[ICTs-and-Society] Plenary session 2 “Towards a Global Sustainable Information Society: Information Society and Digital Media Ethics Today” (Gunilla Bradley, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Charles Ess)

[Christian Fuchs]

Dear colleagues,

I want to point you towards the second plenary session “Towards a Global 
Sustainable Information Society: Information Society and Digital Media 
Ethics Today” of the Uppsala conference that features three interesting 
talks by Gunilla Bradley, Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Charles Ess. The 
session is focused on discussing ethical challanges of digital media and 
the information society.

Overall, Gunilla's, Wolfgang's and Charles' contributions will help to 
ask major questions about digital media ethics and information society 
ethics and to find potential answers.

The questions that their presentations bring up, and that are open for 
discussion, include:

What does quality of life and and quality of work mean and what is the 
role of ICTs? What have Swedish experiences in establishing an 
information society been thus far? What is a good information society? 
What are hindrances for achieving it? Why do we design things we do not 
need and how can we design things that we need for a global, sustainable 
information society? What is a global sustainable information society? 
How can it be achieved, by what is its achievement limited today? Are 
the Occupy movements and other movements germ forms of such a society? 
How are our understandings of privacy, property and the self changing 
today? What are the main ethical challenges society is facing today? How 
do cultural differences and interculturality influence our 
understandings of ICTs? How do "social media" and processes like 
commodification shape our norms and contemporary challenges? What is the 
relationship of critical thinking and ethics? What is critical ICT ethics?

GUNILLA BRADLEY (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden): Social 
Informatics and Ethics: Towards the Good Information and Communication 
Society
ABSTRACT:
Some issues that will be addressed from my research on the interplay 
between ICT, Society and Human Beings are relating to the following 
questions:
- How are human beings involved in the labour market? Present changes 
and new social structures?
- How does the workforce in the so-called flexible companies function?
- What is Quality of Life in the ICT society and how can it be achieved?
- What main changes are taking place in the professional role, private 
role and citizen’s role? How can we balance various roles in our lives - 
at the increasing convergence of them?
- What are new ways to influence our work life conditions as well as to 
contribute to societal change?
- What impact on values, motivation, human behaviour, and life styles do 
networks and network organizations have? Is there a dialectics of 
values? Can early warning psycho-social signals be identified?
- Some trends in psychosocial communication and ICT;
o Collaboration in distributed organizational structures and changes in 
global communication patterns;
o The home as a communication sphere in the network era - new 
opportunities and risks;
o Young IT people in cities and rural areas and their virtual and real 
communities.
I will initially give a short impressionistic picture of “The Swedish 
way” – a trial for many decades to balance two main economic systems. I 
will also summarize my “Convergence model on ICT and Society” that was 
formed from my research during the main eras in the “history of 
computerization”. The convergence reflects the main processes in 
technology, societal structure, organizational design, and human roles 
in society.  Where are the “energy centres” in the 21st Century ICT 
society that can activate and create changes towards the “Good 
Information Society”? Can agreements on the Goals and Visions for that 
society be achieved? What are the hot Ethical concerns? I will conclude 
with some reflections on sustainability in the ICT society from a 
grandmother’s perspective and will address the risk of cyberwar and 
opportunities for peace.

WOLFGANG HOFKIRCHNER
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Potentials and Risks for Creating a Global Sustainable Information Society
ABSTRACT:
Currently, in the IT sector vast numbers of engineers concentrate on 
designing things we do not need, whereas things we would need are not 
designed. The inertia of the economic system builds an obstacle to 
building meaningful technologies.
What a meaningful technology is, derives from the need for societal 
change. A GSIS (Global Sustainable Information Society) is the overall 
framework of conditions promising a future without the danger of 
anthropogenic breakdown. A GSIS is a society in which information is 
used to safeguard sustainable development on a global scale.
Informatisation – the spread of ICTs, computers and the Internet – has 
to be reshaped as a means for informationalisation. This involves 
raising the problem-solving capacity of world society to a degree of 
shared intentionality, to a level of collective intelligence and to an 
intensity of collective action that successfully tackles the problems 
that arise from society's own development. Informationalisation helps 
establish computer-supported communities of action in contradistinction 
to mere communities of practice or communities of interest. Communities 
of action share common goals for the development of world civilisation 
and act collectively to alleviate global challenges.
Spontaneously, ever newer communities of action germinate like the 
“Occupy” movements around the world. How can these communities be 
supported by means of ICTs to have a lasting impact on society?

CHARLES ESS
Aarhus University, Denmark
Digital Media Ethics and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society
ABSTRACT:
Digital media occasion ever greater ethical challenges, including basic 
matters of privacy and copyright. At the same time, both Medium Theory 
and contemporary empirical evidence in the domains of our economic 
behaviour, democratization efforts, and religious behaviour point to 
significant shifts in our conceptions of self-hood and identity 
affiliated with digital media.  Since our ethical and political 
conceptions are deeply shaped through our understandings of the self, 
these transformations raise compelling questions regarding both our 
ethical and political futures.
I begin by sketching moves in “the West” away from modernist notions of 
individual-exclusive privacy towards more group-based notions of 
privacy, if not the elimination of any sort of public/private boundary 
altogether. Similar shifts are apparent regarding property – most 
especially intellectual property, again away from modernist notions of 
individual-exclusive property towards more collective-inclusive 
understandings, as manifest, e.g., in Open Source, FLOSS, and the rise 
of Pirate Bay. I will try to show how these shifts correlate with a more 
foundational movement away from modernist notions of the individual qua 
rational autonomy towards more relational and emotive emphases in our 
conception of selfhood. By contrast, “Eastern” attitudes are 
demonstrably shift-ing in the opposite direction – i.e., away from 
earlier emphases on privacy and property as collective and inclusive, 
towards ever greater emphases on individual privacy and property rights 
as positive goods. Most strikingly, recent developments in legal 
protections for individual privacy in North Asia – including mainland 
China – argue that North Asia will soon stand as second only to the 
European Union in terms of individual privacy protections. But this 
takes place vis-à-vis further erosions of individual privacy rights in 
the E.U. and the U.S., primarily in the name of fighting terrorism.
These transformations suggest a hybridization in both “Western” and 
“Eastern” traditions – one that conjoins both modernist notions of 
individual selfhood with earlier notions (in both East and West) of 
relational selfhood. A particular question here, however, is: What sort 
of “individualism” is fostered through the use of digital media? Further 
evidence suggests that the individual fostered by “Web 2.0” 
communications technologies emphasizes not only the relational, but also 
the emotional. Such relational-emotional selves, whatever their other 
advantages and benefits, have historically correlated with hierarchical 
and authoritarian regimes. In contemporary, market-driven societies, 
this further correlates with an apparent willingness to allow processes 
of commodification to marginalize, if not extinguish, individual 
autonomy, privacy, and the freedom to dissent.
These correlations, finally, suggest that our choices regarding media 
usages and the media literacies we teach and emphasize will determine 
whether or not enough of the autonomous individual, as foundational to 
and the primary legitimation of modern lib-eral democracies, will 
survive in these new hybrid identities in the “West”, in order to 
sustain more democratic processes and egalitarian values. I will argue 
that such choixes may be well guided by various forms of critical 
theory, as well as by an emerging philosophical anthropology that 
conjoins phenomenology, Kantian and virtue ethics, as reinforced by 
contemporary understandings, rooted in neuroscience, of the “embodied 
mind” and embodied cognition.