This news report “Google, Facebook and Twitter may ‘face EU defamation and privacy cases’“surfaces the issues of the digital world, pertaining to how fast rumours and news could spread, and also the anonymity of online users.

On the other hand, there is the debate about enacting sweeping privacy protection for digital data.

Hand (2008) writes that for Robins and Webster ‘the network society is a more transparent society, and a more transparent society is, potentially, a more disciplined society’ (1999: 118).  In the light of the issues raised here of ethics in the virtual domains and the anonymity of online users, the question is whether  transparency should be continued, and if it actually promotes more discipline.

And if we were to use the metaphor of the virtual panopticon in my previous post, are we encouraging neighbours to tell on each other or do we impose a layer of policing from the non-virtual domain?  Where does morals stand for the individual? And which or whose ethics?

Poster argues for a different way to measure or think about ethics in the virtual or Information era, as several factors are fundamentally different from the non-virtual:
1.    the person whom the online user is communicating with is made up of pixels in the screen. It is not permanent as once shut down, it is no longer there but there is a requirement to honour the relationship it holds with others;
2.    the debates that ensue following broadcast of a sex change operation was not about the operation but whether it is ethical to webcast it online, it was the blurring of the line between private and public;
3.    in the new deterritorialiased space there is all sorts of information available from diverse sources which perhaps require a different moral restraint;
4.    and the individual has to process the bits and pieces of disassociated culture and reorganise them or a transvaluation of values emerging from the chaos experienced as part of a process of building the online identity.
5.    Poster believes that there is an act of determinism of the good in the innovation of the Internet.

Reference:

Poster, M (2006) The good, the bad and the virtual, chapter 7 of Information please: culture and politics in the age of digital machines. Duke University Press. pp.139-160.

Plan of the Panopticon, 1843 (originally 1791), Source: The works of Jeremy Bentham vol. IV, 172-3

This is a word which I have come across the first time from reading Hand’s article.   Foucalt, the French philosopher sees the power of social conditioning where people will take responsibility or self-regulate their behaviour when they know they are being watched.  He was fascinated by the architecture of Jeremy Bentham, seen above.  Such designs were used in prisons, and it is a method for exerting control over the inmates.

I found an excellent blog write up by Tim Rayner which looks at social media as the virtual panopticon as something which is desirable in the light of how it is an affirmation of one’s personal identity.  More interesting is the self-creation process that takes place as content is shared online.

Hand (2008), however, used this under the section called zones of enclosure, where digitization is being seen as dystopian.  Sharing of data gives more power to the very bureaucratic institutions which purports to do away with the old and rigid, to a flattened power structure.

Reference:

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.