Category Archives: Communication

a network norm

AI Now or AI as it Could Be

The 2018 Symposium organized by the AI Now Institute (https://symposium.ainowinstitute.org/) under the title of “Ethics, Organizing, and Accountability” is interesting for a number of reasons. The AI Now Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence which was founded in 2017 by Kate Crawford (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Crawford and Meredith Whittaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker) and is housed at the Ney York University.

The name is significant. AI “now” is indeed about AI as it is now, that is, not as it could and should be. Emphasizing the “now” has a critical edge. The focus is on what AI is actually doing, or more accurately, not doing right in the various areas of concern to the Institute, namely law enforcement, security, and social services. The AI Now Institute’s explicit concern with the “social implications” of AI translates into a rather one-sided civil rights perspective. What the institute explores are primarily the dangers of AI with regard to civil rights issues. This is well and good. It is necessary and of great use for preventing misuse or even abuse of the technology. But is it enough to claim that simply dropping AI as it is now into a social, economic, and political reality riddled with discrimination and inequality will not necessarily enhance civil rights and that the technology should therefore either not be used at all or if it is used, then under strict regulative control? Should one not be willing and able to consider the potential of AI to address civil rights issues and correct past failings, and perhaps even to start constructively dealing with the long-standing injustices the Institute is primarily concerned with? Finally, quite apart from the fact that the social implications of AI go way beyond civil rights issues, should not the positive results of AI in the areas of law enforcement, crime prevention, security, and social services also be thrown onto the scale before deciding to stop deployment of AI solutions? One cannot escape the impression that the general tenor of the participants at the symposium is the throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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Is There Such a Thing as “Informational Privacy”?

The concept of “information” is not very informative. This is because there are so many different meanings to the word. Almost every scientific discipline has their own definition, from physics and chemistry to biology, informatics, mathematics, philosophy, and even sociology, which has long been talking about an “information society.” So what does “information” mean? What is information? Obviously, we need to decide, that is, to filter out much of what can be discussed about the topic and select those meanings of the term that are useful for our purpose, namely, attempting to understand what is meant by informational privacy.

According to the classic definition of Alan Westin (Privacy and Freedom 1967), privacy is “the ability to determine for ourselves when, how, and to what extent information about us is communicated to others.” This definition carries with it several important implications. First, privacy is a matter of information. This information must in some way be “about” us, that is, us “personally.” Privacy therefore has to do with a specific kind of information, namely, “personal information,” or as it later became known, “personally identifiable information” (PII). Another important implication of Westin’s understanding of privacy is that it is not the information itself that is most important, but rather the “ability to determine” what information is communicated to others. Privacy therefore does not primarily reside in any particular informational content, for example, information that would somehow describe a person so intimately that he or she would not be able to communicate it without losing privacy. On the contrary, it would seem that privacy resides above all in the freedom to communicate or not to communicate information, whatever it may be. For example, it could be argued that our genome is so personal and intimate that any communication of our genome to others would automatically constitute a violation of privacy. The implication of Westin’s definition, however, is that we could well determine to do so, that is, if we wanted, we could publish our genome on the internet for the world to see and this would not constitute a violation of privacy. If someone else however, for example, our doctor were to do this without our consent, then, of course, this would constitute a violation of privacy. Privacy is therefore a matter of consent, of decision, of freedom and choice and does not reside in any particular information. This means that privacy consists primarily in the will, in the act of deciding to communicate. Only if my free choice about communicating information is infringed upon can we speak of a violation of my privacy. Finally, Westin’s definition assumes that privacy essentially has to do with communication, that is, privacy is the right to communicate or not to communicate. A right to privacy in this sense only makes sense, however, if communication is an option, something we can choose to do or not do. This means that Watzlawick must have been wrong when he stated that “we cannot not communicate.” If human beings are essentially social and human existence is constituted by communication this would make privacy as Westin defines it impossible. Only if information about a person is something that is not necessarily and automatically communicatively constituted and distributed in social space can privacy be possible.

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Being-as-Other, the Hermeneutical “as” and New Media

Can one interpret the AIME project (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence www.modesofexistence.org) from the point of view of communication theory?

Latour doesn’t use the term “communication,” – the term doesn’t appear in the Glossary of AIME which is odd considering for both Habermas and Luhmann communication is the very definition of the social – but a link appears when Latour proclaims that “beings utter themselves.” Another word for self-utterance is taken from semiotics, “enunciation,” which in AIME amounts to an “articulation” of continuity under the regime of time, of discontinuity, hiatus, indeed, of being-as-other. The “as” in this foundational term of the AIME metalanguage cannot help but recall the hermeneutical “as” in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Just as for Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur Being is meaning, so for AIME “being and enunciation can almost be taken to be synonymous since it is the nature of a being to utter itself, to exist, to transit, to throw itself forward through the hiatus of existence or expression.”

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The Actor is the Network

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Goffman’s dramaturgical model for social interaction and face-to-face communication is interesting from the point of view of actor-network theory (ANT) because for ANT social actors are not “individuals,” but networks. Being a network, instead of a unitary, in-divisible, immediately self-transparent subject of knowing and doing challenges the modern understanding of face-to-face communication as an encounter between two people in which the individual social actors communicate directly with each other without being puppets of macro social structures, such as organizations, families, nations, norms, institutions, and so on.

It is an omnipresent assumption of modernity that interaction and face-to-face communication describe a situation in which two people meet each other, exchange opinions, agree to cooperate or not, etc. on the basis of freedom, equality, and, as Habermas would say, “undistorted communication.” Communication is undistorted when no one and no thing interferes with the intentional speech acts of the autonomous rational subjects who are thereby not hindered in forming and expressing their opinions. Two speakers meet, look each other in the eye, and make claims to validity against commonly accepted criteria of truth, truthfulness, correctness, and meaning. This is the modern myth of interaction. And this is also where Goffman is interesting because role theory claims that social interlocutors are like actors on a stage, who never appear as naked subjects, but are replete with costumes, props, scripts, settings, narratives, audience selection mechanisms, and many more “others” that enter into, participate in, become a part of, and condition communication. Were this not so, communication would be without “context,” or as Wittgenstein would say, we wouldn’t know what language-game was being played, and the actors themselves wouldn’t know what to say.

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The Socio-Sphere

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The digital media revolution has largely made both the private sphere and the public sphere obsolete, or at least questionable, and has created a domain that is neither private nor public, a domain in which traditional forms of association, including politics, are being called into question.  Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chooses not to use the terminology of modern social theory at all and speaks of the “collective,” a space of networks instead of a public sphere bound on the one side by a radically individualized privacy and on the other by hierarchical and oppressive social structures. Following Latour we propose dropping the categories of private and public and exchanging them for a new term, the socio-sphere. The socio-sphere is neither private nor public, but is based upon the new form of communication made possible by digital media, namely, “many-to-many” communication. The age old limitations on communication forcing it into either a one-to-one mode or into a one-to-many mode created a public sphere that was inherently contradictory. One-to-many communication disguised itself by means of the concept of representation and pretended to be one-to-one communication, that is, a form of communication in which all co-participate equally. The affordances of digital media create an entirely new form of communication capable of overcoming the limitations imposed upon communication since the beginnings of human history. This is what the technology does. The possibility of many-to-many communication brings with it the hope of resolving the contradiction of representation created by traditional media, namely, that one speaks for the many by means of speaking to the many.  In the wake of the digital media revolution the public sphere, and with it, the private subject of modernity, vanish into the socio-sphere. There is no longer anything like privacy and there is no longer a specifically public space.

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