information ethics - and angels

[Claudia Westermann]

http://icie.zkm.de/research

Introduction

The study of information ethics within different cultural traditions is an 
open task. The following text gives some hints about the Western tradition.

II.1. The Western Tradition

In the Western tradition information ethics has its roots in the oral 
culture of ancient Greece. Agora (marketplace and meeting place) and 
freedom of speech (Greek: parrhesia) were essential to Athenian democracy. 
The cynics cultivated freedom of speech as a special form of expression. 
Socrates (469-399 B.C.) practised his thinking in public places and never 
published his arguments. Plato (427-347 B.C.) discusses in his dialogues 
the transition from an oral to a written culture. Under the influence of 
Christianity a book culture was developed which was mainly centered on one 
book, namely the Bible.
The invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1455 and the Reformation, which 
profited from it, brought back, in the Modern period, the idea of freedom 
of communication, which implied the freedom of communicating ideas to 
others not just in a written but in a printed form.
The French Revolution brought about the transformation of the private 
libraries owned by nobility as well as by the church into common property. 
Projects like the one of the French Encyclopédie and the public access to 
libraries created a new awareness of freedom of information which 
culminated in the principle of freedom of the press as one of the 
foundations of modern democracies.
The Western tradition of information ethics from ancient Greece until the 
beginning of the 20th century is characterized by two ideas:

- freedom of speech,
- freedom of printed works and particularly freedom of the press.
A third element arises now, in the age of a networked world of electronic 
information, namely

- freedom of access.

II.2. Other Traditions
Contributions are welcome!

[..... ? .... ) ....     ]

III.5. Prospects

All these questions become more critical as a result of the globalization 
of information in the Internet. Questions arise such as: Who shuld control 
the information coming from another country and/or another culture? How can 
national laws, being geographically limited, meet the challenges of 
cyberspace?
Solutions to these questions may be found at different levels:
- Self-control: this is the ethical solution propagated by the Internet 
community particularly through the use of filtering software. Its basic and 
most primitive form is the netiquette. Other kinds of self-controll are for 
instance operated within newsgroups through moderators. Sanctions, 
beginning with flaming, through spam, may reach the level of a mail bomb. 
Finally there are the cyber angels who take care of (free) decency 
self-control in the net.


[ ... ) ... lovely ... what a relief ... does someone apply for the angel 
job ? .... hmmmm ...*** ...  .. does anyone know if angels are allowed to 
spam ? ..
frederic ? .. I just think we could need an angel handbook with a very well 
organized index ... you like writing, don't you ?
someone else ? ... ]