The Good, The Bad and The Virtual : Ethics in the Age of Information

-In this essay, Poster describes the ongoing relationship between media and ethics to be a complex one. Each new medium seems to trigger a trend of paranoia as it “deterritorialize culture” and destabilizes the core of ethical practices.

-Poster chooses to use the term “Virtual” as a categorization that makes it hard to adhere to existing definitions of good and bad.

-Ethics as a problem
· Is it possible to apply the same ethical standards and moral judgments used to evaluate face-face speech acts to mediated cultural acts (television, phones, internet)?
· The issue of real life vs virtual world, should the same standards be deployed?
· The limitations of real life ethics in a virtual sphere. New systems of valuation required.

Ethics :
· Bounded by particular times and spaces.
· The boundaries and comfort zones began to crumble with digitalized networks, portable appliances and an advancement of technology that further blurs the lines between real relations and virtual relations.
· Ethics were made in a different era and context. Evolves and varies in perspectives does not included mediated culture.

-Historical discourse looking at the way ethics in relation to its context has changed since the premodern period.

Uses the theories of philosophers
· Kant’s ethics(1949): Universalization of ethical domain
· Kierkeggard: Religion and Ethics
· Levinas: The Other
· Nietzsche(1967) : Genealogy of morals
(pronounced as ‘ni-cha’ according to the Germans)

-The INFORMATION AGE
Before the Web was created in 1993, there was no apparent danger in the Net community (1969-1993). It was an open, safe and trusted environment.However, the forms of conflict that appeared were unparallel to that of real life in its form due to the very nature of the net (spamming and flaming).

These conflicts were thought to be easily regulated with the introduction of ‘netiquette’ where the protocols of online behavior disseminated and were adopted quickly.

After 1993 the WWW attracted millions of people and caused an influx of net users that overwhelmed the net culture and the policies of netiquette never kept up.

Other forms of broadcast media further complicated the ethics of the new media as it increased the net’s reputation by constantly discussing its contents which are deemed “unethical” in the real world. Non-net users became thoroughly informed of the experiences and judged the virtual world though not being part of it.

-Ethics on the internet
Media changes the ethical environment. This is especially so in the case of the internet where what is held apart in real life is mixed together to produce a jarring spectrum of humanity that we often ignore or disapprove of.

With the internet, the content and actions no longer fall under ethical rules that apply in real life.
Poster discusses the issues which brings about large debate
· Anonymity of Identity
· Data/Information Overload
· Censorship

New form of moral restraint required?

-Discourse on ethical machines
· Ethical subject is placed in the limelight.
Pertinent question : How can identity in cyberspace conform with identity in real life?
What is the nature of the communicating subject and its relation with the ‘real’ subject?

· Donath’s : Deception and Identity theory.
She believes in imposing real world standards onto the internet though acknowledging its uniqueness.

-Habermas’s Discourse ethics
The theory is not applicable to the internet as it focuses on face-to-face speech and social interaction.

-Conclusion
· Poster urges a partial application of the Nietzschean perspective of the moralities of good/bad and good/evil. Nietzsche proposed a “transvaluation of all values” to an enhancement of “life”.

· He also calls for a new theory of the political as a collective determination of the good in a context in which individual determination of the good (self-censorship etc) takes less prominence than in the modern or print era.