are built, namely trust among free
  players sharing a common world.  

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Conclusion

• The Declaration of Principles proclaimed in
  December 2003 at the World Summit on the
  Information Society was a good but weak start
  compared with todays urgency of an International
  Charta of Digital Rights establishing global
  rules of fair play for shapes of human interplay
  in the digital age.

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