Digitalization reveals the world in new varieties and forms. This power to unveil not only transforms human outreach and actions, but also changes our conceptions; about whom we are, about our uses and about human horizons for sense-making. In this paper, I explore experience design and the aesthetic turn in contemporary research in human–computer interaction and interaction design. This rather recent interest in aesthetic experience is in my view a move away from a view of digitalization as instances of objects (...) aligned in networks, with certain features, qualities and properties, towards an understanding of digitalization as a relation to the world, to itself, and to what it means to be human (e.g. Technology and the character of contemporary life. A philosophical inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, Holding on to reality. The nature of information at the turn of the millennium. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; Questioning technology. Routledge, New York, 1999; The question concerning technology and other essays. Harper and Row, New York, 1977; Technology and the lifeworld, from garden to earth. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990). As such my attempt in this text is to outline a conceptual account concerning what it might mean to designate digitalization as experienced rather than as what we traditionally think of it—as a cause of what we perceive. The paper is based on some previous work suggesting that a focus on the beauty of digitalization (i.e. the beast) entails the possibility to investigate ambiguous meanings of digitalization, meanings that are intrinsic to digitalization but have so far received little or no attention. My suggestion is that there are aesthetic and/or sublime dimensions inherent in digitalization that involves the realization of meaning that are becoming increasingly important in both use and design of digital materials. Hence, the particular focus on aesthetics as implied by the title of this text refers to a pervasive quality harbouring meaning that through a phenomenological lens could be regarded as the material basis of digitalization. The paper concludes that it is crucial to conduct more thorough studies of the relationship between aesthetics and digitalization if we are truly interested in exploring the potential of digitalization in our lives. (shrink)

Since the internet's breakthrough as a mass medium, it has become a topic of discussion because of its implications for society. At one extreme, one finds those who only see great benefits and consider the Internet a tool for freedom, commerce, connectivity, and other societal benefits. At the other extreme, one finds those who lament the harms and disadvantages of the Internet, and who consider it a grave danger to existing social structures and institutions, to culture, morality and human relations. (...) In between one finds the majority, those who recognize both benefits and harms in the Internet as it currently exists and who recognize its usefulness while worrying about some of its negative impacts. (shrink)

I approach the philosophical analyses of the phenomenon of trust vis-à-vis online communication beginning with an overview from within the framework of computer-mediated communication (CMC) of concerns and paradigmatic failures of trust in the history of online communication. I turn to the more directly philosophical analyses of trust online by first offering an introductory taxonomy of diverse accounts of trust that have emerged over the past decade or so. In the face of important objections to the possibility of establishing and (...) fostering trust in online environments—objections that emerge especially from the perspective of virtue ethics and phenomenological approaches to how we know and navigate the world as _embodied_ beings—I then take up three major arguments in recent work in favor of the possibilities of trust online, followed by three _vicious circles_ that run counter to more optimistic views. I close with a summary of some additional reasons for optimism regarding trust online, followed by a final question that emerges out of recent CMC research on social networking sites that poses, I argue, fundamental challenges indeed to how we understand and may foster and experience trust online. (shrink)

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if any. (...) In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ‘complete’ friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ‘virtue friendship’ are examined in relation to online social media : reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of more widespread and systematic applications of a virtue-based normative framework to questions about the ethical impact of information technologies, and social networking technologies in particular. The first stage of the argument identifies several distinctive features of virtue ethics that make it uniquely suited to the domain of IT ethics, while remaining complementary to other normative approaches. I also note its potential to reconcile a number of significant methodological conflicts and debates in the existing literature, (...) including tensions between phenomenological and constructivist perspectives. Finally, I claim that a virtue-based perspective is needed to correct for a strong utilitarian bias in the research methodologies of existing empirical studies on the social and ethical impact of IT. The second part of the paper offers an abbreviated demonstration of the merits of virtue ethics by showing how it might usefully illuminate the moral dimension of emerging social networking technologies. I focus here on the potential impact of such technologies on three virtues typically honed in communicative practices: patience, honesty and empathy. (shrink)

Using the occasion of the publication of a Blackwell anthology in the philosophy of technology, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (2003), as a key to the contemporary role of this subdiscipline, this article reviews the current state-of-this-art. Both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology are twentieth century inventions, but each has followed a somewhat different set of philosophical traditions and pursued sometimes divergent questions. Here the primary developments of recent philosophy of technology are examined with emphasis upon issues (...) which might also be of greater interest to philosophers of science. These include epistemological, but also environmental and cultural issues. The bibliographical spread includes references to some fifty recent books in the field. (shrink)

This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced. The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in (...) making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data. The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research. (shrink)

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long and (...) tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology. (shrink)

Information and communication technology is changing many aspects ofhuman endeavour and existence. This is beyond dispute for most. Whatare contested are the social and ethical implications of thesechanges. Possible sources of these disputes are the multiple ways inwhich one can conceptualize and interpret the informationtechnology/society interrelationship. Each of these ways ofconceptualization and interpretation enables one to see theinformation technology/society relationship differently and thereforeconstrue its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Atthe center of this technology/society interrelationship we find manycomplex (...) questions about the nature of the human, the technical,agency, autonomy, freedom and much more. This is indeed a vastintellectual landscape, which can obviously not be explored here inits fullness. This entry is about just one particular perspective onthis landscape. It is primarily concerned with the phenomenologicalapproach to interpreting information technology and its social andethical implications. It should be noted from the start that there isnot a unified phenomenological tradition or approach to informationtechnology in particular, or other phenomena more generally. Thephenomenological tradition consists of many different approaches thatshare certain characteristics but not all. We may however suggest, with Don Ihde,that they all accept that “phenomenology investigates theconditions of what makes things appear as such [as that which we takethem to be].” Differently stated, phenomenology suggests thatthere is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomenawe encounter in our engagement with the world. In this sensephenomenologists would suggest that to understand thetechnology/society relationship we need to reveal how theyco-constitute each other—i.e. draw on each other for theirongoing meaning and sense. We will elaborate more precisely what thismeans in section 2 below. However, in order to understand the distinctiveness of thephenomenological approach other possible ways of interpreting thistechnology/society relationship will also be outlined brieflybelow., It can be said that information technology has become in a very realsense ubiquitous. Most everyday technologies such as elevators,automobiles, microwaves, watches, and so forth depend onmicroprocessors for their ongoing operation. Most organizations andinstitutions have become reliant on their information technologyinfrastructure to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed informationtechnology is seen by many as a cost-efficient way to solve amultitude of problems facing our complex contemporary society. One canalmost say that information technology has become construed as thedefault technology for solving a whole raft of technical and socialproblems such as health provision, security, governance, etc. Onecould also argue that it has become synonymous with society’sview of modernization and progress. For most it seems obvious thatinformation technology has made it possible for humans to continue toconstruct increasingly complex systems of coordination and socialordering—systems without which contemporary society would not beable to exist in its present form. To say the least, we, ascontemporary human beings, have our manner of being made possiblethrough a rather comprehensive entanglement with information andcommunication technology. Indeed, the economic, organizational andsocial benefit of information technology is not widely disputed. Thedispute is more often about the way information technology is changingor transforming the social domain, and in particular, the ethicaldomain. This dispute is largely centered around different ways ofconceptualizing and interpreting the nature of our entanglement withinformation technology. This debate is not merely an academic debateabout different and competing theoretical ‘models.’Rather, these different ways of conceptualizing it is central to ourunderstanding of how we go about managing our increasingly entangledrelationship with information technology. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to understand Heidegger’s conception of technology in light of Stiegler’s critique of that conception, anchored in a discussion of books and libraries as technological artefacts. I argue, following Stiegler, that Heidegger did not adequately take into account the inherent technological character of the means by which Dasein’s heritage is transmitted to subsequent generations. Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis—dead matter externally organized to support living, internal memory and instantiated in books and libraries—is therefore a useful supplement to (...) the Heideggerian account of the transmission of heritage. I examine the points where Heidegger mentions books and/or libraries in three exemplary texts from the beginning, middle, and end of his career, indicating at each point how Stiegler’s thought can supplement that of Heidegger. I conclude with a brief discussion of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, considered as a paradigmatic example of Stiegler’s conceptual framework. (shrink)

Purpose– This paper aims to retrieve relevant aspects of the work of idealist thinker T.H. Green to improve comprehension of, and policy responses to, various dilemmas facing contemporary “information societies”.Design/methodology/approach– The paper is an exercise in interdisciplinary conceptual research, seeking a new synthesis that draws upon a range of ethical, metaphysical, empirical and policy texts and ideas. It is an application of moral and political principles to post-industrial problems, part of an ongoing international effort to develop viable normative approaches to (...) the emergent information society. The background research includedin situstudy of archival papers.Findings– Green’s version of idealism illuminates current, technologically induced shifts in our understandings of important categories such as self, substance and space. The paper finds that Green’s doctrine of the common good, his alternative to the (still prevalent) school of utilitarian welfarism, combined with his famously “positive” theory of the state, is highly relevant as a normative template for applied philosophy and policy. The article demonstrates its applicability to three vital contemporary issues: freedom of information, intellectual property and personal privacy. It concludes that Green’s work provides exceptional resources for an original, anti-technocratic, theory of the information society as good society.Practical implications– It is hoped that, as part of the wider rediscovery of the work of Green and other idealists, the paper will have some impact on public policy.Originality/value– The paper contains a new scholarly interpretation of Green’s theories of the common good and of the state. In addition, it is believed to be the first major attempt to apply idealism to the information society and its problems. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of digital hermeneutics understood as the encounter between hermeneutics and digital technology, particularly the Internet. In the first part, I want to raise the attention of IT researchers and hermeneuticists to the theoretic and practical relevance of the encounter of their areas of research that are sometimes considered as incompatible to each other. There is still a lot of translation work to be done in order to get these two cultures (...) come closer to and profit from each other. The second part of the paper deals with the foundation of digital hermeneutics on what I call—following Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s paths—digital ontology as opposed to digital metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that AI-powered voice assistants, just as all technologies, actively mediate our interpretative structures, including values. I show this by explaining the productive role of technologies in the way people make sense of themselves and those around them. More specifically, I rely on the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the material hermeneutics of Ihde to develop a hermeneutic lemniscate as a principle of technologically mediated sense-making. The lemniscate principle links people, technologies and the sociocultural world in the (...) joint production of meaning and explicates the feedback channels between the three counterparts. When people make sense of technologies, they necessarily engage their moral histories to comprehend new technologies and fit them in daily practices. As such, the lemniscate principle offers a chance to explore the moral dynamics taking place during technological appropriation. Using digital voice assistants as an example, I show how these AI-guided devices mediate our moral inclinations, decisions and even our values, while in parallel suggesting how to use and design them in an informed and critical way. (shrink)

In this paper a case is made concerning how important levels of media technology and new interactive tex-tures affect urban landscapes. The case is based on experiences and empirical examples from a Scandinavian city in which levels of interactive infrastructures, mediated spaces, and places, are high, and in which accessibility and social inclusion traditionally have been strong components in societal and systems design. Our designerly approach discloses some of ways that the city is enacted by a new digital materiality. This (...) materiality can only bee disclosed if the relationship between the city and ICT is understood as a meaningful whole – a totality – in this text illustrated by the notions of landmarks and imprints. Based on our case we suggest that it is possible to employ an ethical dwelling reflecting the endless, active and ongo-ing responsibility for the city and its interactive textures in everyday life. (shrink)

If the rhetorical and economic investment of educators, policy makers and the popular press in the United States is any indication, then unbridled enthusiasm for the introduction of computer mediated communication (CMC) into the educational process is wide-spread. In large part this enthusiasm is rooted in the hope that through the use of Internet-based CMC we may create an expanded community of learners and educators not principally bounded by physical geography. The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically upon (...) whether students and teachers are truly linked together as a``community'' through the use of Internet-based CMC. The paper uses the writings of Kierkegaard, and Hubert Dreyfus's exploration of Kierkegaardian ideas, to look more closely at the prospects and problems embedded in the use of Internet-based CMC to create "distributed communities" of teachers and learners. It is argued that from Kierkegaard's perspective, technologically mediated communications run a serious risk of attenuating interpersonal connectivity. Insofar as interpersonal connectivity is an integral component of education, such attenuation bodes ill for some, and perhaps many instances of Internet-based CMC. (shrink)

This paper argues that information should be made transparent as a means to close the global digital divide problem. The usual conception of the digital divide as a bifurcation between the information rich and poor in fact does a poor job at describing the reality of the situation, which is characterized by multiple dimensions of digital divides in many contexts. Taking the lead from Albert Borgmann, it is recognized that the so-called information poor do possess a rich resource of information (...) which needs to be fully accounted for in order to solve the global digital divide problem. In addition, making information transparent means, following the theory of development of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, that information should be made available and accessible through a system of representation. Floridis account of information ethics thus needs to be supplemented by the realization that members of infosphere, which in his view consist of information objects, should be made transparent in order that the global digital divide be ameliorated. In other words there should be a system of information about information, namely semantic representation of objective information which enables the locals to make full use of their available informational resources. (shrink)

Aristotle launched Western knowledge on a trajectory toward disciplinarity that continues to this day. But is the knowledge management project that began with Aristotle adequate for the age of Google? Perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant inter- and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge. This article explores the history of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, arguing for a new, critical form of interdisciplinarity that moves beyond the academy into dialogue with the public and private sectors. (...) Contemporary knowledge production should involve not only a horizontal axis stretching across academia but also a vertical axis where academic research is integrated into contemporary life. (shrink)

Philosophers and others concerned with the moral good of personal privacy most often see threats to privacy raised by the development of pervasive computing as primarily being threats to the loss of control over personal information. Two reasons in particular lend this approach plausibility. One reason is that the parallels between pervasive computing and ordinary networked computing, where everyday transactions over the Internet raise concerns about personal information privacy, appear stronger than their differences. Another reason is that the individual devices (...) which can become linked in a pervasive computing environment: PDAs, GPS sensors, RFID chips/readers, publicly-located video surveillance cameras, Internet-enabled mobile phones, and the like, each raise threats to individual privacy. Without discounting the value of this approach, this paper aims to propose an alternative; and, as a result of recasting the threat to individual privacy from pervasive computing, to identify other, and deeper, moral goods that pervasive computing puts at risk that otherwise might remain concealed. In particular, I argue that pervasive computing threatens to compromise what I call existential autonomy: the right to decide for ourselves at least some of the existential conditions under which we form and develop our ways of life, including our relations to information technology. From this perspective, some moral goods at stake in protecting privacy in an environment of pervasive computing emerge that have less to do with furthering human well-being through the promotion of self-identity and subjectivity, than with stimulating curiosity, receptivity to difference, and, most broadly, openness to the world. (shrink)

Numerous exegeses have been written about the epistemologies of volunteered geographic information. We contend that VGI is itself a socially constructed epistemology crafted in the discipline of geography, which when re-examined, does not sit comfortably with either GIScience or critical GIS scholarship. Using insights from Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology we offer a critique that, rather than appreciating the contours of this new form of data, truth appears to derive from traditional analytic views of information found within GIScience. This is (...) assisted by structures that enable VGI to be treated as independent of the process that led to its creation. Allusions to individual emancipation further hamper VGI and problematise participatory practices in mapping/geospatial technologies. The paper concludes with implications of this epistemological turn and prescriptions for designing systems and advancing the field to ensure nuanced views of participation within the core conceptualisation of VGI. (shrink)

I highlight several aspects of current and future developments of the internet, in order to draw from these in turn specific consequences of particular significance for the ongoing development and expansion of informa-tion ethics. These consequences include changing conceptions of self and privacy in both Western and Eastern countries, and correlative shifts from the communication technologies of literacy and print to a \secondary orality.. These consequences in turn imply that current and future information ethics should focus on developing a global (...) but pluralistic virtue ethics - one that may offset the anti-democratic dangers of such secondary orality. (shrink)

A current trend in the gaming industry is to provide more realistic and believable looking animation. To support this, motion capture has been used to create such animation. Lately, immersive virtual environments have been further developed and can be used to support motion capture actors with their work. Using immersive virtual environments as work environments has already been explored, but no ethical analysis or applied ethical code has been provided for such situations. In this paper, we investigate the ethical implications (...) of introducing a highly immersive virtual environment for motion capture acting and discuss under which circumstances it is ethically justified to place an actor in such an environment. Moreover, we provide an overview of research in computer games ethics, ethics for virtual realities and acting, as well as an investigation of potential moral and ethical issues in motion capture. Finally, a discussion shall help in finding an ethical consensus within the field of motion capture and for related situations. (shrink)

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is (...) not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them “as screens.” In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way. (shrink)

There is considerable controversy concerning the ability of the Internet to provide communal experiences. This article looks at the ability of the World Wide Web to foster religious community, particularly from a Christian perspective. It looks at the nature of religion and community and shows to what extent the Internet has and has not been successful in recreating religious community. It looks at the reaction of two particular groups of users and categorizes Web sites into five types: research sites, extensions (...) of local community, independent sites, spiritual retreats, and online worship. Finally it discusses the limitations of disembodied experience and argues that most individuals use the media within these limitations. (shrink)