From information ethics to The ethics of everything:

A reflection on how the question of ‘What is Information’ shaped my thinking about information ethics

Johannes Britz

1990

It all started way back in…

Rational: •Information law •My own background

Traditional information paradigm “Information is content that is being communicated between sender and receiver”

Shannon /Weaver model

Ethical issues

Generation use

gather

organize store

retrieve

Information Ethics 1 – 3rd year (later up to PhD)

Normative ethics/applied ethics

Descriptive ethics

Ethics – branch of philosophy

Deontological approach

Rule utilarism

Individual Professional social

? good

bad

Customs Culture Religion Law Ethical decision- making

papa Neutrality

Freedom human rights Code of conduct

Norms/values

Meta ethics

Librarian/information professional Computer scientist

Informatics

Life cycle of information

Reach & Richness

Numbers Customization Interactivity bandwidth

Reach & Richness

Customization Interactivity bandwidth

Numbers

From Information Ethics to the Ethics of Everything The new information paradigm - 1997

i-school conference in 2006

Unbundle and a long tail = new information paradigm

Publishing industry

Banking industry

Education

Music industry

Retail

privacy (we become unbundled)

Access and accessibility

Social justice (Fed-Ex factor)

2003

CEPE 2005 – Twente (Train-station discussion)

2001

Unbundled reality Manipulated Recreated Created Truth, meaning

March 2003: During Irak war, the Los Angeles Times ran the photo on top on its front page on March 31

It was a composite of the two lower photos.

Manupilation

Actors Who Died During Filming Philip Seymour Hoffman is the latest star to die while in the middle of shooting a film. Read how other movies dealt with losing a castmember.

Recreation of reality

Revenant

Mental mistake? ICT replaces/100% more accurate than human senses

Example: Cricket

Second level of abstraction Quality of information and

truth

Google images

Match fixing ? Players, umpires of camera crew??

Access to information – From to know to ‘to do’ Banking (etc) = Information based activity Right to participation - socio-economic and political right

Social exclusion marginalization

Information and object relationship

expectations…

From the digital to the material

Access to information ….

Ownership - patents

Relationship between information and object

Economic model

Quality of information

2012

From the digital to the material UWM 2102

“I will email you a beer…”

2013

From ‘to know’ to ‘to do’ to ‘to control’

Big data is a simulacrum of reality…a representation of the world We ‘datafied’ the world

We ‘conquer’ the world by measuring it Then we move away from ‘causality’ to ‘correlation’ – our certainties

Taken away (Big Data, 2013)

Datafication: ‘It refers to taking information about all things under the sun – including ones we never use to think of as information at all, such as a person’s location, the vibrations of an engine, or the stress of a bridge – and transforming it into data format to make it quantifiable. This allows us to use the information in new ways such as in predictive analysis: Detecting that an engine is prone to a break-down based on the heat or vibrations that it produces. As a result, we can unlock the implicit, latent value of information’.

‘Support’ (replace) human judgment Fallibility…human factor

Google images

Uses FlyOnTime.us

Google image

Sir Francis Bacon

Datafication = power ‘With the help of big data we will no longer regard our world as a string of happenings that we explain as natural or social phenomena, but as a universe comprised essentially of information’ (Big Data, p96)

Knowledge is power

Datafication = power ?

Juridical system: From probable cause to Probabilistic cause (p17)

p 183 Big Data

Security Using private and personal

information

Safety: Using private and personal

information

Human rights can evolve over time…..based on evolving concerns and threats …are adaptable to new circumstances and digital technologies

State of being (free, educated, health…)

Ability to do and choose (to communicate, where to live, who to marry, private…

Legal arrangements are not necessarily needed Which interests are ‘urgent

interests’? Problem of proliferation of rights. ‘Overlapping consensus’ Rawls

Baseline protection instead of a moral ideal

Big data

Google images

Normative ethics/applied ethics

Descriptive ethics

Ethics – branch of philosophy

Deontological approach

Rule utilarism

Individual professional social

? good

bad

Customs Culture Religion Law Ethical decision- making

c u g s r papa

Neutrality

Freedom human rights Code of conduct

Norms/values

Meta ethics

Library deontology - information ethics – ethics of

everything

Truth Care Social justice Evolving human rights

Redefine I-R relationship

Re-interpretation

Flattening of the world

1997

2003

2012

2015

1990 – 2016…and going: It is a journey worthwhile

Contribution to African Continent

Met many colleagues and made friends

Open doors -career

Guide me professionally (data driven university, digital future, ethics etc)