The “transcoding” (Manowich) of society along the lines of digital media and computer networks can be considered revolutionary. One of the important consequences of the digital media revolution is the transformation of age-old communication structures. Human society has long been structured by either one-to-one interaction or, as soon as the number of people involved in interaction no longer permits everyone to speak to everyone, by one-to-many, that is, top-down, hierarchical communication. The digital communication revolution may be considered a revolution precisely because asymmetric, one-to-many communication and the hierarchical social structures which for centuries have been a precondition of cooperative action in larger groups is no longer the only means of constructing social order and in many areas is becoming increasingly inefficient. Above the level of face-to-face interaction, that is, on the levels of groups, organizations, institutions, and social systems, communication need no longer be hierarchical. The affordances of digital media modify the spatial and temporal parameters of communication such that it has now become possible for communication to take place in the mode of many-to-many, whereby, as Actor-Network Theory points out, not only human, but also non-human actors participate in communication. This means that social structures must no longer be vertical processes for producing, distributing, and controlling information.
Category Archives: New Media
Where do you want to go today? Space as Interface
Microsoft introduced the Internet to the world in 1994 with the slogan: “Where do you want to go today?” Everyone who booted up Windows 95 was routinely asked this question. Although the Mad Men did not consider this global image advertising campaign a great success, Microsoft’s slogan says something philosophically important about the digital media revolution. Digital media, and above all the Internet, have something to do with space, with where you are and where you are going. The importance of new media for the concept of space has for the most part been formulated in negative terms. Digital media are said to annihilate space, to shrink great distances to the movement of a computer mouse, and create a networked global space – Castells speaks of a “space of flows” – in which everything and everyone are open and available all the time. This is indeed what Microsoft is saying; you can go anywhere; there are no limits to movement, space is no longer a barrier or a hindrance to communication, flows of information, and cooperation. In the Internet space is replaced by cyberspace, a virtual reality, a paradoxical expanse containing the whole world in the dimensionless realm of bits and bytes. Much has been written about the dangers and advantages of cyberspace. In the meantime, so-called virtual reality has become so important for work, shopping, business, education, and all other areas of life that it cannot be thought of as a domain of its own, somehow separated from the “real” world. Physical space and cyberspace have merged to become what could be called a “mixed reality.” But how are we to understand space when it is mixture of contradictory elements. Is the philosophy of space after the advent of digital media doomed to speak of a spaceless space similar to what Castells has called the “timeless time” of the network society?
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.”
Is Informational Privacy a Matter of Contextual Integrity?
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It is no secret that theories of informational privacy based on defining privacy as restricting access to information or maintaining control over information are losing credibility. This is because they think of information as a kind of thing that can be locked up in a safe place, whose ownership can be clearly ascertained, and whose control is possible. These are assumptions typical of an industrial society based on personal property rights and markets of exchange. The digital revolution has made many of these assumptions obsolete. Information is not a thing, there is no “place” where information can be locked up, and ownership as well as control is vague and contestable. Among those thinkers searching for new interpretations of privacy Helen Nissenbaum (Privacy in Context – Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford University Press, 2010) has elaborated a theory basing privacy on what she calls “contextual integrity.” “What people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately…” (2). Consequently, when we talk about a right to privacy, we are talking about a right to “appropriate flow” of information and not as is often assumed about a right to secrecy or to absolute control of personal data.
Legal practice has in fact relied more on what people expect than on abstract definitions of privacy. Being left alone, as Warren and Brandeis described privacy, is a matter of reasonable expectations within a certain social situation. Such a situation Nissenbaum calls a “context.” Society is made up of many different contexts, such as education, health care, politics, business, family, etc. In every context there are norms and rules that govern the flow of information. When functioning properly, these “informational norms” “define and sustain essential activities and key relationships and interests, protect people and groups against harm, and balance the distribution of power” (3). When people feel that their privacy has been violated, it is always with reference not to abstract concepts of access and control, but to the informational norms governing the particular context in which they are acting. What privacy means varies from context to context.
The Ontological Interpretation of Privacy
Luciano Floridi is one of the few philosophers of the digital age who radically reinterprets issues such as informational privacy on basis of an informational ontology (see The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, in: Ethics and Informational Technology, 2006). Being is information. The world consists of information and not things or people. People do not possess their personal information, they are their personal information. Privacy therefore should not be understood as an issue of possession and control of data, but as a matter of personal integrity. Stealing and misusing personal data should not be compared to stealing and misusing someone’s possessions, for example, their automobile, but instead to kidnapping. My data is not the same as my auto, but rather much more like my body.
If information is a state of being and not a state of having, then what constitutes privacy? Floridi defines privacy in terms of the “ontological friction” regulating the flow of information in the “infoshpere.” The more friction blocking, disturbing, slowing down, and attenuating the flow of information, and the more effort it takes to bridge the gaps between information, the more privacy can be ascribed to information. Correspondingly, the less the flow of information is regulated, slowed down, hindered, the less this information can be considered private. Private and public are not different spaces, for example, the privacy of my home as opposed to public spaces like the shopping center or the train station. Digital media do not knock at the door and ask permission before entering. They are ubiquitous. Privacy is neither a space, nor a thing, but a state of being.