Shapes of Human Interplay in the Digital Age Rafael Capurro International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) Tehran University, 29th of September 2014

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom2 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, The full text is available at:

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom3 Introduction UNESCO report “Renewing the Knowledge Societies Vision for Peace and Sustainable Development” (Mansell and Trembley, 2013

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom4 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom5 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom6 Introduction “Tragedy of the commons” (James Garret Hardin, ): 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)

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom7 Introduction ‘knowledge and information societies’: The plural form is a mark of human freedom.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom8 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 Aristotle’s practical philosophy (philosophia praktiké)

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom9 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).

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom10 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom11 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)

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom12 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

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom13 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom14 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom15 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom16 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,

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom17 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom18 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

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom19 III. The Ethical Challenge of Global Surveillance Different societal groups have reacted with open letters and declarations that are worth being documented.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom20 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom21 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom22 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom23 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom24 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom25 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom26 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

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom27 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom28 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.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom29 Conclusion By doing so they undermine the foundation upon which they are built, namely trust among free players sharing a common world.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom30 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 today’s urgency of an International Charta of Digital Rights establishing global rules of fair play for shapes of human interplay in the digital age.

Capurro: Shapes of Freedom31 متشکرم