ii
The Heritage of WikiLeaks: A History of Information Ethics
by
Jared Bielby
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts and Master of Library and Information Studies
Humanities Computing and Library and Information Studies University of Alberta
© Jared Bielby, 2014
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Abstract
From an already established praxis for the field of Information Ethics, the following thesis will
outline an ethics and a historical foundation for WikiLeaks through the exposition of a four-part
history of Information Ethics. It will first trace the historical development of the field of
Information Ethics and secondly sketch the development of a theoretical foundation for
collaborative information and knowledge studies as exemplified by the wiki phenomenon, a
model, as will be argued, that arises from library ethics. Situating the foundation of WikiLeaks
within the framework of the wiki model, it will address issues of privacy, intellectual freedom
and social responsibility, access to information, information literacy, anonymity, transparency
and intellectual property as being similarly foundational to wiki studies, library ethics, and
WikiLeaks, and will conceive WikiLeaks as inevitably arising from the same historical
dialectics as Library Ethics. The wiki collaborative knowledge model will then be addressed
from a platform of information theory and philosophical ontology, ultimately looking at the
wider philosophical consequences of the saturation of information, information control and
flow, message and messenger and information as moral entity, surveying the ontology debates
between Rafael Capurro and Luciano Floridi, and exploring the implications of information
accountability as commentated on by Slavoj Žižek and others.
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Acknowledgments:
I would like to acknowledge my supervisors, Dr. Toni Samek and Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell for
their invaluable guidance through out the writing of the following discourse, Dr. Samek for first
introducing me to the field of Information Ethics and for her matchless encouragement
thereafter and Dr. Rockwell for helping me expand my understanding of Information Ethics
into the realm of Digital Humanities. I would also like to thank both Dr. Rafael Capurro and
my colleague Christine Belley for months of inspired conversation, correction and irreplaceable
philosophical insight into the task at hand. Lastly, but far from least, I’d like to acknowledge
the support, patience and perseverance of my wife, Janeen Bielby, for without whom my
project fails.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgments: ........................................................................................................ iv
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... v
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Information Ethics – Origins And Evolutions .................................................. 4 Overview ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4 Praxis ................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Origins .............................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Library Ethics ................................................................................................................................................................ 18 Evolutions ....................................................................................................................................................................... 23 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Towards a Unified Taxonomy ...................................................................... 30 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 30 Philosophy and Taxonomy ...................................................................................................................................... 32 Information In Formation ....................................................................................................................................... 38 Branches ......................................................................................................................................................................... 41 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Concerning Intercultural Information Ethics ................................................. 54 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 54 Roots ................................................................................................................................................................................. 55 Ethics, ICTs, and IIE .................................................................................................................................................... 59 Privacy and IIE ............................................................................................................................................................. 63 Information Pathologies .......................................................................................................................................... 67 Applications ................................................................................................................................................................... 71 Pluralism ......................................................................................................................................................................... 75 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 4: The Heritage of WikiLeaks ........................................................................... 79 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 79 WikiLeaks and Ethics ................................................................................................................................................ 80 WikiLeaks and Information Ethics ...................................................................................................................... 86 Collaborative Information, Knowledge and Monopoly .............................................................................. 91 Information Entropy .................................................................................................................................................. 93 Libraries and Library Ethics ................................................................................................................................. 100 Information Literacy ................................................................................................................................................ 104 Accountability ............................................................................................................................................................. 110 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................... 118 Bibliography: .............................................................................................................. 121
Other Works Referenced: ........................................................................................... 127
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Introduction
What is the ethical role of an organization like WikiLeaks? The original mission of
WikiLeaks was to throw open the shutters of information monopoly and secrecy, allowing free
flow of information into the public sphere. Upon initial consideration, WikiLeaks and its
founders seem to have taken a high moral ground, establishing their mission and subsequent
actions in critically assessed mores. However the question remains, even today, whether or not
WikiLeaks accounts for an ethics within its mission parameters. Since its inception in 2006,
WikiLeaks has been used as a vehicle for the unmonitored and unedited release into the public
sphere of numerous documents containing the most sensitive and privately held information in
the world. For four years WikiLeaks would serve as an open and anonymous portal of
publication modeled after the wiki concept, encouraging original source material news while
protecting the identities of the individuals submitting confidential information through it. While
WikiLeaks has since reverted to a traditional publication model whereby submissions are edited
and controlled, it continues to release numerous private and classified documents into the
public sphere yearly.
The following thesis will outline, through a four-part history of the field of
Information Ethics (IE), a means for exploring the phenomenon of WikiLeaks from a
theoretical perspective towards a praxis of applied ethics, establishing an ethics for WikiLeaks
by means of its formation amid cultural dialectics arising from specific roots in Information
Ethics, and will conceive WikiLeaks as inevitably arising from the same historical dialectics as
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Library Ethics. Upon establishing its origins in Information Ethics, it will address WikiLeaks
within the current state of IE as an evolving and intercultural meta-discipline with an emphasis
placed on the ethical and philosophical implications of information and information theory in
contemporary information culture.
In order to gage the current practical and philosophical implications of determining an
ethics for WikiLeaks, the following thesis will first establish and define ethics under the rubric
of collaborative information and knowledge ethics as exemplified by an ethics for the wiki
phenomenon, where “content is created without any defined owner or leader…(where) wikis
have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users”
(Wikipedia, 2014). Secondly, it will be shown that collaborative knowledge sharing is not a
new phenomenon unique to a digital era, but is merely one piece in the ever shifting flow of the
life of information, as established by the history of information. Lastly, it will demonstrate,
using WikiLeaks and its shifting publication model as paradigm, that all information, however
originally collaboratively formed, is eventually monopolized and commodified through
controlling power structures. Placing WikiLeaks in its historical context, the following thesis
will outline how contemporary information culture, having only just recently shifted from a
model of monopolized information flow to collaborative information flow, is set already to
return, perhaps prematurely, to a state of information monopoly and control.
Thus, by means of exploration of the ontology debates between Capurro and his
working out of message and messenger (via the communication theories of Shannon and
McLuhan) and Floridi and his work on an information ecology, and explored alongside
applications of whistle-blowing and WikiLeaks, as debated by Žižek and other commentators,
the purpose of the following thesis is threefold. Firstly, it will review the current state of IE as
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an evolving ‘meta-discipline’ (defined below), and will draw a history of the field, including
the establishment of an Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), of which will be outlined in
chapter three. Secondly, it will outline a foundation for collaborative information and
knowledge studies and will assign the study of WikiLeaks a part in the evolving taxonomy of
Information Ethics under the rubric of Collaborative Knowledge Ethics. Lastly, it will address
WikiLeaks within the parameters of information theory, via the history and philosophy of
information, where the ethics of information concern more than just privacy and access to
information, but also an ontological accountability to the state of information itself.
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Chapter 1: Information Ethics – Origins And Evolutions
Overview
Information Ethics (IE) was born under the somewhat humble and yet privileged
tutelage of librarianship. It can be traced back to key figures expressing ethical concerns in
university-taught library courses. It was fostered and raised by individuals passionate and
insightful in the exploration of their field, individuals who in many ways were ahead of their
time, librarians whose groundbreaking work now bears the mark of a global legacy. Tracing the
evolution of the field back to its roots proves a fascinating endeavor, one revealing a tale not so
much of a burgeoning discipline, nor of a cross- or post-discipline phenomenon, but rather a
human tale of personal encounters with an informational world, a dialectic between thought and
conversation spurred into existence by individuals whose intricate journeys of concern for the
daily tasks of librarianship beg a grander philosophy, an authentic approach to understanding
the age old connection between humanity and information. Chapter one will follow the original
scholars of the field, their contributions, and the implications of their work towards a future
outlook of IE. It will trace the origins of Information Ethics from its humble beginnings in
Library and Information Studies and Cybernetics, through its ever-evolving history, and
ultimately explore its current philosophical processes.
While traditional librarianship, introducing the field of Information Ethics in the late
1980’s and early 1990’s, tended to focus on issues of privacy, censorship, access to
information, intellectual freedom and social responsibility, copyright, fair use, and collection
development; Computer Ethics, and thus Cyberethics (while including many of the above
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concerns), placed a focus on ethical issues pertaining to software reliability and honesty,
artificial intelligence, computer crime, and e-commerce (Froehlich, 2004). Journalism and
Media Ethics, having now also adopted the language of ‘Information Ethics’, concerns itself
with issues as diverse as conflicts of interests, fairness, and economic pressure (Smith, 2001).
Bioinformation ethics explores issues of information pertaining to technologies in the field of
biology and medicine where the traditional concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ
donation, euthanasia, and cloning form the basis, where questions are posed regarding rights to
biological identity, the use of DNA and fingerprints, and equal rights to insurance and bank
loans based on genetics (Hongladarom, 2006). Business Information Ethics is the convergence
of two separate fields of applied ethics, those being Information Ethics and Business Ethics,
that addresses concerns of the provision of goods and services, how those goods and services
are provided, and what impact they have (Floridi, 2009).
Thus, traditionally demarcated through the above taxonomy, the field of IE has become
a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the
philosophy of information. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to define.
Praxis
A history of the field would be incomplete without first at least a periphery review of
the praxis of IE, being the concerns and processes of the field. And while the directions of IE in
their various incarnations are for the most part related, critical subtleties do exist. An
understanding of the various strains of IE will lay the foundation for understanding its history
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and evolution. A quick overview of the field reveals a number of foundational pillars along
with their applications.
While on one hand, Information Ethics can be viewed as spanning and evolving into
and through several separate ethical disciplines, it can be noted that many of those supposedly
separate disciplines are merely re-envisioned approaches to the evolution of information itself,
and are collectively covered under the rubric of Information Ethics. A pertinent example of this
is the adoption of IE into the field of Computer Science, a synthesis that forms Computer
Ethics. Computer Ethics in turn, synthesizing with the expanding concerns of ethics and the
Internet as well as implications towards artificial intelligence, has synthesized into Cyberethics.
Thus while Cyberethics would claim to stand as a field of concern in its own right, the claim
can be made that Cyberethics has simply replaced Computer Ethics to compensate for evolving
technology, means and implications (Sullivan, 1996).1
Drawing a history of the taxonomy of the field concerns itself also with what can be
deemed the scions of Information Ethics versus adopted disciplines within Information Ethics.
Adopted satellite fields traditionally include the above noted fields of Business, Media and
Journalism Ethics, areas of information dissemination dealing with aspects of the ethics of
information that don’t necessarily pay homage to Librarianship, the esteemed grandparent of
the field, but that have been grafted into the ‘family’, so to speak, through converging ideals.
While one can argue that computer ethics arises out of library ethics, since the traditional
concerns of library ethics evolved alongside the use of computer technology in libraries,
computer ethics also originally arose independently out of computer and IT related disciplines.
1 While a thorough review of the history of Computer Ethics would at this juncture offer great
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The implications of such subtleties consist of more than mere semantics, and are addressed
below.
The above synopsis quickly outlines what might be considered the traditional spectrum
of, at least, the applied ethics of the field, and doesn’t include the more theoretical branches of
Information Ethics. One quickly becomes aware looking into the breadth of the field, however,
that as far as even the applied ethics spectrum goes, the above outlines only, as stated, a kind of
traditional overview of the field in its original formation. One could argue, and many do, that
numerous other facets form, evolve from, and fall within the parameters of the field. As
Elizabeth Buchanan asks: “Where is the discipline of information ethics? It is increasingly
diffused. It is, simultaneously more important than ever” (Buchanan, 2011).
While Information Ethics now crosses paths with every conceivable discipline, an
argument for interdisciplinary and meta-disciplinary foundations that will take shape
throughout the below treatment of the field, the concern of the present history of Information
Ethics as a discipline will focus on specific developments within its applied and theoretical
aspects, those of which can be captured under the umbrella of the specific discipline of
Information Ethics itself. However, the reader should note that the below discourse will not
exhaustively cover all developments arising from and through Information Ethics.
Accordingly, an overview begins by exploring the founders of the field and their
contributions to it, starting in the 1940s with Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics (Wiener,
1948). It looks towards the work of Robert Hauptman and his reflections on confidentiality and
bias of information in a founding article by Kostrewski and Oppenheim as an origin for the
field (Hauptman, 1988). Thus the field is established by Hauptman, who along with Martha
Smith and Rafael Capurro, first bring the concerns of Wiener’s cybernetics to light in the
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1980’s with the formation of the field’s founding literature. As outlined below, upon such
foundations, the field has since evolved rapidly into several disciplines, referred to by Froehlich
as a multi-threaded phenomenon, and encompasses, among other disciples, the multi-faceted
scope of the Internet, computer science, management information systems, media, journalism,
business, and more (Froehlich, 2004). On the side of activism, Information Ethics includes,
according to Toni Samek, concerns of intercultural relations, liberty and law (Samek, 2010).
Relevant in its own right, as also advocated by Samek, are the concerns of Information
Ethics and education, regarding both the education venture itself, but also the specific
relevance of IE within the University. The first courses taught in Information Ethics were
offered at the University of Pittsburgh, soon to be followed by Kent State University, both
Universities eventually offering Master’s level degrees in Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004).
However, as early as 1990, Information Ethics was being taught in South Africa at the
University of Pretoria (Buchanan, 2009). Soon after the pursuit of Information Ethics became a
legitimized venture, according to Froehlich, Information Ethics was taken on by faculties in
Computer Science, the second major contributor to the field following Library and Information
Studies, and a number of critical and seminal publications from the side of Comp-Sci soon
formed a foundation for Information Ethics literature under the rubric of ‘Computer and
Information Science’, including major texts by Richard Severson’s The Principles of
Information Ethics (Severson, 1997), Marsha Cook Woodbury’s Computer and Information
Ethics, (Woodbury, 2003), and Deborah G. Johnson’s Computer Ethics (Johnson, 1985).
The definition of Information Ethics remains in flux, the field itself referred to by Smith
as a life-world in process, a “socially constructed reality” (Smith, 2001). The implications for
an inclusive definition of Information Ethics are many, venturing into the realms of
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philosophical dialectics, metaphysics and hermeneutics, a fact recognized early on by Smith,
Floridi, and Capurro, key pioneers of the field. As Smith notes even in the field’s infancy, the
philosophical implications are as vast as are the implications of a society facing an unchecked
technological revolution. Her concern, even then, was that society will not be prepared “to deal
with the social, economic, and moral challenges that technological changes present” and that
“the human spirit may be exhausted by the information overload and the intrusions of a wired
society with technologies uncritically employed” (Smith, 2001).
Praxis aside, the nature and phenomenon collectively called Information Ethics must be
addressed philosophically and theoretically in order to understand the sudden and widely
established recognition of the need for such an endeavor. The necessity for an Information
Ethics at a basic level is quite simple, and is a recognized and growing concern across an
information society. The fact is this: the nature and use of information through viral
technologies and our interaction with it, now commonly referred to in the field as Information
and Communication Technologies, or ICT’s, is on the cusp of outgrowing the ability of its
users to understand and control it.
Such a phenomenon looks to the viral and exponentially intricate nature of information
exposed, the breach of ontological walls that previously separated one human being from
another, of the quickly disappearing choice of privacy, and perhaps individualism, and the
audacious question of whether privacy and individualism should even exist. Information Ethics
asks questions that previously had no need to be posed, such as, “Is privacy a human right?”
but does not assume an answer, rather instead exploring the socially constructed world created
through and by information exposure. Information Ethics questions not only the concerns of
ethical interactions with information, personal or otherwise, but also the nature of ‘self’
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(Capurro, 2005) and information entity (Floridi, 1999), of self as information entity, responding
to, and existing among, other information entities.
Critical to the above ontological premise is a far reaching debate that posits philosopher
Rafael Capurro’s “self”, envisioned through Heideggerian hermeneutical ontology, against
Luciano Floridi’s metaphysical “information entity” within the infosphere (Floridi, 2001). The
two are not synonymous ontologies. It is against such a daunting and far-reaching spectrum of
ideologies that information scientists and information philosophers struggle to even establish
praxis. One place to begin, as with many things, is at a place of origins.
Origins
Inquiring into the foundation to Information Ethics takes us back several decades to the
1940s to Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics, who in 1948 published his groundbreaking
book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. We begin
for the purposes of the following history with the work of Robert Hauptman, the most common
starting point with regard to a narration of the field of IE. A primary text, Ethical Challenges in
Librarianship, written by Robert Hauptman, is often cited as the first written account of the
field, introducing ethical concerns for information (Hauptman, 1988). According to Martha
Smith, who with Hauptman is a pioneer of the field, Hauptman was the first to use the term
‘information ethics’ in his work (Smith, 2001), though further exploration reveals an earlier use
of the term by Capurro, as outlined below.
Hauptman’s concern at the time was for ethics as they pertained to librarianship, but
according to Froehlich, who has written on the history of Information Ethics, there was no
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focused attention given to Information Ethics as a field in its own right at the time that
Hauptman began including the subject matter in his teaching (Froehlich, 2004). Hauptman,
after his original publication on Information Ethics, would once again bring up his concerns a
couple years later in Ethical Concerns in Librarianship: An Overview, where he incredulously
notes the lack of concern for an information ethics, as ironically immortalized in his overview
of the situation, where he states that, “As an MLS candidate, I was surprised by this lack of
interest in ethical concerns, and so I devised what is now a rather infamous experiment”
(Hauptman, 1990). 2
One of the pillars of Hauptman’s legacy is his creation of the Journal of Information
Ethics in 1992, where his above concern takes form in what has become the founding journal
for the field. Thus while a basis of literature was established early on, it wasn’t until later when
specific courses in Universities were introduced to address Information Ethics as an integral
component of librarianship, as outlined above, that the concerns began to spill over into other
information disciplines including Information Technology.
The first true venture into the then unknown realm of Information Ethics reaches further
back than even Hauptman where we find references made to issues of confidentiality and bias
2 As is widely exemplified among entry-level students coming into the field of
Librarianship, Hauptman’s infamous experiment involved pitting professional ethics against social ethics, and for the first time exposing the dichotomy of intellectual freedom and social responsibility. The experiment saw Hauptman query a number of librarians on requirements for constructing small explosive devices capable of blowing up a suburban home. Not a single librarian refused to help him based on personal objections and ethics, but instead held steadfast to established ethics in librarianship, attempting to provide him the information he needed. It was in reflection of this experiment, as Hauptman notes, that there was an exponential rise in publications concerning ethics in Librarianship (Hauptman, 1990). Much of the controversy among library and information ethicists surrounding Hauptman’s ‘infamous experiment’ concerned not the irresponsible actions of the librarians involved but rather the perceived incredulity of Hauptman that they would do otherwise. While Hauptman, even today, holds closer to the ideal of social responsibility than to an unchecked acceptance of the right to access to information, many information ethicists and librarians hold steadfast to the ideals of intellectual freedom, despite the cost.
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of information in an article entitled Ethics In Information Science, written by Barbara J.
Kostrewski and Charles Oppenheim. The article outlines concerns over the quality and bias of
information provided by vendors to clients and customers. In the article, the authors are aware
of the burgeoning requirement for an information ethics, as simply stated, “There is a need for a
code of ethics for information scientists, and information scientists need to be far more aware
of ethical questions.” (Kostrewski and Oppenheim, 1980). Ahead of their time, the authors are
perhaps the first to advocate for an ethics in information. One wonders to what extent these
authors could have possibly known that their humble concerns would one day become a
leading, globally infused, worldview, one which would shake and then redefine the very
foundations of philosophy itself.
As noted above, Hauptman was not the first to combine the implications of ethics in
information into the single term Information Ethics. A further review of the founding literature
in the field reveals the use of the term, hidden away in an early article written by Rafael
Capurro. Capurro first uses the term, in German, while referencing the Kostrewski/Oppenheim
article noted above. It was Capurro, as far as can be determined, who was the first to introduce
the term "Informationsethik" (“Information Ethics”) into the literature in his Zur Frage Der
Ethik in Fachinformation Und –Kommunication in 1981, stating, “Man kann die Frage nach
einer Informationsethik im Bezug auf Forschung, Lehre und Praxis stellen, wie Kostrewski und
Oppenheim es in ihrem Übersichtsartikel ‘Ethics in information science’ gemacht haben.” (One
can raise the question of an information ethics in terms of research, teaching and practice, as
Kostrewski and Oppenheim have made it in their review article "Ethics in information
science") (Capurro, 1981).
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Martha Smith, a true pioneer of the field, is in many ways the founder of Information
Ethics. Of her numerous works, her original Information Ethics stands as the most thorough
review of the evolution of Information Ethics from it’s origins up until the article’s publication
in the mid 1990’s (Smith, 1997). Smith reviews the realm of Information Ethics and its growth
through the 1990’s in another paper written a few years later by the same title where she notes
the crux of the concern for an “Information Ethics” as the discrepancy between the rapid
increase in technological communications and the uncritical acceptance of such innovations by
professionals and laypeople alike.
Smith first started exploring Information Ethics in the late 1980s. In trying to develop a
model to visualize her theory, she looked to the newly established field of computer ethics for a
point of comparison. While computer ethics encapsulated the direction and the idea that she
had in mind for Information Ethics, she knew that her vision entailed more. As she states in
looking back on her career, “The scope I had in mind was larger and included not only what
was then called “information” but also the world of knowledge including the philosophy of
knowledge” (Smith, 2011). It was in light of reviewing the philosophy of knowledge that she
first discovered the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science. From here she
went on to develop her initial model of “five working categories”: Access, Ownership, Privacy,
Security, and Community, the first theoretical model for an applied ethics for the field.
In her article, The Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and
Meaning, Smith reflects back on her career and experience in the context of offering insight
from the early years of the field towards those who would take up the torch. While insightful
beyond her time, Smith did not have a smooth career. By the very nature of groundbreaking, of
pioneering, she encountered resistance at every turn. Her colleagues often reacted with fear,
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disinterest and resistance to her ideas and she soon learned to balance deliberation with silence
when necessary. Through her career, Smith would be passed on for tenure in several
appointments. She would be accused of teaching “Sunday School”. Her original vision was so
poorly received that her detractors were not even able to objectively and properly qualify her
work. Thus she had to fight to even use the term “Information Ethics” when even her
supporters insisted she use the term “Library Ethics” instead. Based on her reflections, it is
perhaps both disheartening and encouraging to conclude that in order to do what she needed to
do she had also to sacrifice much of what she wanted to do (Smith, 2011). Her sacrifice is both
exemplary and affirming of the philosophical standards and ideals underlying the very
foundations of Information Ethics and of freedom itself. These same ideals, as explored
throughout this thesis, will take the reader from the foundation of library ethics in modern
librarianship back through thought and time to ancient Greece where Information Ethics finds
its earliest origins in the agora of Athenian democracy through parrhesia, an idea of freedom of
speech that posits the authenticity of ethics in the vulnerability of the speaker.
Perhaps to the new initiate stumbling into the current evolution of Information Ethics,
one might assume that the entire phenomenon is constructed and directed entirely by Floridi
and Capurro, two key players whose thought seem to dominate the field, and whose works
consistently play off of, critique and reference the other. There is no better example of the
intricacy and complexity of the field than as demonstrated by the interchange between these
two Information Scientists / Philosophers, and the numerous papers written in response to their
understanding of Information Ethics through terms of hermeneutics and the metaphysical.
Where Capurro introduces angeletics to the field (the study of messengers and messages), and
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works within the philosophical considerations of a hermeneutical approach, Floridi works
within his post-analytic philosophical framework of information ecology and infosphere.
In order to accurately assess a history or evolution of Information Ethics, one must first
comprehend the foundations of information itself, which was the initial task of Capurro as far
back as 1978 with his doctoral dissertation on the Concept of Information. In his formative
work, Capurro explores the evolution of our understanding of information, from the early
Greco-Roman idea of eidos and morphé to Aquinas’ medieval informatio to the eventual
undoing of such objective concepts of information (information as giving form to something)
towards a modern communicative theory of information (Capurro, 1978/2009). As such,
Capurro’s doctoral and post-doctoral work in the late seventies and early eighties paved the
way for an anthropological foundation for Information Ethics through the application of his
Hermeneutik of information science.
Now a leader in the field, Capurro first revealed his hermeneutical approach en masse in
a series of lectures in Sweden in 1985. Following those original lectures, Capurro brought
together the ideas from the lectures and from his post-doctoral thesis into his Informationethos
und Informationsethik, where he sums up his hermeneutical approach, stating that “The
information habits of a group or society ("information ethos") and the critical appraisal of
moral norms in this field ("information ethics") are the key concepts of these reflections.”
(Capurro, 1988). The conclusions of Capurro’s Hermeneutik define the field in many ways, as
reflected under the “Foundations” page of the International Center for Information Ethics,
where this hermeneutical epistemological framework for the field is reflected in the
differentiation between morals, ethics and law, where morals are customs and traditions, ethics
the critical reflection on those morals, with law encapsulating the legal formalization of ethics
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as norms, a differentiation that has been explored extensively throughout the history of ethics,
beginning with the Greek philosophers (ICIE, 2014).
Of all Capurro’s contributions to the field, his paramount contribution is in his concept
of angeletics, one of the more significant evolutions of the field, being a theory of messages
and messengers that while complimentary to his original Hermeneutik, presupposes
hermeneutics. Where hermeneutics deals in matters of interpretation, angeletics expands on the
communication theory of Shannon and McLuhan, expounding the precedence and import of
message before interpretation. As Capurro explains it:
“The question, 'what is a message?' opens a new perspective not only with regard to media studies but also to the study of signs and their interpretation. Angeletics is a research field at the crossroad of media studies, semiotics, and hermeneutics. Each interpretation presupposes a process of message transmission. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, not just an interpreter of these messages. The message-bearing nature of communication is what angeletics aims to analyse. But any process of message transmission presupposes indeed a hermeneutic situation in which sender and receiver have some common basis of understanding. In other words, angeletics operates with the sender/receiver difference based on the belief that understanding or, more generally, that a selection process between two systems is possible. Hermeneutics operates with the difference between pre-understanding and interpretation based on the belief that what is object of the process of interpretation has been successfully transmitted, i.e., offered to the receiver as an object of selection. Semiotics is concerned with the whole process by which a sign, what it intends to signify and what the interpreter is supposed to select are viewed as a dynamic, self-organising structure.”
Somewhat later to enter the field than Capurro, but just as influential in his efforts at
redefining information as a foundation to the field, especially as it pertains to one of its more
significant evolutions or reiteration of information itself, the Philosophy of Information, is
Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford.
Floridi finds his entry into Information Ethics through his search for a new methodology to the
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problem of the foundation of the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology). In his formative
book, Scepticism And the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies,
Floridi approaches epistemology from a metatheoretical perspective, asking whether an
epistemology is even possible that does not negate itself through logical fallacies. This
methodology is Floridi’s answer to what he deems the failure of analytic philosophy. Regarding
his venture he muses, “I have wandered from the history of ideas to information technology,
from formal logic to the social sciences" (Floridi, 1996). Out of this pursuit, Floridi explored
Popper’s objective knowledge, knowledge not dependent on a subject, which Floridi calls
semantic information, the beginnings of what would later form the basis to his constructionist
philosophy, the philosophy of information (Floridi, 2005).
In his Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics, Floridi
solidifies his approach by terms of information entity and information entropy. According to
Floridi, at a foundational level all things constitute an information entity and all information
entities are deserving of and accountable to moral entitlement. In an informational interplay
within what Floridi terms the Infosphere, each act either contributes to or detracts from the
inclusive “good”, as represented in terms of information entropy. It is from this position that
Floridi’s methodology manifests as an environmental ethics, and whereby Floridi’s concept of
Infosphere arises. Floridi comprehends the task of ethics as a recognition and regulation of
information processes, a recognition in which he regrets as being overlooked and looked down
upon by traditional philosophers, an ailment resulting from, as it were, the interdisciplinary
nature of computer and information ethics, exemplified by Floridi as “everybody’s business,
but nobody’s concern” (Floridi, 1999).
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Library Ethics
While the above history outlines the parameters of Information Ethics as a distinct
discipline, the field finds its primordial roots in library ethics whose concerns far predate the
inception of Information Ethics, finding their own official origins, at least in the professional
sense, in 19th-century librarianship, and their unofficial origins (the crux of the following
thesis) in a tradition of library ethics that stretches back to ancient Greece.
While the inception of library ethics into an official code was first laid down in 1930,
the consideration of ethics by the American Library Association (ALA) dates back to 1892
where a utilitarian motto was adopted to represent the charge of the ALA, characterized as
“The best reading for the greatest number at the least cost” (Preer, 2008). That basic utilitarian
philosophy remains in place to date, though it has been modified over the years to
accommodate changing interpretations of its language. Even so, and criticized by David
Woolwine for its absolutist language, the Bill of Right’s mandate still suggests an allegiance to
strict utilitarianism, a dangerous scenario that opens the door to the very abuses it so fervently
tries to negate. Namely, and especially in our contemporary age of government surveillance
and national security, a utilitarian creed of the greatest good for the greatest number becomes a
gateway to authorities controlling information, invading privacy and restricting access, all
based on “the greatest good” of national security. Woolwine posits that a new philosophy is
needed that revamps or replaces the Bill of Rights with a creed more in line with postmodernist
idealism (Woolwine, 2007).
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Tying Information Ethics to its origins in Library Ethics is the shared foundational
philosophy of the interplay between intellectual freedom and social responsibility. As
Hauptman posits, “Ethical dilemmas arise when two positive necessary dicta conflict with each
other. In librarianship this may occur when the demand for information clashes with an
iconoclastic advocacy of individual decision making, the human necessity to bear
responsibility, to be accountable for one’s actions” (Hauptman, 1990). This interplay could not
be better demonstrated than between the polarization of Hauptman’s views and the otherwise
prevailing views of most intellectual freedom advocates. While Hauptman places personal
ethics (which he equates with societal or ‘common sense’ ethics) before professional ethics, the
general trend in Library Ethics, perhaps more so than any other discipline of applied ethics, is
to hold steadfast to a professional code of ethics before and if necessary, against, one’s own
ethics and personal beliefs. As Preer captures in her Library Ethics, “An ethical mandate to
separate personal beliefs from professional responsibilities is inherent in providing the highest
level of service and the freest access to information” (Preer, 2008, p. 134).
Despite to which bearing one favors in the above gradation of ethics, it is of paramount
importance for the information ethicist to observe Hauptman’s original essay, Ethical Concerns
in Librarianship, namely for the stage it sets for the foundation to the field of Information
Ethics, some of those foundations whose applicability is even now only truly coming to light in
a post-WikiLeaks culture of government surveillance. It should be somewhat humbling to see
Hauptman predict the dialectical directions of an information-based society and a need for
information ethics decades before its current culmination in the WikiLeaks controversies. In the
above noted essay Hauptman somewhat uncannily envisages the WikiLeaks phenomenon in his
exploration of the dichotomy of the ethical spectrum, concluding that, “one’s personal or social
20
ethic should supersede the ethic that journalists have created for themselves”, whereby “Their
ends (discovering information) do not justify the means (acting in an uncivilized or illegal
manner)” (Hauptman, 1990). Hauptman remains true to his original take on the matter, judging
the activities of WikiLeaks an “abomination” and explicitly asserting that, “offering the world a
treasure trove of unvetted proscribed documents embarrasses, harms, and kills” (Hauptman,
2011).
It is no coincidence, as will be outlined in further chapters, that the field of Information
Ethics has seemingly come full circle in the WikiLeaks phenomenon. It will be argued,
however, that the concerns of the field have not come full circle, per se. Nor is it simply a
matter of history repeating itself. Despite certain schools of thought that would argue against
the uniqueness of the problems now faced by our contemporary information culture, the
increased exposure to information is a distinctive experience. Rather than coming full circle,
WikiLeaks is symbolic of the culmination of factors leading to an imminent singularity in
human / information relations. WikiLeaks, the pivotal factor in the present project, is both a
phenomenon and a symbol of fulfillment and dialectical inevitability, encapsulating not only
the tradition of library and information ethics in their entirety, but also the contemporary
dialectical expression of an information-based culture.
While the American Library Association (ALA) and the Canadian Library Association
(CLA) mandate strict ethical codes for library and information professionals, unlike law, where
one can be disbarred for not adhering to, there is no legal requirement for librarians or
information ethicists to follow such codes, nor normally are there prescribed professional
consequences for not doing so. To complicate the situation, the applied ethics of information in
any given scenario, even when applied according to the same set of professional codes using
21
the same mandates, becomes muddied depending on what side of any particular issue one is
standing on. As Hauptman states, “The problem is that correct action is apparently variable
depending on one’s allegiance” (Hauptman, 2009). While such an aphorism is likely true for
ethics in any field, it not only becomes overtly obvious in library and information ethics, but
also in many ways defines library and information ethics at a foundational level.
A look towards the early makings of library professionalism points to an intimate
meeting that took place in Philadelphia in 1876 when the first members of the American
Library Association initially met to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a professional
organization for librarians, founding librarianship as an established profession that in time
would allow for a formal statement of fundamental and centralized ethics. As noted by Preer,
the establishment of the ethical values of Librarianship took shape in real world practice during
that time and as influenced within the cultural horizons of the industrial age and mass
urbanization, cumulating with the ALA’s first professional code of ethics in 1938 (Preer, 2008).
It is thus within the above dynamics that history establishes a common base for both
Library Ethics and Information Ethics, addressing the intricate relationship between the spread
of common knowledge and the drive towards eradicating exclusivist monopolies on
information and access to it. From the early American experience of libraries and increased
public access to information, a professional ethical foundation was sought and established
under similar parameters as those currently at play within the dynamics of the contemporary
digital age. In establishing a history for Information Ethics and ultimately an ethics for a
collaborative knowledge based epistemology as demanded by phenomena such as WikiLeaks,
and WikiLeaks representing a phenomenon, it is thus towards the industrial age and even
further that one must look. In many ways, our current digital society with its void of ethics and
22
questions concerning said void as revealed through matters of technology and information
control is the culmination of what began in the industrial revolution with the onset of mass
production, including the increased distribution of printed information (and this, of course, an
evolution of a post-Gutenberg world). However, as will be outlined below, the foundations of
library ethics, as we understand them today, far predate even Gutenberg, the industrial
revolution and 19th-century professionalism.
While addressing what has been established as Library Ethics under the ALA and
other institutions, one must, in seeking to unearth the origins needed to navigate the entirety of
the evolutions of the field, apply to one’s search an ‘archeology of ideas’ or a historical
geology3 taking the exposition further back and further inward in order to understand the
dynamics involved in the formation of Information Ethics, and thus collaborative knowledge,
including the phenomenon of the wiki and finally WikiLeaks itself. While such an exposition
looks first to the 19th century, it retreats further to ideas of freedom and access as fortified
through the events of the French Revolution, and then further still towards matters of
censorship as exemplified by the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the 16th century.
Further still, slowly threading its way back through history, the traces of library ethics find their
place also in mediaeval Islam in which many ways the modern library most accurately
emulates, the Islamic libraries lending out books for loan periods of one day at a time, and
finally, at least for the purposes of this overview, library ethics turn to ancient Greece itself, to
the very origins of western thought, looking towards ideas of freedom of speech in the Greek
concept of parrhesia, and to Plato's criticism of writing and the implications thereof.
3 Rafael Capurro, in conversation, October 28, 2013.
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While the numerous advocates for library ethics and the tales of their struggles paint a
fascinating, enlightening and colorful history, the details of such cannot fully be illuminated in
the current treatment. The reader is however here directed to Fred Lerner’s the Story of
Libraries for a complete education. The critical point to take from the above is an awareness of
the cultural dialectics, the rise and fall, the waxing and waning of the interplay between
humanity and an informational world that now predicates a digital informational culture as
portended in the concerns of Information Ethics. As noted above, the events and concerns of
the digital age are not new; they are however cumulative in the fulfillment of the historical
conflicts between intellectual freedom and information monopoly, a dichotomy whereby a
detailed analysis of the wiki phenomenon and collaborative knowledge ethics encapsulates the
historical entirety of the tumultuous relationship outlined above.
Evolutions
Current directions in Information Ethics are redefining the scope of the field while
building bridges between disparate and seemingly separate aspects of its semantic spectrum.
Fascinating implications present themselves towards the evolution of that which currently does,
and which can be, encapsulated beneath the umbrella term ‘Information Ethics’. It remains to
be seen what precise form these evolutions will ultimately take, if indeed there ever is a point
where we can put the definition to rest. Where Librarianship has given birth to Information
Ethics, Information Ethics has given birth to the Philosophy of Information and angeletics, new
foundations to ontology and communication theory, spearheaded by Capurro and Floridi, and in
turn, explorations of the Philosophy of Information and angeletics have come full circle to
24
readdress the traditional concerns of librarianship through exploring the philosophical
implications of librarianship, namely the relationship between information organization,
cataloging, classification, epistemology, and ontology, and all of this precipitated at an
intercultural scale (Herold, 2005). It would appear that as the various strains of the numerous
and ever growing disciplines within this yet ambiguously defined field slowly coalesce into a
recognized and common sphere, the relationships between those disparate pieces will become
ever more intimately entwined, greying borders of black and white into a unified kaleidoscope
of semantic possibilities.
It is however all too easy to become swept away with all of this, and in our excitement,
forget the foundations of the field, the foundations that Hauptman fought to establish so many
years ago. With all of the grandeur of the construction of this philosophical Parthenon, one
such foundational pillar is weakened, often unkempt and neglected, the structures of which it
supports threatening to collapse under an ever-increasing thought-load. Thus, least we get
carried away with our task, it becomes incumbent on each of the above players to acknowledge
that ever critical piece of the puzzle, namely education, as hinted at above, without which, the
project fails. It is perhaps somewhat inconceivable that more than twenty years after
Hauptman’s call for the teaching of Information Ethics courses in Library and Information
Studies, there yet remains a void in the very place where the field found life. Though, as
mentioned above, select universities in the US and globally have taken up Hauptman’s call,
there remains a seemingly willful ignorance on the part of many Library schools to include in
their curriculum a course dedicated solely to Information Ethics. Ironically, and despite the
above political landscape, it is education that has arisen as the leading concern in the field of
Information Ethics, at least as exemplified in the literature, a fact revealed through the metadata
25
analytics of Dr. Ali Shiri of the University of Alberta in his Exploring Information Ethics: A
Metadata Analytics Approach, a study that will be explored further in chapter two of the
following thesis.
Despite the lack of a home for Information Ethics in education, there are advocates as
such, who like Hauptman, work from their positions as professors in Library and Information
Studies to push for and make aware the need for the study of Information Ethics especially as it
pertains to Librarianship. One such advocate is Toni Samek, a professor teaching out of the
University of Alberta, whose legacy as the founding player in the creation and advocacy of
Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility equals that of the formative players of
Information Ethics as a whole. In recent years, Samek has taken up the torch of Hauptman, and
advocated for the further inclusion of Information Ethics in education as a critical element in its
own right, but also as critical to Library and Information Studies. Building off of established
pillars in her own branch of Information Ethics, Samek applies her experience in the formation
and teaching of her course Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility to highlight the
necessity of Information Ethics in higher education (Samek, 2010). Her part in the creation of
the Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Association for Library and Information Science
Education (ALISE) sets the stage, but most universities and library schools are not yet prepared
to heed the call. Professors like Samek bring the idealism of Information Ethics back to the
front line, where concerns for Intercultural Information Ethics become a form of activism, often
against the very structures of the University institutions themselves, institutions that knowingly
or unknowingly repress the very advocacy they ought to be supporting. According to Samek, it
is no coincidence that Information Ethics is lacking in the institutional framework. Noting that
academic freedom is dependent on tenure and job security, Samek relates the contracting of
26
instruction and the systematic elimination of full time professorships as directly applicable to a
hesitancy about free speech, thus defeating the quest of Information Ethics at its very core. The
problem here of course translates to matters of education. As Samek put it, “the working
conditions of faculty are the learning conditions of students” (Samek, 2010).
Concerns for ethics in an information-driven world have saturated all facets of society
and culture. One might say that the field of Information Ethics has gone ‘viral’ in recent years,
globalizing at a speed unmatched by any singular phenomenon in history. Information Ethics
has taken up residence even within the halls of the United Nations itself under UNESCO and
“info-ethics”, a term adopted by UNESCO to refer to their own brand of intercultural
information ethics, where the main concerns center around topics such as the digital divide, the
information rich and the information poor, and cultural alienation (Capurro, 1998).
Luciano Floridi reflects back on the transformations in the field over the ten years that
he has contributed to it. Now one of leading philosophers in the field, Floridi notes a two-
pronged evolution of the field stemming from information and communication technologies
(ICTs). On one hand, he notes the various growing dependence in all fields of ethical research
for an Information Ethics, as he puts it, “from business ethics to environmental ethics, from
medical ethics to the ethics of nanotechnologies, from the ethics of cyberwar to the ethics of e-
research.” And on the other hand, he recognizes the conceptual expansion and dialogue within
Information Ethics, crossing paths with numerous philosophical traditions spanning, as he lists
them, “Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Spinozism, Deontologism, Consequentialism,
Contractualism and Buddhism, as well as analyses and discussions of metaphysical,
epistemological and logical topics” (Floridi, 2008).
27
The implications of these evolutions are staggering, considering the partnerships formed
between philosophy and praxis in Information Ethics, and considering the speed at which they
have formed. Under the heading of “Information Ethics” we are now looking at a globally
concerned, socially constructed “life-world” (to employ Smith’s terminology), that spans a
vision beginning with advocacy for free access to information in librarianship and ending with
philosophical studies in information phenomena based in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, both of whom are primary influences in Capurro’s thought and
writing (Takenouchi, 2004). With information scientists and philosophers such as Capurro and
Floridi pushing the envelope at every turn, ever advancing in thought and application the realm
of that which entails Information Ethics, one considers the near futile task of actually defining
the field. But perhaps, as many philosophers would point out, a field that can’t be nailed down
is the only kind of ‘field’ that is relevant, that defined epistemologies are dead scholasticism,
even to the point of irrelevancy.
Conclusion
Despite the uncertainties and yet unresolved foundations of the field of IE, it is difficult
to argue that Information Ethics as a field is not relevant, in all its facets. Studies in the field are
growing exponentially in ways that are barely traceable, all towards a holistic understanding of
the nature of the world as informational, with loaded implications towards responsibilities that
we ourselves have as agents of an informational ontology. But even with this said, the
recognition of the relevance of information ethics in all disciplines, in an ironic sort of way,
perhaps nullifies Information Ethics as a discipline that stands apart in it’s own field, since the
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adoption of Information Ethics globally, corporately, scientifically, and philosophically, into all
aspects of life, has restructured our understanding of our entire world.
Such contemplations are sobering when placed against the digital evolutions of
information societies. While one might consider Information Ethics outside of the current
applications of the field, the scope of Information Ethics is established around two
considerations, those being the proliferation of information, and the digital vehicle in which it
resides. Digital ontology states that “the ultimate nature of reality is digital,” a premise that
Floridi disagrees with, who favors instead an informational ontology where “the ultimate nature
of reality is structural” (Floridi, 2009). Whether or not the ontological debate is ever laid to
rest, and whether or not one agrees to such definitive conceptions of reality, it cannot be denied
that the quest to define and classify Information Ethics in its own field of study becomes ever
more complicated as it coalesces into a state of digital zeitgeist. If everything is Information
Ethics, as Vlatko Vedral’s theory of Quantum Information would suggest, then as Elizabeth
Buchanan points out, nothing is Information Ethics, a stance that she herself disagrees with
(Buchanan, 2011). Perhaps only time will tell if Information Ethics is a field of inquiry, or
simply the recognized zeitgeist.
Spanning everything from the overarching philosophies of Capurro and Floridi to the
more imminent advocacy of Samek’s access and responsibility, Information Ethics has grown
into a global phenomenon, and whether merely a discipline or a new ‘world spirit’, Information
Ethics has now taken front stage in, for, and sometimes against all aspects of society, from
education to government, from access to privacy, encompassing day to day “ethical questions
about relationships in society among people” (Samek, 2010), to the inquiry into self as
ontologically informational. Even as the current project towards a history of the field takes
29
form, new directions are coalescing among the ever changing horizons of thought and
experience, opening doors for further avenues to a world defined by, and responsible to,
information.
30
Chapter 2: Towards a Unified Taxonomy
Overview
The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is
ultimately unattainable, and yet the challenge to do so becomes an obligatory ongoing
prerequisite. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable
practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to what Charles Ess, in
referring to Luciano Floridi’s information ecology, deems ‘philosophical naturalism’ (Ess,
2009). As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse
categorization, but it is this dialectical understanding that necessitates the task. Chapter two
outlines, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information
Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. In the following discourse,
the assumptions behind the current classifications of the field are questioned. Beginning with
the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning
the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael
Capurro and Luciano Floridi, the following chapter explicates how any such attempt to develop
an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete. The historical attempt in
the field of IE to categorize the field into six sub-fields of applied ethics will be explored, those
six sub-fields being Computer Ethics, Cyber Ethics, Media Ethics, Library Ethics,
Bioinformation Ethics, and Business Information Ethics, and an endeavor will be made to
explicate their origins as well as to highlight possible evolutions in the taxonomy of the field. It
will explore whether Floridi’s Philosophy of Information is affirmed in its metaphysical claim
31
to philosophical naturalism in light of the outcome of an evolving field. It will also address
Capurro’s foundation to Information Ethics as a type of meta-ethics encompassing all fields of
ethics dealing with information.
Perhaps for many, the evolution of the field of Information Ethics from its inception
(either in 1948 or the 1980s, depending on one’s perspective) to its current state feasibly paints
a sort of runaway scene, whereby the application of ethical praxis to the real life concerns of
information and communications technology have all but been hijacked and subsumed into
grander philosophical deliberations about the nature of reality and being. Where once the
literature and scholarship of the field addressed head-on the concerns of intellectual property,
privacy, freedom of access and social responsibility (concerns that most people could follow
and understand), the present state of Information Ethics seems conceivably elitist, fallen prey
perhaps to ivory tower scholasticism. The debate, some might surmise, has escaped the house
and is no longer accessible by those to whom it concerns, and is now, as worded by Charles
Ess, a “difficult debate between Floridi’s Philosophy of Information as a philosophical
naturalism and the Heideggarian components of Rafael Capurro’s intercultural information
ethics” (Ess, 2009). And so, to the uninitiated eye, where once Information Ethics boasted a
call to action, it has betrayed the pursuit of worldly good in favor of a sort of cosmic
ontological reconciliation of informational entities. And while this grand standing works
wonders for philosophers, the average worker might wonder if there is any room left for action
on the part of the rest of us.
The above scenario is of course an age-old clash between laity and scholarship, and is
certainly not unique to Information Ethics. The dialectical nature of the debate is in fact
inevitable, cyclical in nature, and a ‘necessary evil’. Like any concern of any age, initial action
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on the part of the laity is eventually and inevitably taken up by philosophers and analyzed, and
in turn taken back by the people to be put into action, and through this dialectical struggle,
‘common’ knowledge is made better for it. The concern here regarding an evolving definition
of the field of IE is not in fact whether ‘scholasticism’ has stolen the cultural zeitgeist and
owned it, (nor will any suggestion here be made that the pursuit of philosophy is merely an
exercise in ivory tower futility!) Rather the evolution of the field of IE raises a concern of a
different sort, that of the possibility of a cohesive taxonomy.
Philosophy and Taxonomy
The attempt to draw any taxonomy of Information Ethics, let alone a unified and agreed
upon taxonomy, proves almost fascinating in its near futile nature. In addition, because all
fields and professions have in recent years come face to face with the necessity of their own
information ethics due to the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT’s), the concept of Information Ethics as a separately defined domain becomes on one
hand, ridiculous, but in actuality, more telling than ever. The best practice to date, according to
those committed to the task, is to work within a framework for the field rather than a formal
taxonomy (Mathiesen, 2004), though formal taxonomical studies attempting to cover the field
are slowly coming to light such as Dr. Ali Shiri’s Metadata Analytics approach towards
exploring Information Ethics, outlined below. The transient nature of the field was recognized
even in its inception in the early 1980s, as Capurro notes in regards to the content of the
Kostrewski-Oppenheim paper, oft cited as the first paper to explore “Information Ethics”:
33
“…the editor critically remarks that it is difficult to identify its aim, since the argument goes off in all directions. This dispersion should come as no great surprise if one considers that the authors, as they themselves at the very beginning remark, are discussing questions which until then, i.e. until 1980, were not found on the front pages of the current information science literature.” (Capurro, 1985).
If there is one thing that can be said for the task, it is that time proves more difficult the
task of doing so. In other words, it appears that as over time we further try to categorize the
field of Information Ethics, our grasp on our characterizations slip further from us. It appeared,
in the eighties and early nineties, that it might be possible to eventually land within some form
of disciplinary parameters, but as the field and nature of Information Ethics grew to encompass
ever broader facets, each successive attempt at putting together a taxonomy only revealed a
wider battle field, more complex than previously imagined. The struggle to capture the
magnitude of the field is perhaps best exemplified by Sanford Berman’s proposal to the
Library of Congress Cataloging Policy and Support Office (2007) that "Information Ethics" be
added as a subject heading. The LC form that was instead approved and established reads:
"Information Technology--Moral and Ethical Aspects (UF Information ethics)”4, a heading that
designates the entirety of the field to what is otherwise explored under “Computer Ethics” and
exemplifying perhaps the limited understanding of the scope and magnitude of what
Information Ethics actually entails.
Representing an idea concerns philosophers and librarians. Perhaps in light of this it
should be no surprise that IE begins in librarianship but currently appears detained by
philosophy, the implications of which could warrant a separate thesis. But where does
taxonomy of information itself begin? And what exactly does classifying classification look
4 Sanford Berman’s original proposal: http://www.sanfordberman.org/headings/inforethics.pdf
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like? (What is the meta of metadata?) Those familiar with the field of IE and its current
directions will here experience a type of cognitive dissonance in the attempt to envision a
taxonomy of taxonomy, conjuring nightmarish Aristotelian visions of the struggle to categorize
all known things. Further contemplation should allow for at least an abstract awareness of the
difference between the undertaking of the philosophy of information and any Aristotelian or
even Platonic comparison. Categories and “form” are one thing, the re-envisioning of Being
itself quite another (…and thus, fittingly, in a single paragraph, one plummets from
librarianship into the abyss of philosophical inquiry…).
Looking toward Library and Information Science is, logically, the place to begin when
addressing taxonomical concerns of any matter. One can begin with a typical subject analysis,
as one would do in librarianship, which asks first to identify the overall discipline or branch of
knowledge under which the matter at hand best fits. From here, an attempt is then made to
consider the perspective audience of the matter, in this case the ‘to whom it may concern’ of
IE. A hierarchal breakdown then follows, subjecting the discipline to important concepts and
most frequently encountered concepts, followed by title, subtitle, headings and so forth.
Metadata, the newest philosophical envisioning of cataloging and classification, takes
taxonomy out of the stuffy environs of libraries and paints it sexy for the ICT generation,
positing numerous and necessary arteries for digital access and flow. And to be fair, there are
many arguments for the validity of fluidity in classification over traditional information
ontologies (not to be confused with philosophical ‘ontology’). However, at the end of the day,
both traditional taxonomies and metadata schemes don’t quite capture the nature of Information
Ethics as they might other ‘disciplines’.
35
Perhaps the biased nature of taxonomies becomes exposed in Information Ethics. As a
helpful reference point to the nature and limitations of informational ontology, one might
consider a couple of the most familiar examples of traditional classification failure, as per
Shirky’s 2005 talks, those being the controversial cases of the Dewey Decimal Classification
(DDC) ‘200s’, and the Library of Congress (LOC) LOC D. The first reference is to the
embarrassing, but yet addressed, bias of religion in favor of western Christianity within the
DDC, the second to the overwhelmingly prejudiced consideration of History in the LOC
(Shirky, 2005).5 Namely, it becomes quickly apparent that all classification eventually fails at
least to some extent, or at least has done so to date. Secondly, the recognition of the fact that
classification fails holds huge ethical implications towards “truth” and information, and thus
epistemology. What is truth? The question is the oldest question known to intellectual being.
The usual answer, or at least the contemporary one, is that truth, to a large extent, is that which
exists in the eye of the beholder, in our case the ‘beholder’ being any contemporary cultural
climate that determines, whether scientifically or non-scientifically, the ethical value of an idea.
Reflection on taxonomy reiterates the question in a less abstract framework, but ironically, in
its exposed biases, comes up with the same answer. Both of the above stated taxonomical
categories are still in use.
5 A number of important considerations become pertinent in the above examples. Eight subcategories of Christianity under the heading of religion, followed by a ninth category covering “other religions” is very telling of the seemingly biased and arbitrary nature of bibliographic taxonomy. Likewise, of the seventeen world-wide geographically-based categories, thirteen cover Europe, one the former Soviet Union, one for Asia, one covers Africa, with the next to last category covering Oceania (the final category allots a place to “Gypsies”), where the Balkan Peninsula is equivalently categorized with Africa and Asia at the bottom of the list.
36
As misinformation is one of the facets that the field of Information Ethics deals with, it
becomes disconcerting on two levels to consider the egocentric nature of declaring an absolute
and authoritative taxonomy for the field. While it is necessary to work within terms of
categorization in order to interact with the world around us (there is no other way to interact
with it), history has yet to impress on us the biased and arbitrary nature of the process. And
thus, as Information Ethics attributes its childhood to the Information Sciences, and strives in
adulthood to consider the ethical dilemmas of misinformation, a bad taxonomy is like a dark
family secret no one entertains. By nature of what Information Ethics is, any taxonomy for the
field must be conceptualized in ideas that entertain inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary
possibilities. In light of this, it will be shown that the family tree of Information Ethics begins
and ends in Librarianship, but allowing for certain taxonomical relationships, having more
often to contend with the adoption of a great many other disciplines, thus grafting into itself (as
a ‘field’) concerns, ideals, and ‘categorizations’ that do not originally trace their roots to the
field of Information Ethics.
There was awareness even in the eighties of the need for further definition of the field in
terms of the ‘yet-to-come’, a concern for things that could not yet be fully visualized, but were
nonetheless surely waiting for us on the horizon. In what was one of the first attempts to apply
an informal taxonomy to the field, Computer and Information Ethics (Weckert and Adney,
1997), one reads about how “computer and information ethics might be (1) all of computer
ethics and all of information ethics, or (2) the intersection of computer and information ethics,
that is, just those issues that concern both.” This somewhat ambiguous schema, whether
intentional or not, leaves the door open to further interpretation. The last chapters of the above
book dealt with further projections towards the implications of ethics in regards to such things
37
as virtual reality, mind and machine. Setting the ground for the very in-depth and very
necessary work of Floridi and Capurro, the authors asked, “Can they (machines), in principle,
be developed to a stage at which they should be treated as moral agents? This is one of those
issues, mentioned at the beginning of the book, that has not arisen as a practical problem yet,
but in all probability will…” (Weckert and Adeney, 1997). The query was an accurate
projection of not only the concern and debate over the potential ‘being’ and moral agency of
machine, but of the current ontological debate that questions whether or not machine, as
information, is any less an ontological entity than animal.
We discover the true origins of information and computer ethics in Norbert Wiener’s
work, who in 1948 published his groundbreaking book Cybernetics: or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine and two years later another book called The
Human Use of Human Beings, followed by a third publication in in 1963 called God and
Golem, Inc. Wiener explored, far ahead of his time, the ethical concerns that face ICTs today.
With Cybernetics, Wiener was already aware of a burgeoning field that was in many ways the
forbearer of Information Ethics. Wiener was also so acutely aware of the lack of a taxonomy
for the field that he felt it necessary to release an official statement on the matter, coining for
the new field the official designation of Cybernetics and relaying the Greek etymology behind
the term, saying that he “had already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems
centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or
living tissue,” and that he was “seriously hampered by the lack of unity in the literature
concerning these problems, and by the absence of common terminology, or even of a single
name for the field.” (Wiener, 1948).
38
Information In Formation
Where then do we find a unified taxonomy for IE? One can access Wikipedia where a
quick search for Information Ethics reveals a categorization of the field into the six separate
official branches of applied ethics, those being Library Ethics, Media Ethics, Bioinformation
Ethics, Business Information Ethics, and Cyber Ethics, Computer Ethics, informing the reader
that these six sub categories form the basis to information ethics (Wikipedia, 2013).
Interestingly, however, the only other place in the literature of Information Ethics that these six
categories are listed together as a seemingly taxonomic foundation of the field is on the
homepage of ICIE (International Center for Information Ethics) website itself, where the six
sub-categories are only listed as examples of the type of questions that are raised in applied
Information Ethics, and they are not even there expounded on, but merely listed as examples.
Being a cautionary tale, one finds in this the perfect example of how Wikipedia can be
misleading when used as an authoritative source, whether in terms of taxonomy or otherwise.
While acknowledging the diverse scope of the field, the Wikipedia entry misleads the
information seeker into believing firstly that a taxonomy of the field has been agreed upon, and
secondly that the field is limited to these six areas, a supposition not informed by the site of the
International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE, 2013). Furthermore, while the Wikipedia
entry gives a nod towards the literature of the field, quoting the “main, peer-reviewed,
academic journals reporting on information ethics” as “the Journal of the Association of
Information Systems, the flagship publication of the Association of Information Systems, and
Ethics and Information Technology, published by Springer” (Wikipedia, 2014), neither of
which are in fact the main academic journals of the field, (though they certainly contribute to
39
it), and neither of which originate with the field. Not listed on Wikipedia however are a number
of journals that are foundational to the field, those being the Journal of Information Ethics, and
the International Review of Information Ethics. The philosophical and/or ethics reader should
here be musing over the perhaps disconcerting fact that Wikipedia now monopolizes the state
of “information” in the world, for better or worse, in much the same way that corporate media
monopolizes “news”. It takes a critical thinker to successfully navigate the influences of both,
and to come out on the other side unbiased by exposure to either.
To further critique the Wikipedia coverage of Information Ethics, one must consider its
uninformed if not biased direction towards Floridi’s metaphysical interpretations of the
foundations of the field while altogether ignoring Capurro’s hermeneutic foundations, an irony
lost on the novice reader who would not recognize the six ‘official’ branches listed on the same
Wikipedia page as a direct copy and paste from Capurro’s ‘field’ foundations page at ICIE.
While the Wikipedia entry, at least at the time of the current research (2014), states that
“Information ethics is related to the fields of computer ethics (Floridi, 1999) and the
philosophy of information” (italics mine); the same entry, in 2008, as critiqued by Capurro in
his paper, On Floridi's Metaphysical Foundation of Information Ecology, stated, “Information
Ethics is therefore strictly (italics mine) related to the fields of computer ethics (Floridi, 1999)
and the philosophy of information,” the correction at least recognizing, however subtly, that the
field’s philosophical foundations are not limited to Floridi’s information ecology. In both cases,
the entry cites Floridi’s Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics
as the only definitive source. While the matter comes across as mere semantics to the novice
reader, the implications are in fact critical in assessing a taxonomical foundation for the field,
which in turn colors the evolutions of the field.
40
In 2003, Martha Smith oversaw the Wikipedia entry on Information Ethics take shape.
Coming from a collaborative effort of her students, it was a student by the name of Cathay
Crosby who wrote and posted the content of the class project to Wikipedia, establishing a
foundation to the field online that same year. In her 2011 reflective article entitled The
Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and Meaning, Smith notes that none
of the original work remains in the Wikipedia entry from the original posted article. She asks
some very pointed questions, the very same questions that will help form the thesis to part four
of the following history of the field as reflected through the WikiLeaks phenomenon and wiki
studies.
Smith takes us to task. She asks, regarding the original Wikipedia article, “Where did it
go? Who replaced it and why? Did somebody wipe out our article intentionally? Should the
field be represented on Wikipedia? How do sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn, and others promote scholarly connections and knowledge?” (Smith, 2011). Indeed, in
the hands of what guardians or keepers does information currently reside? Has information
ceased to belong to authoritative power structures, becoming an uncomfortable abyssal blank
slate that necessitates an existential accountability? If so, perhaps it is in light of this that
collaborative knowledge societies, uncomfortable in such an abyss, offer no resistance to the
return to information monopolies, being the original place of peer-reviewed knowledge, and
ironically, also no less the foreseeable place of collaborative knowledge structures in their final
stages where open-access models such as Wikipedia and WikiLeaks fall to the inevitable vices
of control and monopoly, slowly coalescing from the anti-establishment into the new
establishment.
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Branches
Returning to the supposed six-branch categorization of the field of IE, one must consider
alone the taxonomical implications within the organization of the six branches. The first
taxonomical anomaly apparent in the above stated categories is the lack of a static definition for
any of the particular categories, and the obvious crossover between the branches. While ICIE
would limit computer ethics to the realm of computer science, implying an isolated sort of
ethics for the back room comp-sci sub-culture, it then allots cyber ethics the branch to take up
the slack for the responsibility of interconnectedness, as though it alone should carry the task
on its shoulders. Even then, according to ICIE, cyber ethics is merely “information ethics in a
narrower sense”, as though by default the whole of Information Ethics were restricted to the
Internet alone (ICIE, 2013). Capurro himself would be the first to advocate that Information
Ethics encompasses more than the Internet. And on the other hand, perhaps Computer Ethics is
a more fitting category for that which begins and ends online (One questions too whether or not
anything truly begins or ends online, but that is a debate for another time). Here too, we do not
find a unified taxonomy.
However, as this chapter’s intent is to explore a possible taxonomy, even historically, of
IE, the snapshot of this categorization into the six sub-fields of applied ethics should indeed be
explored, perhaps in ‘wayback machine’ style, if only to look at the categorization of the field
as it stood in one moment of time. It is also noteworthy to explore these six sub-fields in their
own right since, though not exclusive to defining IE, they are currently, and always will be,
very relevant areas to the field.
42
Library Ethics, a fitting place to begin, focuses mainly on intellectual freedom and the
right to access of information. It advocates an access to information as being a basic human
right, and views that right as preceding all other rights, positing any other rights as unfounded
without first providing free access to information (Samek, 2007). It bases its ethics in the
Library Bill of Rights, founding its philosophy centrally through the American Library
Association as the final authority in matters of Librarianship, the Bill of Rights being, “the
library profession’s interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution”
(Intellectual Freedom Manual, 2006). But on the same token, Library Ethics and the field of
Librarianship are constantly challenging assumptions of the field, holding the ALA accountable
to itself and its mandate, holding discussions over round tables about central ethical issues
pertaining to intellectual freedom.
Central issues in Library Ethics involve concerns such as censorship and challenged
materials, and the right to access banned materials. It promotes its philosophy actively by
encouraging the display of banned or challenged books and by making those materials
accessible to the public (Intellectual Freedom Manual, 2000). It makes an effort to regularly
assess its collection specifically in terms of missing or damaged offensive and banned
materials, since library collections are routinely and regularly sabotaged by special interest
groups seeking to reshape library collections in their own image for the ‘betterment’ of society
as per a so-called moral majority (ALA, 2000). It is not however limited to collections. It also
looks at the tensions surrounding Internet access in libraries, where considerations of Internet
filters and the right to access information freely and in public spaces often comes to head with
differing ideas of public ‘appropriateness’ by a variety of social groups that simultaneously
represent what ideas of ‘public’ should and does demand. It also considers equitable and
43
unbiased access to library spaces for all groups regardless of sex, gender, race, belief or
intention, specifically in regards to the public use of library meeting rooms where the precepts
of librarianship represent and condone equitable access to public spaces (ALA, 2000).
Paramount to the debate is the actual law (i.e. the end of the line of argument), where
even intellectual freedom is restricted, at least as far as (legal) access to information goes.
Where the law, on one hand, perhaps restricts advocates of intellectual freedom to prescribed
legal boundaries, it also allows for public open access to materials and information (whether
text, photographic or video) that are deemed publicly inappropriate by sometimes majority
sized public groups. As per typical example, the law prohibits access to pornography on
publicly viewed computers, yet allows for viewing of sensualized or sexualized images that are
not, according to law, deemed pornographic, but which may yet be considered ‘pornographic’
by special interest factions such as religious, family friendly or conservative groups. Notable in
the debate is whether or not, despite the law, open online access to illegal materials should be
made available (i.e. not filtered) in light of the principles of non-censorship and intellectual
freedom (sporting merely friendly ‘reminders’ in terms of service agreements that such illegal
materials not in fact be accessed). And since even the most intelligent of Internet filters cannot
block only those materials which are illegal, thus censoring otherwise legal materials in the
process, however publicly offensive, the question becomes one of whether or not such filters
should be used in a public library where the founding principles of librarianship and
specifically the ALA espouse intellectual freedom and access to ‘information’, however
interpreted.
Cyberethics and computer ethics have recently found peace in the same house, despite
whatever ambiguities may yet exist on Wikipedia. Don Gotterbam, in The Life Cycle of Cyber
44
and Computing Ethics, reviews the obscurities in the literature, concluding that “Cyber Ethics
as a discipline is derivative from Computer Ethics”. In fact, to avoid any unnecessary
taxonomical discomfort, he cleverly declares in his introduction that he shall henceforth “just
refer to the total sets of issues in computer and cyber ethics as C-ethics,” two birds, one stone
(Gotterbam, 2001). Cyberethics, or C-Ethics, deals with technologies of a digital and
computing nature (not to be confused with Information and Communication Technologies, or
ICTs, whose scope reaches beyond digital and computing technologies), and the ethical issues
arising for the individual user as well as for society, in the knowing or unknowing application
of each new technology.
C-Ethics is limited, as a field, to computers and computer specific technologies, but
excludes other technologies that would be included in the broader scope of Information Ethics
(Moor, 2000). The ICIE, in categorizing Cyberethics as “information ethics in a narrower
sense”, was after all correct in its summation, since C-Ethics deal primarily with issues of
privacy, rights, and security, but on a scale limited to digital and computing technology.
Typical ethical issues dealt with in C-Ethics include P2P file sharing, website linking, online
privacy (both for and against), data mining, workplace surveillance, computer crime, and even
facial recognition systems (Spinello, 2001).
Leading the cause of social responsibility in computer ethics was the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), an international organization initiated in 1981
and only recently disbanded in 2013. The organization promoted a replacement of the
traditional philosophy of the ethical imperative with the concept of social responsibility,
looking critically at assumed mores in the computer and ICT industry, and was in many ways
complimentary to the philosophy of ICIE, as well as to Samek’s advocacy of Intellectual
45
Freedom and Social Responsibility in the field of Librarianship. In the years that CPSR was
active, they founded several annual and ongoing conferences including the Directions and
Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC) symposium and the Community Information
Research Network (CIRN) annual conference. In addition, they introduced, and have awarded
annually since, the Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility.
Media Ethics begin with an awareness that journalism and media play a large part in
shaping worldviews in society (CIME, 2013), and as such demands a journalists responsibility
in ethical discourse through personal commitment and choice towards a proactive handling of
media and journalism (Islamabad, 2013). It contends with issues as diversified as conflicts of
interest, fairness, and economic pressure (Smith, 2001). Of primary concern to Media Ethics is
the purity of the source, especially in journalism where credibility sustains the field. Credibility
also requires speed of dissemination of information, where being the first to disseminate
information is everything to the journalist. Ethical concerns around dissemination in an
efficient and truth worthy manner, however, require fact checking, but the competition is high.
Ethics should determine quality in the field, not just speed (Spence, 2008).
As such, where the Media Ethicist focuses mainly on ensuring access to information
free of corporate and governmental control, they must also express a concern for the rampant
and unchecked flow of misinformation prevalent in a digital culture where culture itself
determines, no less biased than corporate or government agencies, the interpretation and
dissemination of information. As Spence states:
“Reports can be uploaded to the Web nearly instantly as news unfolds, but often without safeguards such as copy-editing and fact checking. The haste with which many news gatherers post their reports on the Web naturally challenges our confidence in the
46
accuracy and completeness of their coverage. In these cases, the worry is often that competition drives the rate at which one publishes rather than the confidence reporters and editors have in the completeness and accuracy of their stories” (Spence, 2008).
One perhaps sees here a conflict within the wider scope of the foundations of
Information Ethics. Whereas in Library Ethics, the advocacy of unbiased access to information,
credible or not, becomes the prime directive, Media Ethics seemingly posits a responsibility
towards credible information only. From their mandate one reads, “Our driving emphasis is that
media professionals take responsibility in shaping society” (CIME, 2013). One wonders
however about the implications behind such a statement. Does the terminology of this mandate
place media ethicists in an authoritative position to determine “truth” from “non-truth”, and
then ensure that only true information be released into the infosphere (to use Floridi’s
terminology), shielding an impressionable culture from “wrong” interpretations? Is there truly
such a thing as just reporting it as it is or does it come down to reporting it as we see it?
Quite telling and somewhat disconcerting, one reads from the CIME newsletter in
Plagiarism: Addressing the Skeleton in the Closet how:
“Throughout history, the news media has tasked itself with telling the truth, even when the government, majority or authorities do not wish the truth to be heard. The advent of the Internet and its role in facilitating the free flow of information has strengthened the need for an ethical media to interpret the mass of information, decipher truth from fiction, and deliver the facts. However, the recent endless barrage of plagiarism incidents threatens to undermine the public’s trust in the international media establishment” (Gray, 2013).
A good example of concern in Media Ethics is the above noted scenario that posits
Wikipedia as both an authoritative and un-authoritative control of information flow. While
scholarship maintains, perhaps rightfully so, that authoritative flow of information should stem
47
from peer reviewed scholarship into the wider contexts of culture, culture has taken
“information” into its own hands, creating a middle-man that supplants information before the
so-called natural process of dissemination can take place. Where once we had a cultural faith in
information preceding communication, we now face a culture that has hijacked not only the
credibility of information but also the credibility of credibility itself. Dissatisfied and impatient
with the slog and staunchness of authority and “high-brow” scholarship, culture has re-
interpreted not only information, but the very idea of information, taking taxonomy, ontology
and epistemology into its own hands (unaware, of course, of what those foundations are) and
creating the wiki phenomenon, which in turn gives birth to such phenomena as Wikipedia and
WikiLeaks. It will be highlighted towards the end of this thesis that the above are really only
one phenomenon, manifestations of the same thing - affordance to a digital culture in the very
process of tearing down the power structures that in form it.
And yet even here the conscientious reader should be considering the possible ironies
and double standards posited in this very assumption of peer-review as incontestable, and
should be addressing the red flags of censorship implied within, at least coming from a library
ethics point of view. Does not even the scholarly control of information through peer-reviewed
avenues constitute a form of censorship? It is not unthinkable that bias, chance, and ideology
guide the process. A large portion of the peer review process involves not just fact checking but
also capitalizing and prioritizing based on ‘suitability’, where only the ‘very best’ work (based
on what parameters?) sees the light of day. As will be highlighted further on by Nathanial
Enright, capitalism quickly turns information into a commodity (Enright, 2011). The best peer
reviewed journals are also the most stringent, and rigorous competition weeds out everything
but the ‘best’ submissions. In such a scenario it isn’t long before prestige becomes the
48
motivating factor in publication. And what better sign of gross censorship than a drive towards
ego before subject? As Casadevall and Fang point out, “The prestige of a journal has become a
surrogate measure for the quality of the work itself. (Casadevall and Fang, 2009).
Moving onward, Bioinformation ethics, as the name suggests, explores ethical issues of
information as it pertains to technologies in the field of biology and medicine. While inclusive
of traditional informational concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ donation, euthanasia,
and cloning, it also asks questions about the right to one’s own biological identity, about the
non-voluntary use of one’s DNA and/or fingerprints by policing agencies, about equal rights to
insurance and bank loans despite bad genetics, and concerns over the privacy of said genetics
(Hongladarom, 2006). The field of Bioinformation Ethics may inaugurate the largest strides in
the advance of the field of Information Ethics, the reasons of which cannot be dealt with in this
thesis. Suffice it to say, the field of Bioinformation Ethics, born from Bioethics, has already
taken up residence in a new Information Ethics context that brings together Computer Ethics
and Bioinformation Ethics under the new rubric of Bioinformatics. Though largely unexplored
thus far, the concerns therein hold huge implications in light of the tenets of Floridi’s
Philosophy of Information.
Business Information Ethics is also the convergence of two separate fields of applied
ethics, those being (somewhat intuitive and obvious) Information Ethics and Business Ethics.
The abstract to Floridi’s Network Ethics: Information and Business Ethics in a Networked
Society sums up the convergence as such:
“This paper brings together two research fields in applied ethics – namely information ethics and business ethics– which deal with the ethical impact of information and communication technologies but that, so far, have remained largely independent. Its goal
49
is to articulate and defend an informational approach to the conceptual foundation of business ethics, by using ideas and methods developed in information ethics, in view of the convergence of the two fields in an increasingly networked society.”
Floridi clarifies the conglomeration of the above applied fields as inevitable, another evolution
in the wake of ICTs, where an ICT networked society becomes “increasingly porous” as
barriers in all fields begin to collapse (Floridi, 2009).
Having explored the various so-called divisions of Information Ethics in their current
historical context, one sees that developing a taxonomy based on those subjects alone proves
difficult if not impossible. While any particular branch crosses over with another, one must
contend at the same time with an evolving prototype in either branch, either as the branches
evolve in their own right, or evolve into each other. All the same, the best attempt to date at a
taxonomy for Information Ethics, and perhaps the first, is Shiri’s work in metadata analytics. In
his Exploring Information Ethics: A Metadata Analytics Approach, Shiri systematically
explores Information Ethics through the explication of the metadata records of relevant
publications in the Scopus multidisciplinary database. His objective is to “shed light on the
history, volume, variety and topics of publications on ‘information ethics’” (Shiri, 2014). He
asks a number of pointed questions: What are the publication trends for articles on Information
Ethics? Who are the top authors of Information Ethics articles? What disciplines and domains
have been concerned with research on Information Ethics? What are the active countries in
research on Information Ethics? And what are the most frequently used terms and topics in the
titles abstracts and author keywords of article publications (Shiri, 2014)? Though Shiri clarifies
that the above quantitative study is both non-exhaustive and preliminary, he exemplifies a yet
unexplored methodology towards a unified taxonomy for the field, namely the exploration of
50
metadata records as outlined by both author and indexer, ultimately very telling of trends in the
categorization of both the field and of external references to the field.
Using data visualization and text analysis tools that include Automap (Carnegie Mellon
University), TAPOR, OpenRefine, Google Books Ngram viewer, IBM’s Many Eyes (IBM),
and Datahero, Shiri was able to graph and analyze the field at a level of complexity that no one
to date has done. Evaluating the numerous graphical and statistical results from the study, Shiri
was able to redefine the traditional six taxonomical sub fields of Information Ethics into an
evolutionary representation of the field, pointing towards current and future directions and
refocusing the traditional concerns of the field to contemporary relevance. Shiri’s taxonomy
thus includes nine conclusive thematic facets for the field, those being global, technological,
medical, legal, privacy and security, educational, business, informational, and philosophical,
and breaks those nine into further facets that cover the entirety of the field to date.
While Shiri’s own observation of the trends point to the most relevant growth of the field
as belonging to three branches, namely health, education, and business, where education is the
only new taxonomical arrival not already included in the six traditional categories, it will be
posited here that his research is also very telling of, and confirms that issues of privacy and
security, as well as the legal parameters surrounding privacy and security have risen in
relevance as taxonomical foundations in their own right rather than being merely sub-
categorized as concerns of the traditional six categories of Cyber Ethics, Computer Ethics,
Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Library Ethics, and Bioinformation Ethics.6 This is not
surprising at all, and makes perfect sense in light of both the nature of the field and also the
6 While the significance of the raw data of Shiri’s work cannot justifiably be represented
herein, the reader is encouraged to affirm the above analysis by accessing Shiri’s original material.
51
current culmination of the concerns of the field in our contemporaneous post-WikiLeaks
surveillance society. The one other ‘new’ branch that rises to prominence in Shiri’s taxonomy
is Education. Such a seemingly innocuous point in actually very telling and should inform
reflections of the entirety of the current evolutions of the field, namely in terms of awareness,
personal accountability, and knowledge of information, the crux of the present thesis that will
take shape in chapters three and four pertaining to collaborative knowledge ethics and the
WikiLeaks phenomenon. Shiri’s taxonomy also quantitatively confirms for us two things that
are taken for granted in the field, firstly, that the field is multi-faceted and trans-disciplinary, a
meta-ethics, as per Capurro, and secondly that it is evolving.
Conclusion
Perhaps even a few years ago one could agree with the supposition that Information
Ethics could be divided into the above six branches, however a thorough review of the latest
literature will reveal what Elizabeth Buchanan terms the collapse of disciplinary specificity,
where the exposure of classical issues of information ethics across the board becomes explicit,
including such things, as Buchanan lists them, “data integrity, ethical research practices,
privacy, autonomy, identity, trust, reality, data sharing, data manipulation, fragmentation,
orientation,” and so forth (Buchanan, 158). It shouldn’t escape the cognizant reader that
Buchanan throws ‘reality’ right into the middle of the mix, as though a tongue in cheek gesture
towards the irony of the matter, as though to query, after all is said and done, what should
reality cover, if not everything?
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Buchanan paints a picture of disciplinary homes where she places the various other fields
of applied ethics comfortably in their allotted niches - computer ethics with computers,
business ethics with business, and so forth – but she demonstrates in doing so the extent to
which Information Ethics comes out a misfit, at least in its traditional sense, having had barely
a “rocky home in library and information studies” (Buchanan, 2011). She points out that very
few accredited library schools actually offer, even now, courses in Information Ethics. Her
contention is that most institutions believe that an ethics education is implicitly included in the
deal, whereas, she notes, nothing is further from the truth, and ethics is but an “afterthought” in
any given information science curriculum, negating the understanding necessary to even
establish a taxonomy. How is it feasible to find the taxonomy of a field that doesn’t even have a
proper home? In response to the above inquiry, Geoffrey Rockwell notes that, “Often applied
ethics attach to professions. IE is exploding as the information professions explode”.7
The ‘field’ is broad indeed, as Toni Samek writes regarding the teaching of Information
Ethics. Samek states that “the broad information ethics teaching terrain is inextricably linked to
diverse understandings of life, liberty, the law, and the state; justice and injustice;
communication, information, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; education,
knowledge, and power; equality, equity; universal access to information; human rights and
moral dilemmas; and, multicultural landscapes, immigration and mobility patterns”. ‘Reality’
is not thrown into that mix. Reality is that mix. Indeed, what is truth? The truth of the matter is
that the “information professional” is no longer exclusive to the field of Library and
Information Science, or even to the six categories listed with ICIE but is in fact now necessarily
an equal factor in all disciplines and/or fields.
7 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation. September 2014.
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Having looked at the possibility of taxonomy within some of the various evolutions and
branches of applied Information Ethics, the hope for a categorization of the field escapes us,
which is as it should be. Though Floridi unlikely fully envisioned at the inception of his form of
the philosophy of information just how the details of the metamorphosis of Capurro’s six
branches of applied Information Ethics would ultimately play out, his PI is affirmed in its
metaphysical claim to philosophical naturalism in light of the outcome of an evolving meta-
field, and thus the assertion that “everything is fundamentally information” no longer seems so
far fetched (Ess, 2009). The evolving direction of the field and the impossibility of any
cohesive taxonomy bear witness to the universal claims of Floridi and Capurro. As supported
by Capurro, Information Ethics is a type of meta-ethics encompassing all fields of ethics
dealing with information. Information Ethics can be seen simply as an approach to a
professional engagement of information across all fields. Indeed, perhaps the birth of
Information Ethics is, as suggested by Mark Alfino, that moment when ethicists recognized en
masse, ethical concerns and problems within the professional world coming together under a
common denominator, that common denominator being information (Alfino, 2012, p. 14).
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Chapter 3: Concerning Intercultural Information Ethics
Overview
Having explored the origins of Information Ethics as well as a brief projection towards
its evolutions, and having delved into the taxonomical parameters of the field, recognizing the
impossibility of the task due to the meta- and trans- disciplinary nature of IE, a history of the
field looks next to the phenomenon of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE) as the most
significant development of the discipline. While the preceding chapters capture the history of
the field as developed by western philosophers and as realized through the lens of European,
North American, and other first-world susceptibilities, part three looks to the significance of an
intercultural understanding of the effects of information and communication technologies on
the larger world over the last few decades and the various world view responses to such
developments.
As Capurro notes, IIE endeavors to draw out both the philosophical and applied
differences between what might be considered the technological confluence of international
concerns and the technological confluence of intercultural concerns, whereby the crossroads of
the digital with environment and ecology, global politics and economies, and cultural and
ethnic tradition calls for an address of how ICTs are altering localized ways of being-in-the-
world (Capurro, 2007). Thus, differing from other international addresses, the task of IIE
focuses on the digital shaping of lebenswelt and zeitgeist as the ground for shared experience in
55
the world, and is positioned in the working out of what Luciano Floridi calls the infosphere and
by what Rafael Capurro refers to as digital ontology.
Roots
As has been noted by the founders of IIE, the task of realizing an Intercultural
Information Ethics outside of the so-called developed world remains open, inadequately
attempted, or at the very least undefined (Capurro, 2004). At the same time it must be
acknowledged that an ethical consideration of ICTs external from a western ethical worldview
certainly exists, albeit in many cases only in its infancy or in some cases, as in Africa, barely at
all (Britz, 2013). The very drive towards developing an Intercultural Information Ethics is, at
its roots, a biased postulation of western or otherwise developed countries that deem the need
for it, where a western cultural platform assumes an advocacy of IIE as supporting universal
rights. Thus the task of IIE is somewhat duplicitous, but consciously so. IIE endeavors, despite
the double standard in doing so, to understand and advocate that what one culture deems a
fundamental right may not even be desired by other cultures. However, in its own defense, IIE
posits that even if differing worldviews do meet at similar crossroads, they do so on their own
terms. The complexity as such is best explicated by Johannes Britz, who, underlining Africa as
a referent to the task, states that we are either referring to the idea of teaching IE to Africans, or
to “an ethical reflection by Africans on the information ethical problems facing Africa” (Britz,
2013) – two completely different things.
IIE posits that perhaps even the need for an information ethics is grounded in western
sensibilities. To not perceive a need for information ethics is not the same as to not understand
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it. History reveals the vices of western presumptions being forced on the world, and such
cautionary tales should guide any exploration of intercultural matters. One cannot demand a
cultural investigation of the implications of Information and Communication Technologies or
the ‘Information Society’ by individual societies any more than one can demand the acceptance
of democratic principles by those same cultures. On the other hand, since western and first
world cultures are initially responsible for the advent and proliferation of ICTs, it can be argued
that there is a place for stewardship if not at least accountability and responsibility on the part
of western and other first world cultures towards the advent and current ‘state’ of ICTs.8 It is in
the above tension that one encounters IIE, a tension that one must remain sensitive to also in
considering a history for the field.
Capurro, while being one of a handful of key players in the development of the field of
IE, is also responsible for first bringing together the disparate reaches of the field’s intercultural
infancy into a collaborative whole in 1999 through the establishment of the International Center
for Information Ethics (ICIE), an organization, association, and center for publication that sees
scholars from around the globe coming together on the practical and philosophical nature of
Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004). ICIE focuses on establishing an international basis for
collaboration in teaching and research in the field. It was through the efforts of ICIE that the
first realization or formalization of the idea of an intercultural information ethics arose,
specifically formalized by an international symposium that took place in 2004, culminating in
the first official publication on Intercultural Information Ethics in the field, ‘Localizing the
Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural Perspective’.
8 Christine Belley, in conversation, 2014.
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That symposium, graciously sponsored by VolkswagenStifung, is certainly ICIE’s
greatest legacy to date. Dedicated to intercultural perspectives, the first formal shaping of IIE
was therein established through the praxis of the field of Information Ethics. Of foremost
concern at the symposium was the recognition of the above noted western-rooted bias in the
foundations of philosophy, and thus in Information Ethics as well; a concern that nurtures
numerous questions for Intercultural Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004). Since the
symposium, and perhaps notably before it, a growing global awareness of the foundational
necessities of a unified intercultural philosophy beg consideration, noting the futility of any
attempt at developing an Information Ethics without first recognizing and then reconciling
westernized philosophical monopolies to the exclusion of, for example, Buddhist philosophical
world views.
Worth quoting at length in its entirety is the below concise summary of the totality of
the field of IIE by Capurro. As Capurro states:
“We need an intercultural debate on information ethics in order to critically discuss
the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information technology. This would open different paths of theory and practice that would weaken the ambitions of information technology, no less than the pretensions of moral codes and ethical thinking, and open at the same time different kinds of strategies when dealing with the digital divide. This debate presupposes a patient and respectful philosophic dialogue that should not take place under a consensus compulsion of reaching universality also because universality remains, to put it in Kantian terms, a “regulative idea” that cannot be reached by any kind of moral codes. The role of ethics is to enlighten or weaken not only local moralities but also the pretension of universal principles with regard both to their unquestioned presuppositions and especially as far as they are practically misused for local interests. This is not a plea for moral relativism but an incentive to enlighten our minds and lives with regard to the open space of thought and the groundless world we share, which allow us to remain in an endless process of intertwining society, nature and technology, looking for flexible norms that regulate rather than block such a process” (Capurro, 2008).
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The history of Intercultural Information Ethics as a separate discipline of its own (apart
from even the wider scope of IE) and the inter-discovery of fragmented pockets of localized
explorations in ICT based information ethics is a short history only a decade old. The origins of
IIE begin in Africa. The consideration of both academic and practical matters concerning IIE
was first initiated by Rafael Capurro, who, through the International Center for Information
Ethics in 2004, opened up the first intercultural dialogues regarding the crossroads of culture
with information and communication technologies. However it wasn’t until 2007 when, in
partnership with UNESCO, the International Center for Information Ethics took the burgeoning
discipline, and in a series of conversations regarding the nature of an Information Ethics for and
from Africa, moved the discussion from a merely academic venture into the hitherto unfamiliar
realm of hands-on applications.
As the possibility for an IE for Africa was first explored by members of ICIE, it quickly
became apparent that some initial work on the examination of ICTs in terms of improvement of
quality of life already existed, at least in Africa, namely through the UN supported African
Information Society Initiative (AISI) that as far back as 1996 looked to addressing the
intersections between culture and technology. Thus in many ways, Africa was already further
ahead in terms of an information ethics then other areas of the world. By the time the
international information ethics community found their counterparts in Africa, AISI had
already formalized a pointed E-Strategies program that looked at IC Infrastructure at national,
sectorial, village and regional levels and a specific ICT programme, as well as addresses of
information and knowledge capacities in the aggregation and dissemination of information
from indigenous perspectives (Capurro, 2008b).
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In many ways, IIE owes its heritage to Africa, and initial conversations surrounding IIE
find their roots therein. Since the initial establishment of the field of IIE between ICIE and
Africa, numerous commissions, partnerships and conferences have been founded in Africa and
by Africa towards an international address of Intercultural Information Ethics. Africa is now
one, if not the, leading partner in IIE, boasting numerous initiatives in IE, centralized by ANIE,
the African Network for Information Ethics, an organization that arose out of the above
mentioned initial conversations with ICIE. The history of African Information Ethics is
compound, and is elsewhere elaborately covered in detail, consisting of a rich history that
cannot be covered herein. For further enlightenment, the reader is directed to explore Capurro’s
Information Ethics for and from Africa.
Ethics, ICTs, and IIE
How does one escape personal bias, the biases of a western or classist worldview, or for
that matter, any worldview, and more precisely, how does an ethicist set aside their western
philosophical worldview in order to not only compare and contrast, but to actually perceive
through the lens of another’s view? Ethics, as a discipline, is deeply entrenched in western
history, tradition and culture, and the uncritical application of day-to-day presuppositions about
the nature of reality, of being, of “right” and “wrong”, appear so automatically and are so
subconsciously engrained that the exercise of moving into an externally objective stance seems
unlikely. And thus, as abstracted by Britz, while the field of Information Ethics as historically
developed under a western worldview can be exemplified in three main notions, those being the
freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and freedom of the press (Britz, 2013), a
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direct overlay of such foundations at a global scale is a gross misrepresentation of the subtleties
of other cultural and historical worldviews and the numerous ways of interpreting the world.
The prospect of bridging the ontological, phenomenological and experiential horizons that
separate self and other is explored below, and the question is asked whether or not such an
event is possible, or perhaps even desirable.
The above enigma is one of the founding concerns of ethics at its basic level. But herein
lies the problem. While ethics as a philosophical tradition (whether we are referring to the
western tradition – ancient Greece onward, or an eastern tradition – Confucianism, for
example), explores the very question, it can only do so within the parameters of its own
tradition. While the western tradition, for example, has attempted to assess its own localized
nature of morality, critiquing its biases in detail, establishing what is referred to as descriptive
ethics (asking the question – what it is that people think is “right”) and from that what is
referred to as normative ethics, a critical exploration of morality (what people aught to do), but
recognizing even therein the biased nature of the task, thus delving into applied ethics (how
does one put a critical morality into practice?) and finally into the realm of meta-ethics (an
exploration of the biases behind the terminology itself - commonly typified as “what does
‘right’ even mean?”)9, the entire process speaks yet to a specific cultural horizon, namely ethics
as per Greco-Roman, Christian, and otherwise western traditions, and the question of
objectivity persists.
The World Summit on the Information Society envisions an Information Ethics through
a truly global-centered approach that addresses the most critical elements of a fair and equitable
9 As explored by the National Open University of Nigeria course syllabus for Comparative
Ethics In a Pluralistic Society, online, accessed April 17, 2014.
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globally informed citizenship. Its eleven key principles, as listed in its Declaration of
Principles, explore: the role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for
development, information and communication infrastructure, access to information and
knowledge, capacity building, building confidence and security in the use of ICTs, enabling
environment, ICT applications, cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local
content, media, ethical dimensions, and explorations of international and regional cooperation
(WSIS, 2003, 2005).
However, as noble as the above agenda is, encompassing the vast array of potential
dynamics involved in the development of an equitable global citizenship, it is ultimately still
only idealism, and as many would be quick to emphasize, idealism and action are not the same
thing. As per the First Regional Conference for the Asia and Pacific Region on the Ethical
Dimensions of the Information Society, 12-14 March 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam, Peter
Malcouronne comments in regards to such globally centered principles as those highlighted
above, specifically regarding the Asia Pacific region:
“Ethnic diversity in the Asia Pacific region is unequalled. We have hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Shinto, Sikh and Buddhists; we live under feudal kings, socialist prophets and capitalist roaders. Our differences pose unique regional challenges to reaching a consensus on Information Society Ethics. Would we be able to reach a consensus amongst ourselves? And if we did so, the concerns of our region are likely to be very different to those, say, of Europe. Indeed is a meaningful International Code of Ethics possible, even desirable?” (Malcouronne, 2008)
ICTs have the potential to both support and undermine efforts towards developing an
equitable global citizenship. While the advantages of ICTs connect and enable global dialogue,
awareness and education, they also enable the widespread abuse of privacy, autonomy,
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anonymity, and security (Capurro, 2013). The greatest and most relevant example of such
abuses centers around issues of surveillance, now the complex contemporary face of IE in
general and IIE globally. While democracy ideally realized should enable trust, the mere
presence of ICTs, never mind the abuse of them, potentially undermines the foundational
cultural and psychological stalwarts behind democracy itself where the dynamics of the
distribution of political power and the ‘rule of the people’ become ambiguous, resulting in a
distrust of power structures in general. As Charles Ess notes, “privacy is important as a means
to develop a sense of self and personal autonomy first of all – along with the intimate
relationships, and other capacities and abilities important to this singular autonomy. Thereby,
privacy funds the basic elements required for participating in a democratic society – i.e.,
personal autonomy/freedom and then the capacity for dialogue, debate, etc.” (Ess, 2006).
A post-WikiLeaks society reveals the insidious nature of power monopolies and their
relationship to the life cycle of information. While ICTs allow governments to protect their
citizens from ‘terrorism’ (often a convenient demonization of dissidents and oppositions), the
means to doing so can become a vice at a moments notice where the mass “monitoring” of
individuals for national security purposes becomes a gross erosion of anonymity. From both
psychological and philosophical perspectives, such an erosion undermines more than simple
privacy, but threatens also the dignities of being, undermining also the prerequisites of
autonomy at their core (Ess, 2006).
On the other hand, in an ICT saturated society, the traditional checks and balances of
the media and anti-establishments become swollen and cancerous, the paradigm example being
the WikiLeaks phenomenon and its fallout, whereby the exposure of vast amounts of
information becomes immeasurably unprotected, saturated and unaccounted for by both citizen
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and government.10 Not only then do ICTs potentially inaugurate distrust, alienation or even the
negation of established information guardians, but they also dissolve borders both literally and
metaphorically, (from national borders to borders of nationalism), ultimately abstracting
information to such an extent that an accountability to information ecology disappears all
together. At this point both the establishment and the anti-establishment become equally
unbearable behemoths.
Privacy and IIE
The complexity of the definition of privacy is wanting. The foundations of the very
concept of privacy cannot be substantiated in common evaluations. Ess explores the variance,
highlighting the traditional cultural understanding of privacy in countries such as Thailand and
China where any semblance of an individual’s drive towards privacy is reflective of shame and
disgrace where assuredly deviance underlies even the need for privacy. The closest idea to a
western appreciation of privacy in Thailand is the idea of a collective privacy as per the group
unit, i.e. the holistic sacredness of family as protected from the wider society, thus a special
protection of the secret-familiar. In China, the influences of Confucianism emphasize the same.
A culture of shame is built on such. As per the analects: "Lead the people with administrative
injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will
be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through
10 While privacy is one of the founding pillars and most critical debates to IE, it will be
posited here that the issue of privacy was not fully understood in its fullest, especially (if at all) at an intercultural level, until the arrival of WikiLeaks, the argument for which will be presented in part four below.
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roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order
themselves harmoniously" (Analects II, 3). In contrast, Ess underlines ideas of privacy in
Japan where the Buddhist worldview encourages the rejection of one’s connection to self
through the practice of denying one’s self its privacy, all toward the goal of purification from
self (Ess, 2006). Such acts encourage a disclosure of shame and secrecy, a necessary act that
frees the self. By such cultural terms, there is neither the need for, nor the expectation of,
privacy, though through the proliferation of ICTs, traditional values in Asian countries are
slowly transforming under western influences, adding a complexity to an already relative
intercultural face-to-face (Ess, 2006).
Toru Nishigaki of the University of Tokyo weighs in on the nature of Information
Ethics in Japan. Nishigaki highlights that Information Ethics in Japan, to date, is concerned
mainly with maintaining the status quo of society, and stresses that there is no drive in Japanese
Information Ethics as there is in its western counterpart towards redefining the human being,
instead looking simply towards how ICTs should be incorporated into already established
cultural norms and expectations. He differentiates however, this general application of
Information Ethics in Japan from his own understanding of the consequences of ICTs on
Japanese society (Nishigaki, 2006). Rather, Nishigaki takes a critical look at the western
ontological presuppositions of a coherent self and contrasts it to the eastern idea of no self,
juxtaposing the two perspectives through the praxis of Information Ethics towards the
possibility of a “middle way”. Where western ontology considers the wellbeing of self as
primary, in contrast, Buddhist philosophy does not adhere to any confirmation of a coherent
self, looking instead to an ethics where, as in China and Thailand, the relationship between the
individual and the community takes precedence (Nishigaki, 2006).
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Capurro explicates the difference by noting that, just as in the west, where the questions
of technological reformations concern the preservation of the ontological self in light of the
proliferation of ICTs, the eastern perspective asks how ICTs are affecting the preservation of
the community instead (Capurro, 2008). As Nishigaki qualifies, the Buddhist perception sees
self as “something that should be denied, not appreciated”. The world of Buddhism is already
abyssal to begin with, and emptiness is not seen, as per western sensibilities, in negative terms
(Nishigaki, 2006). Selfless being in Buddhism is not an undesirable condition to be dreaded, as
per the nihilist western interpretation of such, but rather the state is a natural one to be sought,
whereby selflessness allows for codependence, again dissimilar from the negative western
interpretation of such. As Nishigaki confirms:
“The Buddhist idea of ‘‘codependent arising’’ maintains that all things under the sun arise in a codependent relationship with each other. Nothing in the world exists in complete independence and isolation from others. Buddhist philosophy of the Madhyamika school (or the middle-way school) of Mahayana Buddhism asserts that since all things under the sun arise codependently, it is utterly meaningless to try to choose between subject (or mind) and object (or the world) as two alternatives, and therefore the ‘‘middle way’’ is important (Nishigaki, 2006).
To obfuscate the matter, Adams, Murata and Orito whose paper, ‘The Japanese Sense of
Information Privacy’ is supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, contend that the idea
of privacy has always existed in Japan, but that the cultural fluctuations of technology and law
have distorted the traditional cultural Japanese norms of privacy. As stated:
“In keeping with this recent trend to demonstrate that the Japanese do have concerns about privacy, we claim that there is a strong sense of information privacy in Japan which has long been a part of the culture, and in this paper we will draw on the sociological and psychological literature to provide an analysis of the mechanisms
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contributing to the origins of the Japanese sense of information privacy, and in particular the social pressures leading to the recent adoption of laws on the protection of personal information. It is our contention that this legal development is not indicative of a new emergence of privacy concerns within Japanese society, but a response to the failures of social norms that previously guaranteed such privacy. These failures have been brought about by economic and technological shifts” (Adams, Murata and Orito, 2009).
Whereas a western initiated IIE develops an awareness of cultural variations of privacy,
one must be alert to the fact that while exploring ‘other’ cultures, it becomes all too easy to
forget one’s own place in culture as a product of culture, critically assessing the implications
thereof, for both better and worse. The question can also be asked – why should it be assumed
on the part of the ‘westerner’, a priori, that a bias exists against other cultures simply because
of a partiality towards one’s own cultural worldview, or vice versa?11 The matter is certainly
dependent on education, but perhaps at the end of it, it becomes not a matter of bias but instead
choice. It becomes also too easy to fall prey, in our contemporary globalized society, to
scapegoating through ‘west bashing’, decrying the ills of first world inflicted injuries. As the
globalized community, through the information society, is now ‘openly’ aware of the dark
history and continued influence of western weight and the oppressions imparted on the world
from the west, intercultural accountability becomes easily misplaced through misguided blame
where the ‘west’ becomes all too often conveniently and uncritically demonized. It certainly
works both ways, and as Nishigaki aptly points out in his exploration of Information Ethics in
Japan, “It is possible to say, therefore, that in a sense the West now stands in need of Eastern
ethics, while the East stands in need of Western ethics” (Nishigaki 2006, 238).
11 Christine Belley, in conversation, July 1st, 2014.
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Information Pathologies
Capurro notes regarding both the definition of privacy and the impending state of
information overload at an intercultural scale that we yet “lack a systematic pathology of the
information society” (Capurro, 2012). This lack of a systematic pathology regarding
information overload and definitions of privacy could concern everything from the lack of an
awareness of current information monopolies to ideas of the saturation of information to the
dissolution of information including concepts of information entropy, and all of it resulting
ultimately from a lack of collective and individual accountability to the state of information,
information ecology, digital ontology, or, to use Floridi’s terminology, the infosphere. It can
thus be argued that, central to information society pathologies is the fallout of the sudden loss
of borders via ICTs between previously defined frameworks and the sudden and sometimes
violently globally exposed abyssal nature of ethics, morality and truth as being anything but
universally grounded, and that any common agreement on global ethical discourse must depend
on a fluid and moveable ethical code separated from any ‘natural’ or divinely established moral
praxis.
The above constructivist framework is not new to philosophers or to information
ethicists. Rather it is the starting point to information ethics, especially as it pertains to
Intercultural Information Ethics, a starting point as established in the original working out of
the definition of information for the field of IE by Capurro and others, based on a Heideggerian
ontological framework, especially for IIE as brought to life in Capurro’s work in
communication theory, specifically in his monumental angeletics. The dichotomy between
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message and communication, as established in the western continental tradition of philosophy -
culminating in hermeneutics as worked out ontologically by Heidegger and perhaps
penultimately illuminated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, as well as demonstrated through the fields
of cybernetics and communication theory, informationally represented by theorists such as
Shannon, Weaver, Wiener, and McLuhan - such a constructivist framework offers the praxis
and phronēsis of Intercultural Information Ethics from western sensibilities, but as such the
representation of other philosophical methods is left wanting.
Tadashi Takenouchi approaches the task through what he terms hermeneutic
information studies or hermeneutic informatics (Takenouchi, 2004), an approach that captures
the study of information in terms of communication and dialogue, based on Heidegger’s
original re-envisioning of being-in-the-world, his dasein, where among other implications of
self and being, the recognition that an understanding of the relationship between philosophy
and language precludes ever returning to any and all preceding experience, including the Greek
understanding of logos, and while unable to return to experience and understanding as having
already been, it is also not possible simply to move on from or synthesize it, as perhaps Hegel’s
model would allow for. Thus here one encounters the hermeneutical circle, a basic
hermeneutical premise positing that any understanding as a whole is established by reference to
the individual parts, but in turn, any understanding of each individual part must be referenced
back to the whole, and that this iterative process becomes the ongoing dialogue that allows the
truth of a matter to emerge.
Heidegger’s groundbreaking work, eventually taken up by his own student, Gadamer,
whose fusion of horizons offers one means to navigating the above noted abyss, providing a
means to addressing if not at least exploring, this systematic pathology of an intercultural
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information society, propels the task forward.12 However, as Capurro himself notes first off
regarding Gadamer’s direction, “the idea of 'horizon' (Greek: horizein=limit) is an old one”,
and secondly that “Gadamer's concept of 'fusion' of such horizon is somehow ambiguous”13.
The fusion of horizons is an idea that remains open to assessment, but one that in theory would
allow for a phronēsis, or a ‘practical wisdom’, that permits one to both participate in and reflect
upon otherness, despite the boundaries of time and the divisions of culture, by first critically
incorporating and then negating the biases that would otherwise serve as nothing more then a
mirror of the projections of one's own biased methodologies.
Heidegger and Gadamer regenerate hermeneutics (hermeneutics originally limited to
the study of the interpretation of biblical texts), reinterpreting the hermeneutical circle and the
fusion of horizons as an answer to the basic idea that truth is not housed in a ‘correct’
explication of an ‘author’s’ intention, i.e. an exegesis. Rather truth is encountered in the
receiver’s interpretation of the text itself, where the interpreter plays a part in the historical
process of interpretation, ideas of author and text being expanded in modern hermeneutics to
real world actors and real world ‘texts’. With Heidegger, the hermeneutic circle indicates the
back-and-forth between dasein and our comprehension of the world where the hermeneutic
circle demands an existential accountability on the part of each individual (Ramberg, 2013).
Gadamer’s fusion of horizons is a dialectical model that simultaneously negates both the
12 Even using the above terminology of pathology, indicating the need for a ‘study of the
diseases’ of information implies an ingrained assumption, namely that there is a question to be answered, and presuming in the first place that there is a problem that needs to be solved. While writing about an IIE must consciously maintain, as much as possible, a distance from such assumptions, recognizing the philosophical bias that necessitates such a stance to begin with (a bias not necessarily explicate in all cultures regarding the implications of ICTs in the world), it yet remains the only point at which a western-based IE can start from. This tension perhaps illustrates the condition of Gadamer’s fusion of horizons.
13 Capurro, in conversation, email: Around the World, June 8, 2014.
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egocentric objectification of self and the universality of a closed system. As such, and while it
remains true, as Locke states, that “no man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience”,
and picking up from Schopenhauer’s critique and observation that “every man takes the limits
of his own field of vision for the limits of the world," (Schopenhauer, 2007), we are presented
with the possibility that each of us neither exists under a universally closed horizon nor in an
entirely existentially objective one.
Charles Ess speaks to the above noted foundational tenets of Intercultural Information
Ethics in terms of Ethical Pluralism. The beforehand conclusions regarding the ungrounded
nature of ethics inevitably leads to a situation where any stand on ‘truth’ and ‘ethics’
whatsoever becomes an impossibility, since it appears now that truth only exists in the eye of
the beholder. Ess notes, regarding truth and cultural differences, that:
“A first response, in the face of these irreducible differences, is that of ethical relativism. Such relativism, of course, pits itself especially against an ethical dogmatism – the usually ethnocentric belief that universal ethical standards indeed exist, that these are known to a particular person and/or ethnos, and that these standards must indeed be acknowledged as universally legitimate, i.e., as normative for all people in all times and all places. This dogmatism simply condemns all different views, claims, approaches, norms, etc., as wrong because they disagree with the one set of putatively universal truths and values. The resulting intolerance of all such different norms and claims inspires precisely the relativist effort to establish and justify tolerance towards a wide diversity of views, beliefs, practices, and cultures. The relativist can do so, however, only at the cost of actively denying the possibility of ethical standards and norms that may be compelling and legitimate for more than the individual and/or specific ethnos” (Ess, 2006).
How then does one come to terms with cultural truth? Ess points out that to succumb to
relativism is as good as abandoning any hope of arriving at an Intercultural Information Ethics.
Of the many possible implications of Ess’ above noted concern, one might consider foremost in
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the case of relativism the emergence of the neglect of being, the loss of accountability to self
and other, a negation of the effort to face-to-face with anyone or anything outside of one’s own
‘field of vision’. Such a state may be referred to as cultural alienation. From a traditional
western perspective, the consequences of such a state to the individual self are devastating,
placing each individual as a type of ‘madman’ living in isolation with no other to reflect self,
and no way of grounding self as a reflection of otherness. Yet while the dissolution of self from
the western perspective is devastating, the Buddhist worldview, as per the preceding
arguments, seeks it. What are the implications of such disparity? Is the western conclusion truly
constrained to nihilism? Can Buddhism offer insight? Such questions are yet to be addressed,
or are currently being surveyed in the field and will formulate the evolving directions of
Intercultural Information Ethics.
Applications
Such philosophical digressions are certainly worthy of exploration, but an immediate
application of the concerns of relativism and intercultural encounters must be surveyed first.
The very crux of information ethics and thus IIE begins and ends with the prevalent, pervasive
and interconnected proliferation of information and communication technologies on a global
scale, requiring, as Ess sums it up, “agreed-upon technical standards in order to function.” It is
this simple fact, a fact that turns out not to be simple after all, which dominates the concerns of
the field. It is from here that all other concerns in Information Ethics arise. Of all the above
addressed presumptions and biases thus far outlined, the presumption that undergirds all of our
concerns comes down to a matter of functionality. While this may seem an odd pivotal point in
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our deliberations on the nature of communication and ethics, it becomes critical to grasp that
without a basic awareness of how the functionality of ICTs (globally) assume their own built in
biases, IIE fails at a basic level.
An example of such functionality and of the philosophical deliberations of bias in ICTs
made tangible is exemplified as embedded somewhat perniciously in the very structures of both
the computer hardware and software of Information and Communication Technologies
themselves. The fact that all computer code, at least until very recently, is programmed in Latin
characters, in English, is not insignificant. Pondering the implications therein, the reader may
further consider recent scholarship that looks at how computer code - the ‘DNA’ of front-end
digital interconnectedness - is not only biased in language and script, but also by the subjective
signature, style and experience of the individual programmer. An exploration of some of the
subtleties of how one programmer codes script compared to another are disconcertingly telling,
and like any textual analysis, a lot can be gleaned about programmer biases based on the
inflections of the code itself. As per Friedman and Nissenbaum:
“From an analysis of actual cases, three categories of bias in computer systems have been developed: preexisting, technical, and emergent. Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints or considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use (Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996).
The exploration of alternative language coding options is still in its infancy, even two
decades onward, and the obstacles to any alternative are many, encompassing the fact that if
nothing else, English, as a linear languages adapts well to the hardware ‘direction’ of
computers. This is not by accident since “the computer”, at a very basic mechanical level, was
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built around English linguistic structures. The immovable limits of intricately established forms
of hardware beg exploration. As expressed by Mark Bielby in response to the matter, “can you
imagine coding in Chinese or Japanese ideograms? Reading from right to left or bottom to top?
Or typing backwards in Arabic? There are many functional problems in trying to expand this
box…(where) apart from the fact that people have basically accepted English as the working
computer language”.14 Where English linguistic symbols are restricted to phonetic
representations, Asian linguistic symbols, for example, are semantically layered semiotic
statements in themselves. Consider the quagmire of unpacked semiotic dissonance in trying to
code backend ICT applications in symbols of “meaning” and “stories” that require previously
established historical and often mythical context? As per the Wikipedia entry on the matter,
“An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa "idea" + γράφω gráphō "to write") is a
graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by
familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to
a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms” (Wikipedia, 2014).
At the time that Friedman and Nissenbaum weighed in on the matter, ICT and Internet
use were yet novel. There was no known concerted effort to explore bias in computer systems,
and information ethics as a field was just on the horizon, but Friedman and Nissenbaum
believed even then that the exploration of computer and programming bias was critical. They
concluded regarding computers, even then, by “suggesting that freedom from bias should be
counted among the select set of criteria—including reliability, accuracy, and efficiency—
according to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged” (Friedman and
Nissenbaum, 1996). An equitable representation of interculturally influenced backend
14 Mark Bielby, in personal conversation, 2014.
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technologies is perhaps a viable prospect. However, for the time being, one must wonder, based
on contemporary tendencies towards capitalist driven ends, to what extent programmers
perpetuate the control of information itself and thus also cultural standards by encouraging
English-based keyword search monopolies. Consider what goes into the creation of algorithms.
Just as perilous, if not more so, than the deliberately biased inclusion of preferences into
algorithms are the unaware culturally engrained biases of the programmer. In such a case, more
damage is inflicted not through malevolence, but through ignorance. While perhaps such an
unawareness cannot be avoided, as per Locke’s observation again that no one’s knowledge can
supersede her or his experience, an accountability to equally represented knowledge forums
and influences is a thing that can indeed be addressed.
Thus, slowly and insidiously, western bias has become established also in the physical
structures of a world established over time on certain cultural power structures. It is too late to
turn back, to reinvent “the box”, so to speak. Evan as we deliberate on the possibility of an IIE,
our physical world through computer-restricted “linguistics” is systematically negating and
reforming in a digital image the subtle nuances, and in fact the very foundations, of human
culture. Care must be taken to avoid promoting a kind of relativism that negates differences.
Rather, it becomes more critical than ever to highlight the vast differences of tradition and
thought that exist in the world, placing localized ways of being-in-the-world on an equitably
enabled global platform, uniting both localization and globalization, observing that the
dissolution of borders through ICTs and digital citizenship is the result not only of globalization
but perhaps even more so of localization.
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Pluralism
It would thus seem, as per the above illustration, that simply equally allowing cultural
distinctiveness, linguistic and otherwise, is the starting place to an intercultural information
ethics. However Ess goes beyond the above standard by advocating for a pluralism that looks to
a multiethnic global city where the avoidance of such compromises is critical, specifically, the
move beyond mere tolerance or token inclusion, the consequence of which results in nothing
more than a state of ignorance. This kind of blind tolerance and its vices are not new to a
postmodern multicultural society, and as both Ess and Floridi point out, was a form of
pluralism known in ancient Greece as modus vivendi pluralism, a multiplicity that, rather than
allowing for the co-existence of cultures as it claimed to do, almost inevitably ended in forced
conflict (Ess/Floridi, 2006). The Greek modus vivendi, or ‘way of living’, is equivalent to the
modern scapegoat of the abdication to accountability commonly exemplified by the ‘agree to
disagree’ apothegm so prevalent in our present overwhelmingly rapid clash of cultures.
If such pluralism is destined to end in violent conflict, then the modus vivendi model
creates a scenario that, much like any ‘Band-Aid solution’, only postpones the inevitable. If we
surmise that the modus vivendi model seems most prevalent with the rise of suddenly and
vastly multicultural historical moments, the Hellenistic/Greco-Roman clash of cultures and our
own modern globalism being prevalent examples, and that from a psychological perspective,
modus vivendi is at a basic level a type of fear-based discrimination where the knee jerk
reaction to the fear of otherness (fear of the unknown) ends with either seclusion or, if put up
against a wall, lashing out violently, then Ess and Floridi make a valid observation that the
return to the use of force is the only possible conclusion to such pluralism.
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Thus, rather than advocating a pedantic pluralism, Ess explores the move to a place of
authentic sharing, a type of pluralism he defines by a state of shared multiplicities. Ess notes
that if mere tolerance of differing values inevitably leads to ‘ghetto’ like divisions within a
global city, resulting again in a form of cultural alienation which inevitably leads to conflict
through force in the end despite such tolerance, then pluralism must look towards a value
structure built around not just agreements of difference, but also on a sharing of differences that
avoids the fragmentation that so often accompanies ‘tolerance’ (Ess, 2006). Ess looks towards
models of connection and ‘complimentarity’ in what he deems an active engagement that
results in both sides connecting through self and identity (identifying) but doing so without the
negation of ‘irreducible differences’ (Ess, 2006). The goal is irreducibilily not irreconcilability.
Thus, if one can abstract Ess’ understanding of pluralism into a simple equation, it might be
posited that modus vivendi is to irreconcilability as complimentarity is to irreducibilily. Based
on Ess’ thought, it appears that the difference between the two modes of pluralism center
around three facets, accountability, encounter, and edification (education). Or in Ess’ own
terms, “complementarity relationships preserve and enhance the irreducible differences that
define distinctive individuals, cultures, and civilizations” (Ess, 2006).
Ess draws the charge of an intercultural information ethics further in, looking to the
origins of western tradition and philosophy itself in order to escape the western tradition, or at
least to offer perspective, engaging Plato and Aristotle as forbearers of the above pluralism
whereby Plato’s cybernetes (the origin of Wiener’s Cybernetics, and thus of Information
Ethics) and Aristotle’s phronēsis (practical wisdom) offer more than just a methodology to IIE,
but also a common starting place for IIE through parallels to eastern, specifically Confucian,
thought. Ess quotes Joseph Chan as making the crucial point regarding the similarity between
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what Plato and Aristotle understood as practical wisdom and what the Confucians deemed rén,
the Confusion virtue of shared humanness or shared experience that focuses on the connection
or relationship between two subjects of an action. As Chan summarizes the manifestation of
rén, “If after careful and conscientious deliberation, two persons equipped with rén come up
with two different or contradictory judgments and courses of action, Confucians would tell us
to respect both of the judgments” (Chan, 2003, 137). This deliberation is the very act of Greek
phronēsis, where rather than employing an uncritical tolerance, and thus avoidance of
differences that creates a cultural ‘peace’, instead an accountable engagement is pursued and a
pointed and deliberate encounter results in a mutual edification of Self and Other based on
irreducible differences, not irreconcilable differences.
Conclusion
While traditional Information Ethics assumes a western founded philosophy and an
intrinsic positive value to ideas such as privacy, complimented by democratic and capitalist
concerns of ownership and rights, and assumes a fundamental and existential self, IIE is
confronted now with the undoing of everything that IE has thus far established under its
western tutelage, including the value and nature of self! If given the space and time to revaluate
the structures of the field, an IIE might be easier navigational terrain. However, the culmination
and conjoined effects of media and ICTs, functions that are necessary and critical in of
themselves (from a western perspective), through being swept up in the storm of exponential
self-perpetuating affordances, allow for a malignant dissemination and experience of
information as in the case of WikiLeaks and other en-masse exposures of and access to
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information, culminating in a premature synthesis of cultures and forcing the hand of natural
dialectics in perhaps very unnatural ways. While the larger scope of IE readily looks to wider
implications of the address of the en-masse arrival of ICTs, pause must first be afforded to
working out an IIE whereby the sudden sharing of a cultural-techo world awaits a fair
advocacy.
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Chapter 4: The Heritage of WikiLeaks
Overview
Recently enlightening the realm of Information Ethics are all of the consequences,
ethical dialogues and politics of that which currently resides under, and from, the WikiLeaks
phenomenon, where ‘WikiLeaks’, for the purposes of the following thesis, is more than the sum
of its parts, being a symbol for an information society, and the culmination of the entirety of
western philosophy, idealism and history, an audacious claim that will be argued below. A
thorough exploration of WikiLeaks first as a progeny of the concept of the wiki, or
collaborative knowledge, is addressed, and a platform is established through what can be
termed wiki studies and from it WikiLeaks studies, and secondly, a pedestal is raised upon
which WikiLeaks is placed as both a symbol and dialectical manifestation of information
culture. It will be argued that the phenomenon underlying the materialization of WikiLeaks is
both the inevitable result of and encapsulation of the social dialectics and information
pathologies arising from a contemporary information society whose roots reach back through
western history to the politics and philosophies of ancient Greece. It will be reasoned that
collaborative knowledge and Wiki Studies as envisioned through the technological and
philosophical praxis of the field of Information Ethics becomes not only an applied branch of
the field, but representative of the entirety of the Information Ethics prerogative.
Forming the above argument, it is posited that the exploration of an ethics for the
WikiLeaks phenomenon can be included in the corpus of applied ethics within the field of
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Information Ethics via practical and theoretical roots traced through Library Ethics as much as
Media Ethics, where Library Ethics is the grandfather of the field of Information Ethics. As
such, part four advocates a place for the study of Collaborative Knowledge Ethics, symbolized
by WikiLeaks, among the established but evolving corpus of Computer Ethics, Cyber Ethics,
Media Ethics, Bioinformation Ethics, and Business Information Ethics as an original ethics of
Information Ethics. Defining WikiLeaks within a Collaborative Knowledge Ethics thus draws
on philosophies of Intellectual Freedom, Social Responsibility, Access to Information, and
challenge to Censorship, and compares and contrasts the ALA Bill of Rights to the mandate of
WikiLeaks as being the same mandate (Zimmer, 2011).
WikiLeaks and Ethics
WikiLeaks, upon its inception, took the main concerns of the field of Information
Ethics, those being privacy, ownership, and so forth, and violently catapulted them into both a
subcultural and intercultural pandemonium, baring a wanting comprehension of the meta-
ethical landscape of the founding concerns of IE, a vacuity that comes to light in Intercultural
Information Ethics, one that was scarcely perceivable beforehand but through WikiLeaks is
now exposed in all its fragilities and failings, imploring a resolution to an assumed end, namely
the unfounded reality of the various considerations and definitions of privacy, self, information
or lack thereof. In typical western fashion, we (who?) tend to think of the WikiLeaks
phenomenon in capitalist terms only, i.e. a clash between intellectual property and intellectual
freedom. It is however both naïve and dangerous to do so. While the crux of WikiLeaks from
the perspective of first world cultures is limited to addressing merely a singular and rather
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superficial question in comparison, namely whether or not Snowden, Manning and Assange are
criminals or heroes, the rest of the globe, faced with the reality of a post-WikiLeaks world, is
beset with numerous considerations of a day-to-day existence under a new and often uninvited
brutality of an ICT driven reality, more so, as will be argued, then previous to the inception of
WikiLeaks.
As the name suggests, WikiLeaks was originally founded on a wiki publication model,
a model that allowed for a non-moderated and anonymous submission of otherwise inaccessible
documents. However, while WikiLeaks originally represented itself under a wiki format, it can
be questioned whether or not it legitimately falls under the wiki label since it has not and likely
will not achieve the collaborative flow and function of established wiki models such as
Wikipedia. As longtime Wikipedia writer Pete Forsyth states,
“WikiLeaks doesn't have very much to do with wikis at all. I don't think any broad consideration of wikis would benefit by considering WikiLeaks. There are certainly ethical questions around WikiLeaks, but they are very different from the ones around wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. As I understand it, WikiLeaks benefited from a perception of being driven by a broad community, and probably chose its name for that reason. But the perception, I believe, is far from the reality.”15
Whether legitimately a wiki or not, WikiLeaks discontinued its wiki model in 2010,
replacing it instead with a traditional publication model, thus closing volunteer edits and
submissions. While closing its open access structure, WikiLeaks and its whistleblowers
continue to process numerous classified documents annually, but under censored conditions,
15 Pete Forsyth, in conversation, Quora, March 10, 2014. https://www.quora.com/Has-any-
philosopher-or-philosophy-analyzed-the-nature-of-the-wiki-phenomenon-including-Wikipedia-WikiLeaks-If-so-what-are-we-looking-at
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abdicating on their founding objective to provide open unmediated access to information. As
admitted to on their homepage, “When information comes in, our journalists analyse the
material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society.” The
questions must be raised. Who are the journalists analyzing said information? What are their
biases? And ultimately, how does the analysis of the information present once interpreted by
WikiLeaks? What is WikiLeaks version of the ‘significance to society’ of any particular piece
of information? Also admitted to on the WikiLeaks homepage, “Our news stories are in the
comfortable presentation style of Wikipedia, although the two organisations are not otherwise
related. Unlike Wikipedia, random readers can not edit our source documents.” Such
considerations come into play in developing an ethics for WikiLeaks.
The wiki argument aside, WikiLeaks, for better or worse, has had far greater an impact
globally on challenging, changing, and spotlighting the place and nature of power structures
pertaining to the life cycle of information control than any other collaborative knowledge
model. Despite the contention by some that WikiLeaks does not qualify as meeting the
standards of wiki collaboration, it yet stands as a paradigm of the nature of the ebb and flow of
knowledge access, exemplifying a phenomenon whereby all information, however initially
equally accessible to all citizens of the world sharing a common globe, eventually becomes
monopolized, restricted, censored, or controlled. While the following thesis explores an ethics
for WikiLeaks in terms of its actual existence as a website and an organization, a parsing of
the term ‘WikiLeaks’ itself herein represents an equation whereby the first half of the term,
wiki, stands in for ‘quick collaborative knowing’ and Leaks underscores a phenomenon of
‘uncontained’ or ‘escaped’, encompassing a cultural phenomenon that can be both represented
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and parsed in the terminology of ‘WikiLeaks’, the exploration of which hopefully becomes
clear with the concluding arguments below.
The WikiLeaks saga has, since its inception, opened the door to an unprecedented
philosophical and ethical quagmire regarding the nature of information and information control.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has demonstrated, if unintentionally, that while the
mission statement of WikiLeaks is seemingly forthright, an established ethics for its
foundations and operation is lacking. What is the ethical role of WikiLeaks? Assange himself
has acknowledged the iniquities of the uncritical release of confidential information, though he
believes that the potential devastating consequences meted out on innocents pales in
comparison to the lives saved due to the actions of WikiLeaks and whistleblowers. Assange
also claims that the proof of burden remains on the opposition to prove that any innocents have
yet been affected by the WikiLeaks releases (Khatchadourian, 2010).
The question of the need for an ethics for WikiLeaks may thus present as incongruous
considering the very detailed ethical and moral mandate already worked out and advocated for
by Assange himself. Why the question at all? Whether one agrees with the WikiLeaks mandate
or not, the entire project is seemingly built on ethics. According to WikiLeaks, as stated on its
homepage, the “broader principles on which (WikiLeaks) is based are the defence of freedom
of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the
support of the rights of all people to create new history.” The ethical discourse supporting the
venture is certainly there. According to common interpretations of the WikiLeaks mandate,
information wants to be free, particularly when the information in question pertains to the
government.
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To begin to understand where and why one might question the lack of an ethical
foundation for WikiLeaks, one must first address the common appropriations and assumed
moralities of WikiLeaks. It would be fair to acknowledge that a WikiLeaks ethics, as
established by WikiLeaks, would claim a.) That the more information that is available, the
more efficient societies are at making collectively beneficial democratic choices, and b.)
Whenever information can assist citizens of democratic states to make informed choices and
politically engage in the decisions that affect them, that information should be openly available
and transparent, and c.) WikiLeaks exists to offer alternatives and opposition to mainstream
information access and control. Thus, information leaked by WikiLeaks serves society and the
individual pursuit of knowledge and WikiLeaks is therefore an ethical entity.16
Despite its grandstanding, a critical assessment of WikiLeaks, it mission and its
history reveals a seemingly contradictory (or even non-existent) ethic in regards to how its
administrators handle their prerogative. While their own mandate requires transparency in what
they themselves do, as well as obviously their expectation of the institutions and authorities
they critique, their history reveals a tale of internal dissonance, while the restructuring of
players and mandates seem to signal a less than concrete ethical foundation and even a less than
thought out organizational structure behind the WikiLeaks directive (Bates 2010, Spiegel
2010). However, the purpose of the following discourse is not so concerned with the above
conflicts per se, but rather with the wider implications of information and knowledge control,
as scripted through WikiLeaks, and the fallout of such.
As the administration of WikiLeaks has in recent years seemingly taken on an ethical
awareness of the consequences of the un-critical release of vast amounts of sensitive
16 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation, email, August 16th, 2014.
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information, and have not only placed parameters on their publication model, but have also
begun to “scrub” sensitive elements from documents such as the names of individuals prior to
release, all towards maintaining social responsibility, and in addition have taken to pre-
moderating submitted material, choosing to release some material while not other documents
(Zimmer, 2011), one must question a number of things. Namely, can WikiLeaks, with a
minimalist and largely voluntary staff, be expected to reasonably and in a timely manner pre-
moderate such vast amounts of information prior to its release? And more importantly, can
WikiLeaks maintain their own mandate towards the defense of freedom of speech and media
publishing if their own structure falls into the fray of censorship and bias? But most
importantly, the question must be asked: what does the manifestation of WikiLeaks symbolize,
culturally and philosophically? What does ‘WikiLeaks’ mean? The move from the open wiki
model to a controlled model, in itself, embraces numerous implications indicative of a wider
philosophical inquiry, as will be expounded upon throughout this thesis.
While privacy is one of the founding pillars and most critical debates to IE, it will be
posited here that the issue of privacy was not fully understood in its broadest terms, especially
(if at all) at an intercultural level, until the arrival of WikiLeaks. No single ‘symbol’ has
singlehandedly altered the landscape of global and local considerations of the philosophy of
privacy or of information itself more so than the zenith of factors that make up the WikiLeaks
phenomenon and its fallout. WikiLeaks is both a symbol and a dialectical manifestation of the
malignant but inevitable consequence and result of the pressurized and premature ‘forcing’ of
an otherwise natural ebb and flow of the life of information, encompassing a theoretical and
historical lineage of the entirety of the founding concerns in Information Ethics as preceding
WikiLeaks. The heritage of WikiLeaks is a complex one, its parentage not yet revealed. The
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attempt to do so will be the concluding task of drawing the current history of Information
Ethics.
WikiLeaks and Information Ethics
WikiLeaks’ ethics (as established by WikiLeaks) and Information Ethics cross paths in
three places. Firstly, they intersect at the place of critical analysis on the part of information
ethicists of the presumed moral and ethical foundations to WikiLeaks’ self established ethics.
The Euro-centric presumption that more information is better for society and individual citizens
prefaces WikiLeaks’ ethics, as it prefaces Information Literacies (expounded on below),
foundations that are not shared interculturally.17 Secondly, they intersect on common
foundations of the philosophy and application of emerging Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs). As per the ‘How WikiLeaks Works’ section of the homepage of
WikiLeaks, “WikiLeaks has combined high-end security technologies with journalism and
ethical principles. Like other media outlets conducting investigative journalism, we accept (but
do not solicit) anonymous sources of information. Unlike other outlets, we provide a high
security anonymous drop box fortified by cutting-edge cryptographic information
technologies” (WikiLeaks, 2014). Thirdly, WikiLeaks and IE intersect in their common cultural
heritage, namely the same cultural dialectics that precede both Media Ethics and Library
Ethics, where while both media culture and library culture are two pieces of a foundation for a
WikiLeaks Ethics, it is with Library Ethics that the present thesis is concerned. The exploration
17 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation, email, August 16th, 2014.
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of a theoretical foundation for a WikiLeaks Ethics is scarce, and more so as far as established in
the praxis of Information Ethics. All the same, some initial progress has been made. A brief
overview of the different approaches to a WikiLeaks Ethics in IE is offered below.
Kay Mathiesen opens up the discussion with her "Wikileaks and Methods in
Information Ethics" where she reviews the question of WikiLeaks ethics against established
philosophies, including utilitarianism as well as Kant’s categorical imperative, critiquing any
return to utilitarian ideas of the greatest good for all and universal standards since it is unclear
in regards to WikiLeaks and an ICT based society exactly what the ‘interests of all’ are, as well
as to the abyssal, or ungrounded nature of morality in an intercultural era. She advocates
instead for a multi-factor ethics that, similar to Ess’ Pluralism, looks to addressing a balance
through specific addresses since “there is not one principle or value to rule them all”
(Mathiesen, 2010).
Like Mathiesen, David Woolwine also critiques the ALA’s use of utilitarianism for its
absolutist language, where the Bill of Right’s allegiance to strict utilitarianism presents a
dangerous scenario that opens the door to the very abuses it so fervently tries to negate.
Namely, and especially in our contemporary age of government surveillance and national
security, a utilitarian creed of the greatest good for the greatest number becomes a gateway to
authorities controlling information, invading privacy and restricting access, all based on “the
greatest good” of national security, where national security is in the best interests of all.
Michael Zimmer, one of the leading scholars of the field of Information Ethics, was
the first to draw together the mandates of WikiLeaks and the ALA’s Bill of Rights as being the
same mandate in his ‘WikiLeaks and Information Ethics’ (Zimmer, 2013), the premise of which
supports much of the remainder of this thesis. Zimmer’s research into WikiLeaks highlighted
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early on the transforming nature of WikiLeaks and its relationship to information flow and
information control. As gleaned from Zimmer, it can be argued that three distinct stages, or
philosophies, arise from the life of WikiLeaks. These three stages can be seen in terms of the
life cycle of information control, highlighting the impact of power structures as they attach
themselves to the various stages of information flow, couched in a chronology of anti-
establishment and establishment.
Zimmer contrasts the original purpose of WikiLeaks, whose “primary interest is in
exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the
Middle East”, a very anti-establishment sentiment, to a second-stage evolution (which
corresponds chronologically to WikiLeak’s switch from the original wiki publication model to
the more traditional moderated publication model) which clarifies that “The broader principles
on which our work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the
improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to
create new history”, a very noble goal indeed. Thus the subtle transformation in the intent and
goals of an anti-establishment to a moral convention rises and posits already the insidious
nature of information as power, where power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The last stage of WikiLeaks is, of course, the complete transformation from anti-establishment
through an eventual moral imperative to a new establishment, a cumulative stage perhaps not
yet obvious in the life of WikiLeaks, but one which all the same becomes inevitable, as per
similar examples of the relationship between power and information highlighted throughout
history. This third stage, while emphasized through WikiLeaks, is symbolic of the nature of the
modern collaborative knowledge model and the power structures contained therein, from
Wikipedia to concepts of open source and ‘copyleft’.
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Patrick Backhaus and Gordana Dodig Crnkovic of the School of Innovation, Design
and Engineering at Mälardalen University, Sweden have presented an excellent assessment of
WikiLeaks and ethics, viewing an ethics for WikiLeaks through the lens of three different types
of ethical approaches, the Utilitarian Approach, the Virtue Ethics Approach, and lastly, what
they deem the ‘Information Ethics’ Approach. Approaching WikiLeaks from a Utilitarian
approach, according to this assessment, Backhaus and Crnkovic consider both sides of a
utilitarian application. Regarding the consequences of the WikiLeaks release of classified
publications, they note first that transparency leads to a better understanding, thus allowing for
an informed opinion or education of the largest number of people to the mutual benefit of all
involved. On the other hand, noting the potential threat to national security, the release of
damaging information can “lead to a society with decreased institutional integrity which may
eventually result in self-censorship, decreased communication, more technical restrictions and
so in less freedom.” In their Information Ethics approach, they too have deemed the task of
finding a WikiLeaks Ethics as necessitated within the praxis of the field of Information Ethics,
specifically through an application of similar foundations as those laid out by Capurro and
Floridi. As they state, it is through “The Information Ethics Approach (that) we can study how
information is revealed/communicated in the networks of agents.”
However, perhaps most relevant to the below task in the intersection of WikiLeaks
and Information Ethics in Pramod K. Nayar’s WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures, and
Digital Parrhesia, where a cultural and intercultural focus is afforded WikiLeaks. As per
Nayar, WikiLeaks “cannot be identified just with an individual Julian Assange, even though he
pops up as soon as one opens the website. Assange is a messenger, he is neither messiah nor the
message. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he has become identified as the ‘face’ of WL.
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However, to do this is to personalize-individualise what is really a cultural phenomenon”
(Nayar, 2010). Such an insight supports the premise of the following thesis. As Nayar states,
WikiLeaks “locates itself in a global cultural apparatus: the universal movement for Human
and related Rights. What WL represents is a new culture of information that dovetails into two
other cultural practices: whistleblowing and parrhesia (truth-telling)” (Nayar, 2010).
The connections between the concept of parrhesia and Information Ethics are, perhaps
unbeknownst to Nayar, the very foundations to the field as established by Capurro himself long
before a common knowledge of Information Ethics even existed. As Capurro now states,
“Information ethics has a long and a short history. The long history in the Western tradition
goes back to the question of parrhesia or freedom of speech in ancient Greece” (Capurro,
2005). Parrhesia advocates, as worked out through the long history of western philosophy, both
an ontological foundation to “information” and an existential accountability. Capurro reminds
us “Parrhesia is thus not just based on what one believes to be the truth but implies a personal
as well as a public commitment to this belief. The knowledge of the believer is linked to his or
her being” (Capurro, 2005). Thus one begins to understand where an ethics for WikiLeaks
dwells, and how the claims of Assange find a possible grounding.
Following Nayar’s insights, an ethics for WikiLeaks is herein established on an
existential accountability, and is founded, as was western philosophy per ancient Greece, on the
well established Greek concept of parrhesia, the idea that ethics must be situated in the
ontological vulnerability of its speaker, where to speak boldly exemplifies an authenticity in the
face of personal exposure and/or sacrifice, not just of life, but of being itself. And while being
becomes intimately associated with its “informing”, information ceases to exist outside of an
ontological forming of its being as intimately connected to the informer. In other words,
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information only exists in the moment of its speaker, of the dialogue itself, of it being spoken.
‘It’ (a mere potentiality) is otherwise a non-entity, not even constituting data and remains un-
informed and abyssal, a concept explored further in information theory and in Capurro’s
angeletics. As Capurro says regarding the subject of information, “Her being must be of the
kind to make possible such a parrhesiastic utterance” (2005).
A WikiLeaks Ethics is thus situated in a historical framework of information flow and
the power structures thereof, and timely manifested in a moment of unguarded information
where accountability not only becomes a choice but a necessity. Where collaborative
knowledge and WikiLeaks are both manifestations of a culture of appropriated knowledge, an
Information Ethics becomes ungrounded, demanding at the failure of all else, the necessity of a
personal account to information as being.
Collaborative Information, Knowledge and Monopoly
Cunningham’s Law states that ‘the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is
not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer’. The reference is to none other than Ward
Cunningham, inventor of the wiki concept. The implication implies an outcome of dialectics,
in this case the tendency towards an evolution of debate as inevitably resulting in
collaborative knowledge, where thesis and antithesis result in synthesis, the living
manifestation of Hegel’s dialectic. Cunningham first introduced the wiki in 1994, the term
‘wiki’ the Hawaiian term for quick, a very apt and telling label revealing an accelerated turn
in the nature of knowledge and information flow where the exponential increase in the speed
of the synthesis of information points towards not just quick knowledge building, but
ungrounded information flow.
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Scholars in the field of Information Ethics first weighed in on assessing the nature of
the wiki in 2004 when Anja Ebersbach and Markus Glaser wrote an article on the wiki for the
International Journal of Information Ethics (IJIE) entitled Towards Emancipatory Use of a
Medium: The Wiki, a descriptive article that attempted to define and assess the philosophical
and social nature of the wiki. Criticizing popular ideas of alternative media inspired by the
advent of the Internet and specifically the wiki, Ebersbach and Glaser insightfully foresaw the
nature of collaborative knowledge building as a temporal stage in the life of information
rather than an end. They remind us that the concept of collaboration defining the wiki is not
really that new other than the expediency of its utility, nor is the transformation from
collaboration to monopoly and control. Referring to the misled and idealist hopes that first
arose alongside the concept of the wiki, they point out that “with commercialisation, there also
came centralization and control” (Ebersbach and Glaser, 2004). Both Wikipedia and
WikiLeaks, as unrelated as the two are in popular scholarly opinion, qualify.
Collaborative information and knowledge models encapsulate the contemporary cultural
postmodern understanding of knowledge as freed from authoritative and peer reviewed
standards. The nature of collaborative information and knowledge models such as the wiki
concept, wikipedia, wikimedia, open source, big data, copyleft, crowdsource, social media,
knowledge commons, creative commons, and collective intelligence are telling of the nature
of information dialectics, information monopoly and established power structures.
Collaborative knowledge models are the contemporary face of information dissemination and
control, a product of cultural dialectics that first attempts to free information, only to
monopolize it in the end, a pattern not exclusive to the digital age. To understand the above
cyclic nature of power structures, we start by comparing two supposedly opposite standards of
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authoritative knowledge, those being on one hand the traditional peer reviewed journal and on
the other hand the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. While the traditional
argument would posit that the peer-reviewed journal is representative of highly qualified
information, it would insist that collaborative information and knowledge, as per the wiki
phenomenon, is neither qualified nor quantifiable. However, the argument will here be made
that both peer-reviewed information and collaborative information are susceptible to the same
cyclic nature of monopoly and control and that the state of transparency of either at any given
time is a matter of the waxing and waning of cultural dialectics. Whereas peer-reviewed
information circles become closed systems of dead scholasticism where information often
becomes nothing more than self-serving affirmations of already established parameters, so too
is the wiki phenomenon, as exemplified by Wikipedia, while on one hand a catalyst to
information dissolution through saturation, on the other hand a monopolized product of a
select few (Mehegan, 2006).
Information Entropy
From the preceding context, the following discourse will propose that the concerns of
Collaborative Knowledge Ethics and WikiLeaks Studies are not just with matters of privacy,
intellectual freedom, access to information, anonymity, transparency and intellectual property,
but also with negligence and accountability on the part of both government and individuals to
the state of information, a state that under pathological conditions encourages and allows for
information dissolution in the absence of information guardians or keepers. Whereby
negligence towards both self and information encourages and allows for information
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dissolution, or, using the language of the Philosophy of Information, entropy of the infosphere,
a full existential accountability to self and information will allow for a recovery of what Floridi
deems the infosphere, and an understanding and engagement of Capurro’s information
pathologies can begin to take place.
Spence’s argument for the fifth estate is telling in terms of the dissolution of
information, whereby every citizen becomes a journalist. What happens to Information when
every citizen is a journalist and all information is available en masse to be disseminated? If one
posits that all citizens cannot disseminate all information, can the exposure of all information
still inform? Can it still in form? One of the field foundations for understanding information is
that of metaphysics (in forming) where questions are asked about the nature of form and
knowledge. Another approach to information theory asks about interpretation. Can saturation
and thus dissolution negate the formation of ideas through a failure of dissemination and
interpretation? As stated early in part one, such a scenario becomes conceivable when
information ceases to belong to authoritative power structures, becoming an uncomfortable
abyssal blank slate that necessitates an existential accountability. It is in light of this absence
that collaborative knowledge societies, uncomfortable in such an abyss, offer no resistance to
the return to information monopolies, since the return to a denial of self becomes all the more
easier. The nature of such questions is a large part of both IE and IIE.
Floridi’s Philosophy of Information (PI) introduces information ecology as a prima facie
philosophy. His Philosophy of Information is founded on ontological principles that recognize
the moral agency of all information entities, not only human beings. Charles Ess considers
Floridi’s naturalistic philosophy as marking a noteworthy era in the development of the six
decade long legacy of Information and Computer Ethics, where the all-encompassing system of
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Floridi’s ecology based Philosophy of Information brings together both western and eastern
philosophical traditions while at the same time reconciling various theologies with secular
worldviews under the umbrella of ethical pluralism; no easy task, by any means (Ess, 2009). In
Floridi’s PI, ‘Information’ holds a privileged position as “primary ontological category and
constituent” (Ess, 2009). Floridi holds that “moral actions are the result of complex interactions
among distributed systems integrated on a scale larger than the single human being”, and that
moral actions either add to or prevent the entropy of the infosphere (Floridi, 2008, p 198).
Can Floridi’s Information Ethics Group (IEG), an institutional foundation for
Information Ethics, created in 2001 to bring together theoretical concerns of the field and
provide a necessary foundation for an ethics for WikiLeaks? The IEG, a partnership between
the Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of
Oxford, purposes to establish a theoretical field for addressing all of “computer science,
information science, ICT studies, information theory, computer/information ethics, logic,
epistemology, philosophy of science, and the history of ideas” (IEG, 2014), establishing it as
the Philosophy of Information (PI). The IEG has since its creation, subsumed ‘Information
Ethics’ as a field into the larger scope of the new field of the Philosophy of Information.
However, the Philosophy of Information, at least from a chronological perspective, and
arguably from a theoretical perspective, is an evolution of Information Ethics. The theoretical
foundations of the Philosophy of Information, by its own mandate, “to develop a clear
understanding of the nature, scope and life of information” (IEG, 2014), is, as highlighted by
Capurro, a reworking of the roots of Information Ethics itself. As Capurro states in his essay
On Floridi’s Metaphysical Foundation of Information Ecology, “Floridi placed information
ethics within the larger horizon of the “philosophy of information” (Floridi 2004, Herold 2004),
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a field whose roots, at least as far as the concept of information is concerned, go back to core
concepts of Western philosophy in Ancient Greece, namely idea, eidos, morphe and typos.
(Capurro 1978, Capurro and Hjørland 2003).”
Like the internal battles of WikiLeaks itself, the field of Information Ethics (especially
as regards the Philosophy of Information) is also divided in its foundational precepts. Capurro
challenges Floridi’s assumption of an autonomous infosphere by reaffirming an abyssal and
hermeneutical revealing of information and Being against Floridi’s metaphysical foundation,
opting instead for an ontology that requires an ethics similar to what Levinas describes as the
face-to-face, or the responsibility to Other (Capurro, 2006). Capurro points out that Floridi’s
ontology of Infosphere lacks cohesion, and that the concept of ‘information ecology’, pre-
existing Floridi’s Infosphere, is “a dimension of everyday life of millions and even billions of
people, and hence it is not a particular “sphere” separated from it” (Capurro, 2008). As noted at
the beginning of this thesis, ontology in Information Ethics is currently being worked out in an
ongoing debate (and “perhaps irresoluble” debate, according to Ess) between Floridi’s
philosophical naturalism in information ecology and Capurro’s Heideggarian based
Intercultural Information Ethics. Ess believes that it is within the dialectical nature of this
debate that the future development of Information Ethics resides (Ess, 2009).
How does and should ideas of information entropy as used in IE, per Floridi and
others, be applied? Is Information Entropy in IE synonymous or not with the classical
understanding of information entropy in terms of Shannon’s mathematical theory of
communication? Is information entropy in IE compatible with Capurro’s theory of Message
and Messenger? Angeletics and the Philosophy of Information, as adjuncts of Information
Ethics, open the door to ontological and metaphysical re-interpretations of Being (Capurro,
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Floridi, 2007, 2009), but in what terms, philosophically or mathematically do we begin the
process? Where the Philosophy of Information attributes all information entities, not only
human, with an equal moral obligation towards the determination of universal entropy, through
positive or negative interactions (Hongladarom, 2008), angeletics looks at message and
communication as inevitably arising from the historical dialectics of a hermeneutical process. It
will be posed, for arguments sake, that information entropy, for the purposes of this thesis,
means the loss of value in data as potential information through a process of saturation where
dissolution, as the result of an increase in speed and exposure of data, inhibits or prevents the
communication of information.
Perhaps key to the question of WikiLeaks and information dissolution is a notion
posited early on in the development of field of Information Ethics, one that could be said to
have influenced its current and complex philosophical dialectics, a notation made by Capurro
on Langefors’ infological equation, arising out of Capurro’s original lectures from 1985, where
as quoted from Langefors by Capurro in his Epistemology and Information Science, Langefors
states:
“If data are what is handled by computers and information is what is to be served to people, then information is totally distinct in kind from data. Information is of the same kind as knowledge and data must form sentences in some language. Data inform if they bring about changes in the knowledge of the users. This will only happen if the data (or sentences) are formed in correspondence with the knowledge structure (S) of the user. Data, or sentences, do not 'contain' information, they only 'represent' information fragments and the information becomes established only if these fragments are brought into connection with a knowledge 'whole'” (Langefors 1982).
Floridi talks about “a substantial erosion of the right to ignore: in an increasingly
porous society, it becomes progressively less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by
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the easily predictable events and hardly ignorable facts. And therefore an exponential increase
in common knowledge: this is a technical term from epistemic logic, which basically refers to
the case in which everybody not only knows that p but also knows that everybody knows that
everybody knows..., that p. In other words, (a) and (b) will also be the case because meta-
information about how much information is, was or should have been available will become
overabundant. From (a) and (b) it follows that, in the future, ( c) we shall witness a steady
increase in agent’s responsibilities. ICT’s are making humanity increasingly responsible,
morally speaking, for the way the world is, will and should be.”
The use and understanding of the concept of entropy in Information Ethics becomes
convoluted, best illustrated in the various debates between Capurro and Floridi on the matter.
Floridi understands entropy as “a metaphysical term (that) means Non-Being or Nothingness.”
Floridi’s entropy, as Metaphysical entropy, “is increased when Being, interpreted
informationally, is annihilated or degraded.” Capurro in turn notes that “Floridi believes that he
discovered the notion of information (and its relation to 'form') and even the philosophy of
information”. Capurro states that, “With regard to entropy and some key metaphysical concepts
such as "Non- Being" the critical reader might remember that these are really not new issues,
neither in science nor in philosophy” (Capurro, 2008).
Does the speed and increased exposure of ‘data’ bring about saturation to such an
extent that data (as potential information…but not even data until it is interpreted as such)
becomes ungrounded in our capacity to receive it, and thus not able to be communicated,
causing information entropy or the dissolution of information? Is there even such a thing as
‘raw data’, or does the basic form of data itself require an ontological connection to a ‘speaker’
in order to exist? A common theme among information and computer scientists is the inevitable
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singularity of machine intelligence surpassing the intelligence of its creator. Is it conceivable to
understand that singularity as being the point at which the sum of all information created
surpasses the totality of our ability, as creators of said information, to re-interpret it and thus
communicate it? Perhaps Capurro’s cultural alienation is the face of message dissolution,
whereby grounded information becomes unaccounted for, becoming again a mere potentiality.
Is cultural alienation, due to an abdication of accountability to our information, the first step
towards message dissolution?
Introducing two possible relationships between accountability and information entropy,
those being monopoly and saturation, it is here posited, exemplified within the collaborative
information and knowledge model and WikiLeaks phenomena, that it is information dissolution
through saturation that best exemplifies the condition of message dissolution, affirming that it
is neither monopolized knowledge nor collaborative knowledge that initiates the dissolution of
information, but rather a personal abdication of accountability to information through cultural
alienation. Defending information saturation as the catalyst to information entropy, WikiLeaks,
as exemplified in the above synopsis, functions as a symbol for an Information Ethics whereby
an accountability of self to the infosphere becomes central. The question is thus asked:
Ontologically, as information entities, how is accountability to self and other maintained in
light of information entropy due to information dissolution? Through information overload,
does Floridi’s ‘information entity’ get placed within a paradoxical conundrum where it can no
longer be in order to become? When through speed of exposure, of coming-into-being (its ‘in
formation’), information (as data) can no longer touch the ground; can no longer become static,
then what can be said about accountability to information? (Floridi, 1999, 2002, Floridi and
Sanders, 2001, 2002).
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Libraries and Library Ethics
Looking at Floridi’s information ecology, Capurro’s theory of message, and Samek’s
dialectic of intellectual freedom and social responsibility, the concluding task of this thesis is to
outline a heritage of WikiLeaks and to thus establish an ethics for WikiLeaks as founded in
traditional Library Ethics, where WikiLeaks is a reflection of library ethics, libraries ideally
being a mirrored reflection of society itself both past and present, and WikiLeaks the inevitable
conclusion to the choices of each individual in our information society rather than merely the
choice of a handful of dissidents who expose government information.
As demonstrated previously in part two of our history, the move from librarianship into
philosophy and back again is largely what defines the field of IE. As such, one of the most
pertinent questions addressed within Librarianship is the very philosophical inquiry into
whether or not every issue is a library issue (Berry, 2011). It is posited here that the existence
of Libraries should not, as presumed, represent the mandate of an institutional ideology, that of
libraries, nor are they a depository for materials or technologies based on a prescribed
collections directive, but rather the library is a unique phenomenon that stands out among all
other societal institutions. The library is a mirrored representation of society. Ideally, the library
is society in its entirety, both past and contemporary. Within such a context, the continuity
between WikiLeaks and Collaborative Knowledge Ethics will be traced back through concerns
in Librarianship and Information Ethics, establishing WikiLeaks Studies and collaborative
information and knowledge Studies properly at home within Information Ethics.
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Opinion on the actions of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is widespread, not only
between the opinion of government and citizen, but also between the players of the field of
Information Ethics. Robert Hauptman calls WikiLeaks activities an “abomination” explicitly
asserting, “offering the world a treasure trove of unvetted proscribed documents embarrasses,
harms, and kills” (Hauptman, 2011). On the other hand, Edward Spence writing in the
International Review of Information Ethics unequivocally states that according to “national and
international journalism codes of ethics, Julian Assange, in his assumed role as a social
journalist, has committed no wrong, at least no moral wrong, in disseminating documents
concerning diplomatic classified information, if the dissemination of such information was in
the public interest” (Spence, 2012). At two ends of the spectrum with any number of shades of
grey in between the issue cannot be resolved by those whose place it is to address it, namely
information ethicists.
But therein lies the crux of the matter and a presumption unaccounted for, a
presumption that uncritically assumes and places the WikiLeaks phenomenon at home within
the scope of Information Ethics, as though the establishment for such a placement has a priori
been determined. It is the above scenario, a spectrum of not only disagreement, but also vast
dissimilarity in approach between information ethicists and the matter of WikiLeaks that
exposes the need for an established praxis and framework for a WikiLeaks ethics. It is through
the lack of a common methodology that such difference arises, whereby the very vice that
ethics so vehemently tries to avoid resurfaces in light of WikiLeaks, namely the uncritical
application of morals, whereas Information Ethics is established on a platform of critical
application between morals, ethics, and law, the foundations of which are outlined under the
field foundations at the International Center for Information Ethics. The objective of the
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following dialogue is concerned with establishing WikiLeaks Studies as primarily finding its
place within the realm of Information Ethics, both through Media Ethics and Library Ethics, the
later heritage being where our thesis is concerned, and it will be shown that it is through the
scionship of Library Ethics, from which Information Ethics arises, that an ethical WikiLeaks
finds its heritage in the traditional dialectic as represented in Samek’s intellectual freedom and
social responsibility. The long heritage precipitates first the collaborative information and
knowledge phenomenon, and secondly WikiLeaks itself. The continuity between WikiLeaks
and Collaborative Knowledge Ethics must be traced back through concerns in Librarianship
and Information Ethics, establishing WikiLeaks Studies and collaborative information and
knowledge Studies properly at home within Information Ethics.
It is no coincidence that librarians and librarianship so quickly embraced WikiLeaks
and its drive towards information access and transparency. No stranger to conflict with
government censorship themselves, Librarianship at large immediately felt a kinship with the
prerogatives of WikiLeaks. The one exception to the apparent natural affinity between the two,
and very telling to the nature of relationship between them, was the reaction of the Library of
Congress in systematically condemning WikiLeaks, proceeding to block all access to the
WikiLeaks site through library computers. There was an immediate drive of the ALA to
petition and advocate for WikiLeaks against the Library of Congress in support of Julian
Assange. As Bill Sleeman, the Assistant Director for Technical Services at the Thurgood
Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland School of Law pointed out in his article, A
Librarian reacts to WikiLeaks, “all librarians, myself included, envision ourselves as zealous
advocates of open access so we are generally supportive of any effort to distribute officially
declassified government information no matter how suspect or unfamiliar the organization”
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(Sleeman, 2011). The article fostered a somewhat legendary debate among Librarians
surrounding the complex nature of the matter. The “WikiLeaks” phenomenon was in fact not a
new concern in Librarianship, especially at home in the ALA, where the same debate
surrounding transparency of government information and library access to government
information had been raging since the 1970s. In many ways, the only thing new about
WikiLeaks from the perspective of Librarianship was the sudden attention and widespread
coverage of what was an ongoing, complex, and frustrating warfront between government and
librarianship.
However, Sleeman’s article struck a chord across the board and catapulted the debate
into the spotlight by pinpointing the complexity of what WikiLeaks entailed, pitting long held
values of access to information against the yet abstract concept of information ownership,
especially as it pertained to stolen property. Of concern also was the aspect of motivation on
the part of Assange and WikiLeaks. Against the hype to support the WikiLeaks initiative,
Sleeman triggered a metaphorical silence with his thought provoking reflection. As per his
inquiry:
“Should we even care about any possible bias on WikiLeaks? As librarians we should care, not so much about WikiLeaks per se but more importantly we should be concerned with what it says about our community to so willingly embrace the WikiLeaks initiative when we know so little about it. In library information literacy programs we try to teach our students that when using Internet sources the need to continually question; to look beyond the surface and identify any bias in a web site. Yet there seems to be little willingness on the part of some in the library community to do so here” (Sleeman, 2011).
It is through the history and praxis of Information Ethics that a theoretical foundation
for an ethics for WikiLeaks must be introduced. WikiLeaks is not simply another cog in the
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wheel of the history of Information Ethics, nor simply a manifestation of media culture and
media ethics, but rather it is the inevitable manifestation and fulfillment of the same cultural
dialectics behind library ethics, as chronicled throughout history from the philosophy of
ancient Greece, to the history and ethics of mediaeval Islamic Libraries, to ideas of access to
private libraries arising from the French Revolution, and finally to the encapsulation of
Library Ethics in the professionalism as established by the ALA in the 19th century, where
ontological accountability prefaces the life cycles of information control and colors the
dialectical outcomes of information flow. Thus Library Ethics, Information Ethics, and an
ethics for WikiLeaks ultimately find their origins in the agora of Athenian democracy through
ideas established around parrhesia and existential accountability.
Information Literacy
Tadashi Takenouchi speaks to the previously explored question of the predisposition of
the western drive towards an Intercultural Information Ethics18 and envisions similar biases in
terms of the push for “information literacy”, a very western born idea founded in democratic
and humanist principles whose tenets have again been presumed and globally layered as one
size that fits all (cultures). As he states in his Consideration on the Concept of Information
Literacy:
“The phrase ‘information literacy’ has been used as a focal concept to encourage information education in recent years. It is often said that information literacy is an ability which is ‘necessary for all’ living in the information society. But the concept of
18 One must keep in mind that even the word “ethic” is a Greek term, originating in a
western philosophical context!
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information literacy is quite ambiguous, and its meaning is different according to different situations. Is information literacy really ‘necessary for all’? In reviewing various descriptions of information literacy, they do not seem to be” (Takenouchi, 2004).
Paramount to the objectives of Takenouchi is the need for a critical assessment of the
engrained beliefs of modern library culture, namely the assumed and inferred requisite towards
Information Literacy. Does modern library culture assume an uncritical Information Ethics?
When Takenouchi asks if information literacy is “necessary for all”, he is not making a value
statement on information literacy, but rather questioning the category, field, and level of the
concept of information literacy in any particular situation. He is acknowledging that the
understanding of information and of literacy must not be assumed, since literacies are
understood in anecdotal terms, with already predetermined foundations. To not address the
meta-ethical variations in terms of ethnic and cultural experiences, in some cases the scarcities
of such meta-ethical presumptions, dialogue becomes again a one-way street leading to “faulty
conclusions” (Takenouchi, 2004).
Public libraries ideally (at their best and most authentic actualization) are manifestations
of and symbolic of both the present and past worldviews of cultures and societies at localized
and globalized levels. Public libraries, so long as they have existed, have always been on the
forefront of Intercultural Information Ethics in terms of the dialectics and evolution of
education and ‘literacies’, and where modern redefinitions of the purpose and meaning of
public libraries expand into social realms that include cultural settlement and outreach
‘missions’, thereby assisting new, displaced, or otherwise culturally disadvantaged individuals
with information needs, the above question of literacies ought to be especially addressed.
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Above all, a certain humility should pervade the task of the activist called ‘Librarian’,
since it becomes incumbent upon said activist to know that they are witness, not missionary,
to the ebb and flow of not only information, but also culture itself. The Librarian is, and has
always been, situated in a privileged position to represent the entirety, so far as universality
exists, of all culture, thought, belief, and knowledge, and while the Librarian represents the
entirety of such, they need to understand the gravity of what it entails to act not as guardians
of information, determining in their own ways and time what knowledge shall be, the value of
said knowledge, as well as the means of its dissemination, but rather they should stand
humbly aware that the library is the living formation of things past, present and yet to come,
and that their job as witness is just that, witness. Were the conditions right, the shift from
information guardian to witness and teacher could be enacted through the vehicle of
information literacy, but a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies of literacies is
lacking. James Elmborg, writing on information literacy and the role of the librarian states,
“This shift, driven by demand, implies an evolution in what librarians do, and moving from
service provider to active educator challenges librarians and library educators to develop new
guiding philosophies” (Elmborg, 2006).
Within their emerging roles as teacher, where to teach is to witness to that which is,
rather than to determine what is, and while keeping in check as far as possible both bias
against and monopolies on knowledge, the new librarian seeks to encourage others to engage
with sometimes the most volatile issues facing society, while not enforcing their own
preconceived moralities on the issues, and not forcing their hand, but instead advocating for
and allowing the representation of knowledge a fertile ground on which accountability on the
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part of all citizenry in able to find root. It is by this means that critical librarianship becomes
real and by which the librarian becomes an activist as witness rather than missionary.
Louise Limberg demonstrates the role of the emerging librarian as witness and teacher
below:
“The view of information seeking as something that is learnt is well in accordance with the view that the appropriation of information literacy may be a goal for learning. However, information literacy can be approached as an object of teaching as well as an object of learning. In librarianship information literacy appears particularly often as an object of teaching. It follows therefore that we can assume that literacy is the outcome of learning. We may also claim, however, that all learning is embedded in cultural practices and imbued with norms and values, since learning implies developing one’s ability to understand and act in gradually more sophisticated ways within a specific practice.” (Limberg, 2012).
Christine Pawley, in Information Literacy: A contradictory Coupling, advocates a
critical librarianship around terms of information literacies, pointing out the weakness in both
assumptions of the values of information literacies and their supposed democratic culmination.
It is noteworthy to consider once again, as Heidegger states, that democracy may not be the
best answer to technicity. As Pawley states:
“Information literacy has established itself as an important subfield of librarianship. Yet although librarians justify information literacy as increasing democratic participation by all citizens, their efforts to improve 'quality control' of information also threaten to restrict choice in systematic ways. This contradiction results in part from the genealogy of the terms 'information' and 'literacy,' terms that share a relationship traceable to an Enlightenment ideology, namely, that reading could transform society by informing its people.” (Pawley, 2003).
The implications of such are more than mere semantics, especially when it comes to
understanding critical librarianship, which advocates for, among other points, an advocacy and
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assessment of the dialectic of intellectual freedom and social responsibility, and the layers of
complexity are many. Samek, pioneer and leading scholar in areas of critical librarianship,
imagines an authentic librarianship where transparency plays a part at all levels, including
internal ones. As she states in her Days of Action speech to the Madison graduating class of
2013, “Advocating outward for our publics requires some inward work within our own
institutional culture” (Samek, 2013). Samek explores at length the lesser known forms of
censorship at play within library institutions themselves, those forms of censorship that restrict
advocacy and intellectual freedom on the part of the librarian and the library school professor,
whether through corporate backed loyalty oaths or media relations policies. She points out that
while the American Library Association (ALA) has adopted, in 2005, a Resolution on
Workplace Speech to guard against internal censorship, the Canadian Library Association
(CLA) falls short of ensuring the same protections (Samek, 2013), a difference that could in
turn hinder her own work as well as the task of the new librarian as teacher and advocate,
creating an environment of fear, self-censorship and ultimately of silence and ignorance,
impeding public literacies, information, digital or otherwise, at a foundational level.
The dangers undermining cultural transparencies, and thus education, knowledge and
personal and social accountability arrive not so much in the form of outside external forces
pushing back against libraries, but rather from a treacherous cancer festering within the very
heart of the body of culture, the library itself. Where the power structures of the institution
increasingly fall prey to corporatization and where, as such, the administrators of libraries in
turn encourage an uncritical environment by shamelessly assuring self-censorship, where
intellectual freedom becomes mere lip service to the public face, critical thought on the part of
librarians is blatantly discouraged and librarians fall silent, defeated in their place.
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However, the hypocrisy and deviousness of the above scenario is increasingly exposed
as the international library community slowly begins to develop an awareness of libraries as
inter-culture, as the heart of all education and communication. As per The International
Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Code of Ethics for Librarians and
other Information Workers: Section 3: Privacy, secrecy and transparency, “Librarians and other
information workers support and participate in transparency so that the workings of
government, administration and business are opened to the scrutiny of the general public. They
also recognize that it is in the public interest that misconduct, corruption and crime be exposed
by what constitute breaches of confidentiality by so-called ‘whistleblowers’”. WikiLeaks is the
representation of what Libraries would be, freed from power structures, while Libraries provide
the historic-ethical framework needed by WikiLeaks in developing an ethics. The clash of
cultures exemplified by ICTs is due to a digital appropriation of the world, and traditional
information literacies quickly demand digital literacies of its citizenry but do not necessarily
provide or encourage it, widening digital divides. Where local and global borders are
increasingly both simultaneously erased and emphasized, libraries potentially stand in a unique
position as the only remaining public social institution existing to represent the entirety of
publicness, not just carefully selected elements, and they exist not only as the face to ever
changing cultural and intercultural facets under a digital appropriation, but also to acculturation
itself.
Capurro in his summation of IIE, quotes a Korean curator by the name of Won-il Rhee,
whose Conflicts between and Becomings of different Time-spaces captures well the field of IIE,
but incidentally (and not coincidently) also acutely describes the place of the modern Library at
the frontline of collaborative knowledge ethics. Rhee references acculturation as the “collision
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between globalism and localism, the discord and conflict between tradition and modernity, the
collision and coexistence between high and low culture” (Rhee 2007), very aptly summing up
the phenomenon that defines the frontline of the modern public library, where more than at any
other time in history, the allowance for, and sanction of, publicness truly exists. The potential
for a true open allowance of information flow becomes possible, but issues of information
guardianship still preside, blocking the healthy movement of information as a body, often
within the veins of culture itself, the library.
Accountability
Samek reminds us that we must “recognize our being in our doing” (Samek, 2013).
Floridi speaks of the dialectic of reflection, that the human mind must constantly give meaning
to its surrounding environment to escape meaninglessness, nothingness, chaos, because these
‘threaten to tear the Self asunder, to drown it in an alienating otherness...this primordial dread
of annihilation urges the Self to go on filling any semantically empty space with whatever
meaning the self can muster’ (Floridi, 2002). Slavoj Žižek would posit that, through
WikiLeaks, the denial of knowing has been shattered, that we must now fess up to not only
knowing that our suspicions regarding, for instance, government surveillance, are grounded in
fact, but more disturbingly, that we must now take accountability for knowing. We have been
forced out of our denial. We are put face-to-face before the glaring inconsistencies of our own
renunciation of responsibility to self and other, and we know, if even for only a brief moment
in time, that it is we ourselves who are solely responsible for the state of information. As
portended by Floridi, we will fill the semantic chasm with one meaning or another. What we
choose to fill that space with will either reflect an accountability of knowing, or a denial of it.
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Žižek , venturing into the debate, warns that the danger of the WikiLeaks phenomenon
resides in its “liberal appropriation”, whereby through the act of voicing our outrage, we
misplace immediate responsibility to action, and WikiLeaks becomes a convenient scapegoat to
the acceptance of responsibility. As S. M. Reid-Henry points out in his article On Zizek on
WikiLeaks, the perceived recompenses of WikiLeaks has failed us, namely in that the shame of
our own apathy has only been all the more exposed in the silence following our initial uproar.
As Zizek says, the shame is that we “we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone
knows we know”. Picking up from Floridi, “the right to ignore” no longer exists.
An authentic ethics for information demands a return to accountability, a task that
becomes perhaps somewhat easy to neglect in our ideological grandstanding. Two concerns not
raised often in the field (or any field for that matter) are the vices of abstraction and ego,
whereby the negation of one’s accountability to their claims occurs through the very pillars that
would support them, those pillars being on one hand, as outlined by Nathaniel Enright and
Slavoj Žižek, the capitalist influences and/or foundations to Library and Information Studies
and the commodification of information, and on the other hand, our own ego.
Through an in-depth study of the field, the critical observer might note that this
grandstanding of the field itself as a field becomes a wall against accountability to self and to
other. Ultimately it is ego as both vice and virtue that both enables and prohibits the
actualization of Information Ethics, in the same way that Information Literacies have the
potential to inhibit knowledge flow, as highlighted above. Without attending to any detailed
study of the nature of egoism vs. altruism, let it simply be noted here that ultimately, one’s
concern for any matter, including one’s drive to do Information Ethics, resides largely, for
better and worse, in a self gratifying desire to do so, for whatever reason, whether that reason is
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openly and admittedly for personal interest or for the betterment of society and others. While
building our ventures and writing our papers, while attending conferences and staking our
claims, it becomes all too easy through doing so to abdicate on the very responsibilities we so
fervently advocate, if only because in doing so, we believe we have addressed our task, and
thus lay it to rest. It can be argued that true advocacy requires true sacrifice, sometimes even to
the point of personal loss, as exemplified by the pioneers of the field of IE. Unfortunately one
all too often becomes too comfortable in one’s complacency and luxury to easily step into the
foray of the actual cause.
By establishing a claim and paying lip service to it, it becomes easy to ‘appease one’s
guilt’, so to speak, to feel as though we have made the prescribed difference simply by making
a noise. The above phenomenon can be demonstrated by comparing it to the all too familiar
debate over the value of online social forums such as Facebook. For all their value, and apart
from the conversation surrounding digital identities, such forums too easily encourage a not so
new tendency (history is full of examples) of one to renounce accountability simply by
announcing it, whereby one starts to believe that simply by “sharing” a cause, or clicking
“like”, one fulfills their self-accountable ‘quotient’ and thus through means of slacktivism, feels
as though they have done their part, but in fact it is in the very doing so that eliminates our
conviction to personal accountability.
Similarly, Information Ethics risks becoming a means to the wrong end, and merely
becomes just one more scapegoat to not actually having to address ethics, to not having to
choose to do so. Žižek speaks of our unbearable freedom. He reminds us that the trauma of
being informed is not in the discovery of some abstract puppeteer secretly and deceitfully
pulling the strings of our destiny, but rather in our confrontation “with the fundamental
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unconscious choice by means of which every one of us has to choose her or his existential
project” (Žižek, 2011). It is not the puppeteer we fear, but rather the freedom that comes with
the choice we must make free from the puppeteer’s strings. The players of WikiLeaks and
especially Assange, even though representing the pathologies of information control, stand
paradigm to the ancient Greek idea of parrhesia, to self-sacrifice, and it is in light of their
sacrifice that the citizen is convicted in their apathy.
Nathaniel Enright, in his speculation into the origins of Information Ethics, tolls the bell
on abstraction and the commodification of information when he posits that even the very
foundation of the field itself, Library and Information Studies, is culpable to the abdication of
ethics, being itself a product of a capitalist drive to commodify information, where
“information becomes an everyday mechanism for the reconstitution of exploitation and control
immediately foreclosing on the possibility of an ethics of information” (Enright, 2011). Enright
highlights that Information Ethics is similarly imperative and impossible and cautions that “in
Library and Information Science (LIS), information ethics is understood in a very general sense
to be a self-verifying good and as such something that must be unquestionably defended,
supported and promoted” (Enright, 2011). As stated above, Samek raises the same concerns
over the commodification of information and information literacy in her struggle to maintain
academic freedom in the University, remarking that “in many instances information literacy has
been co-opted by the state”. Samek implores the information ethicist to “try to save information
ethics from the same fate – a fate that ultimately closes down rather than opens up new
possibilities for effectively understanding human trajectories in the economy of ideas,
commodification, monopolization, and war” (Samek, 2010).
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WikiLeaks and the implied recompenses of WikiLeaks were quickly adopted by the
library communities without a lot of critical judgment or knowledge on what it entailed. Even
if, as the argument is made, libraries were in a privileged position to recognize the essence of
WikiLeaks and all it occasioned, they did so based on western philosophical biases as
established in the Agora of ancient Greece, the same biases that have unquestionably founded
western cultural dialectics since, namely, the unquestioned rights to privacy, information and
value of self. If one could even simply come to terms with that, a dialogue could ensue. The
situation is, however, even more insidious than just a matter of western bias, involving the
totality of human vices, including everything from scapegoating to greed to fear and denial and
ultimately to matters of accountability and lack thereof. The question must be asked of libraries
and society in general - is the willing acceptance or rejection of WikiLeaks not just an
appropriation of the same vice that Enright speaks of, namely the commodification of
information? After all, what do western capitalist founded cultural ethics really value - equity,
or equity? One is reminded here of the biases of Intercultural Information Ethics, previously
addressed, whereby the unquestioned and engrained assumptions of the most foundational
cultural elements of any given society form unconscious biases against irreducible pluralism.
Enright’s work on the commodification of information seems to emphasize more than just the
appropriation of information and information ethics for self-serving, political, or capitalist
reasons, but is also reflective of the ontological debates between Capurro, Floridi and their
eastern Buddhist counterparts, posing questions of self and entity. What is self and what is
entity? And what is their worth? Such concerns are rife with yet unsolved ethical
considerations.
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Capurro says that it is the worldview of the digital that embraces all the dimensions of
our being-in-the world. He talks about cultural alienation within societies and in society as a
whole because of the consequences of information technology on individuals and society
(Capurro, 1992). The implications of cultural alienation within an information-saturated society
must be addressed alongside notions of accountability to self and other, explicating the
dimensions of being-in-the-world, as per Capurro’s Heideggerian ontology. This is where
‘ethics’ comes into play, in terms of our post-WikiLeaks society and otherwise. How do we
responsibly navigate mass-information while maintaining accountability to knowing? Capurro
says “information technology gives us means for reality construction through awareness of and
respect for people and other living beings,” (Capurro, 1992) and yet the aftermath of
WikiLeaks would suggest despite such means, and although it ought to be the case, we have
actively opted out of responsibility. And yet accountability to information becomes difficult
when even the foundations of contemporary culture become ungrounded. What happens when
established encyclopedic definitions change at a moment’s notice, as per the previously noted
example regarding Smith’s original work on the Wikipedia entry for ‘Information Ethics’?
Indeed, “How do sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and others promote
scholarly connections and knowledge?” (Smith, 2011).
An existential accountability to information must be demanded for a foundation to an
ethics for WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks phenomenon signifies the choices of each individual in
the ‘information society’, not just those of a handful of dissidents. Žižek says, “The only
surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we
learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances:
we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox
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of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes
everything” (Žižek, 2011). But it should be contended that only in actively knowing can
accountability to information take place, where knowing should inform one’s daily choices.
Žižek psychologizes our reaction to information saturation to stages of grief, where we
first react in ideological denial, and then anger, followed by bargaining, and ending in
withdrawal. Žižek, Capurro and Floridi set the stage. Upon each revelation of WikiLeaks, the
obligatory outcry by citizens-to-whom-it-concerns is sounded. The expected noise is declared
and broadcasted by the media, but the citizen, upon manufacturing the obligatory clatter, then
returns to the comfort zone of complacency and abstraction, as though to make a noise is good
enough to appease their sense of accountability to the state of government, to the state of
privacy, to the state of secrecy, to the state of their own self. After all, ‘what can one really do’?
It is here that information pathologies begin, and where cultural alienation takes hold. Žižek
concludes by noting that, “Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our
shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicized” (Žižek,
2011). Ultimately, the abuses of power are a reflection of what the citizen chooses, at least in a
democratic society, and existentially speaking, it might be posited that the active choice, that of
ignoring, and the consequences thereof, is ultimately what the citizen wants.19 Are the short-
lived reactions of citizens and their noise merely a straw man set up to redirect one’s guilt from
the vices of complacency? If the citizen were truly engaged with what they know, they would
not lay down their “ballot” after casting it, but would take it up daily. They would make good
on themselves (their selves) as democratic citizens. It is only through a full participation on the
part of every citizen that information pathologies can even begin to be addressed.
19 Christine Belley, in personal communication, January 14, 2014.
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As Reid-Henry puts it, what is really in question with regard to WikiLeaks, and
especially within it, is how one does and should believe and act as an agent of change (Reid-
Henry, 2011). Žižek divides the WikiLeaks phenomenon into two war fronts. On one hand,
WikiLeaks is a war between WikiLeaks and its suppressors, but on the other, it is a war of
philosophical debates over the nature and implications of WikiLeaks itself, a war over what
WikiLeaks is and ultimately over what it should be (Shin, 2011). The second war front is what
concerns the present thesis. As Žižek has challenged the common assumption numerous times,
the public and corporate interpretation of WikiLeaks misses the mark on several occasions. The
greatest mistake that has been made in regards to WikiLeaks is the polarization of its players,
whereby either ‘lionizing’ or ‘demonizing’ Assange and fellow whistleblowers, either putting
them on a pedestal or casting them as dissidents, we have both misrepresented their journey and
abdicated on our own responsibilities in regards to what WikiLeaks is and how it has come into
being as the very representation or manifestation of our collective apathy to the state of
information and information flow.
Even though WikiLeaks, as a symbol for collaborative knowledge in an information
society, may have fallen short of adequately representing the wiki phenomenon, namely in that
WikiLeaks never did reach in its efforts the level of collaborative knowledge required to place
it in the same category as other wiki-based platforms such as Wikipedia, and being as it was
focused on government documents only rather than the entirety of monopolized knowledge, it
all the same becomes a symbol for collaborative knowledge in its conviction of a collectively
apathetic information society, revealing the truth as that of a collaborative denial of
responsibility to the state of information and our place in it. As suggested above by Floridi and
Žižek, a knowing society, when faced with the conviction of their collective denial of a
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responsible and accountable information ecology, can no longer ignore their part in creating in
the first place the very structures and conditions necessary to allow the need for such
monstrosities as WikiLeaks, the monstrosity of such being not WikiLeaks and its players
themselves, who in speaking loudly the truth despite the consequence, model accountability
and expose the culmination of a heritage of cultural pathologies whose formation can be traced
through history to their origins in the widely unheeded call of parrhesia in ancient Greece, but
rather the monstrosity being that which WikiLeaks has blown the whistle on, the
collaboratively backed vacuum of knowledge denial.
Conclusion
The main platform that WikiLeaks and information dissolution come together on is in
the uncritical release of tens of thousands of classified documents into the public domain by
WikiLeaks, an act that harbors harsh criticism even from other journalists who point out that
such a lack of editorial discretion bypasses the necessary analysis of responsible journalism
(Carr, 2013). A very valid critique, it is a complete lack of analysis, not so much on the part of
WikiLeaks but rather the citizen, that abdicates accountability for the content and influence of
information exposed, including the inevitable lack of influence of said documents on those-to-
whom-it-concerns, namely the free citizen, who having not taken accountability for the state of
information previous to its exposure through the efforts of whistleblowers, continues to deny
that accountability in the face of it. It is not the government that WikiLeaks has blown the
whistle on; but the citizen.
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This lack of accountability is the very exemplification of the above noted concerns of
Floridi and Žižek, where the concern becomes not one of secrecy and access, but rather of
accountability. As Žižek points out, our outrage over the government surveillance revelations
should not be about the danger of government monitoring our information, but rather the
opposite, that of the government, of WikiLeaks, of any institution not knowing the very
information that it monopolizes for the sheer magnitude of the information. (Žižek, 2011).
Namely, there is no way that a single government or institution, consisting of only a handful of
people in control can be accountable to the content of such vast swaths of information. More
concerning, of course, and the crux of this thesis, is that the above revelation of the true dangers
of information accountability becomes mirrored in Žižek’s critique, turning the notion of
accountability for information back on society and the individual. If the institution, whether
being an institution of government, peer-reviewed journal or collaborative knowledge forum is
not capable, as an elitist faction limited in number, of being accountable to the vast amounts of
information available through information and communication technologies, and yet they hold
exclusive rights to it, monopolizing it to the disadvantage of both themselves and society, then
it becomes incumbent upon an information society to ask why such a scenario is allowed. It is
only as a collective of individuals that we have the capacity to face information dissolution and
to account for it.
As exemplified in the recent Heartbleed scenario, our fears are not unfounded
conspiracies, and the state of information in the world is more vulnerable to theft, attack,
misuse, and dissolution than it has ever been throughout human history. Heartbleed was a
wakeup call. Further worldwide security breaches are inevitable, with each attack being
exponentially more severe. It is unacceptable that as global citizens we allow the state of
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information, personal or otherwise, to sit unaccounted for and unguided in the hands of
negligent guardians, whether library administrators or governments. Capurro notes that a “free
Internet can foster peace and democracy, but it can also be used for manipulation and control”.
He believes it “a necessity to strive for a future Internet governance regime on the basis of
intercultural deliberation, democratic values and human rights”. Regarding such concerns as
ICT controlled and borderless economies, the ecological crisis of our environment, and an
accountability to a ‘human’ rights that expands beyond humanity to include both non human
and environmental systems, Capurro states succinctly that “we have to change our lives in
order to become not masters, but keepers of our natural environment” (Capurro, 2013).
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