Information technology is now ubiquitous in the lives of people
across the globe. These technologies take many forms such as
personal computers, smart phones, the internet, web and mobile phone
applications, digital assistants, and cloud computing. In fact
the list is growing constantly and new forms of these technologies are
working their way into every aspect of daily life. In some cases,
such as can be seen in massive multiplayer online games, these technologies are
even opening up new ways of
interacting with each other. Information technology at its
basic level is technology that records, communicates, synthesizes or
organizes information. Information can be understood as any
useful data, instructions, or meaningful message content. The
word literally means to “give form to” or to shape
one's thoughts. So a basic type of information technology
might be the proverbial string tied around one's finger to remind
or inform you that you have some specific task to accomplish
today. Here the string stands in for a more complex proposition
such as “buy groceries before you come home.” The
string itself is not the information, it merely symbolizes the
information and therefore this symbol must be correctly interpreted for
it to be useful. Which raises the question, what is information
itself?
Unfortunately there is not a completely satisfying and
philosophically rigorous definition available, though there are at
least two very good starting points. For those troubled by the
ontological questions regarding information, we might want to simply
focus on the symbols and define information as any meaningfully ordered
set of symbols. This move can be very useful and
mathematicians and engineers prefer to focus on this aspect of
information, which is called “syntax” and leave
the meaningfulness of information or its “semantics” for
others to figure out. Claude E. Shannon working at Bell Labs
produced a landmark mathematical theory of communication (1948), where
he took his experiences in cryptography and telephone technologies and
worked out a mathematical formulation describing how syntactical
information can be turned into a signal that is transmitted in such a
way as to mitigate noise or other extraneous signals which can then be
decoded by the desired receiver of the message (Shannon 1948; Shannon
and Weaver 1949). The concepts described by Shannon, along with
additional important innovations made by others who are too many to
list, explain the way that information technology works, but we still
have the deeper issue to resolve if we want to thoroughly trace the
impact of information technologies on moral values.
The second starting point is a bit more deeply philosophical in
nature. Here we begin with the claim that information either
constitutes or is closely correlated with what constitutes our
existence and the existence of everything around us. This means
that information plays an ontological role in the manner in which the
universe operates. A standpoint such as this would place
information at the center of concern for philosophy and this idea has
given rise to the new fields of Information Philosophy and Information
Ethics. Philosophy of Information will not be addressed in detail
here but the interested reader can begin with Floridi (2010b, 2011b) for
an introduction. Some of the most important aspects of
Information Ethics will be outlined in more detail below.
Every action we take leaves a trail of information that could be
recorded and stored for future use. For instance, you might use the
simple technology of keeping a detailed diary listing all the things
you did and thought during the day. But today you could augment that
with even more detail gathered with advanced information technologies
some examples include; all of your economic transactions, a GPS
generated plot of where you traveled, a list of all the web addresses
you visited and the details of each search you initiated online, a
listing of all your vital signs such as blood pressure and heart rate,
all of your dietary intakes for the day, and many other examples can
be imagined. As you go through this thought experiment you begin to
see the complex trail of data that you generate each and every day and
how that same data might be collected and stored though the use of
information technologies. Here we can begin to see how information
technology can impact moral values. As this data gathering becomes
more automated and ever-present, we must ask who is in control of this
data, what is to be done with it, and who will insure its
accuracy. For instance, which bits of information should be made
public, which held private, and which should be allowed to become the
property of third parties like corporations? Questions of the
production, access and control of information will be at the heart of
moral challenges surrounding the use of information technology.
One might argue that this situation is no different from the moral
issues revolving around the production, access and control of any basic
necessity of life. But there is one major difference, if one
party controls the access of some natural resource, then that by
necessity excludes others from using it. This is not necessarily
so with digital information, it is non-exclusory, meaning we can all at
least theoretically possess the same digital information because
copying it from one digital source to another does not require
eliminating the previous copy. Since there is no physical
obstacle to the spread of all information, then there remain only
appeals to morality, or economic justice, which might prevent
distributing certain forms of information. Therefore,
understanding the role of moral values in information technology is
indispensable to the design and use of these technologies (Johnson
1985; Moor 1985; Nissenbaum 1998; Spinello 2001).
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