Читать книгу Digital Media Ethics - Charles Ess - Страница 16

To begin with, digital media work by transforming extant information (e.g., voices over a phone, texts written on a word-processor, pictures of an impressive landscape, videos recorded and broadcast, etc.) into the basic informational elements of electronic computers and networks, using binary code (1s and 0s – bits on and off). By contrast, analogue media, such as increasingly popular vinyl records, capture, store, and make information accessible by producing specific material artifacts that are like (analogous to) the original. Music recording equipment, for example, begins with microphones that translate the vibrations of an original sound into magnetically stored information, corresponding to specific sound pitches and volumes; this is then “written” onto a tape that passes by a recording head at a specific speed. These analogues of an original sound are in turn transformed into further analogues: they are mechanically carved onto the grooves of a vinyl record in the form of bumps and valleys that correspond to the high and low frequencies and volumes of the original sound. These physical variations are then translated by a phonograph needle back into electronic impulses that likewise mimic the original variations of a sound. Finally, these impulses are turned into sound once more by an amplifier and speaker(s) – again, as an analogue or copy of the original that, ideally, is as close to the original as possible.

One of the reasons digital media are so attractive is that analogue media, by contrast, always involve some loss of information across the various processes of collecting, recording, and storing it. This means – and this is particularly critical to the ethical discussions of copying – that each analogue copy of an original is always less true to the original; and the more copies that are made – e.g., a tape copy of a record as a copy of a tape of an original performance – the less faithful (and satisfying) the resulting copy will be. By contrast, once information is transcribed into digital form, each copy of the digital original will be (more or less) a perfect replica of the original. Copy an MP3 version of your favorite song a thousand times and, if your equipment is working properly, there will be no difference between the first copy and the thousandth.

Even more importantly, analogue media are strongly distinct systems: how information is captured and replayed on a vinyl record is not immediately compatible – and hence not easily exchangeable – with how information is captured and replayed in a newspaper or printed book. But once information is translated into digital form, such information – whether destined for an MP3 player as an audio recording or a word-processor as text – can be stored on and transmitted through a shared medium. Hence the same computer or smartphone can capture, create, process, and distribute digital photos and music, along with a thousand other forms of information held distinct in analogue media, from simple emails to word-processing files to maps to ... “you name it.”

To be sure, these distinctions between analogue and digital media are only one side of the coin. As advocates of the post-digital remind us (Cascone 2000; Berry 2014), however much our media technologies have changed in recent decades, the human eyes, ears, and voices have not: we as embodied beings still generate and receive information in resolutely analogue form. The digital codes, for example, that pass between two computers or smartphones, whether in the form of a Skype call, Facebook update, or phone call, begin and end for their human users as analogue information. The emergence of “the digital,” in short, does not mean the quick and complete end of “the analogue” (cf. Massumi 2002). This is critical to keep in mind especially from an ethical perspective: as digital media build on and enhance – rather than replace – our analogue modes of communication and experiences, they thereby call into play experiences and communication that have been part and parcel of human ethical reflection and frameworks for millennia. This is good news, ethically. That is, it is sometimes argued – and tempting to think – that the ethical experiences and challenges of digital media are so strikingly new that they require entirely new frameworks (e.g., Braidotti 2006). But these continuities with our experiences as analogue and embodied beings argue that the emergence of digital media does not require us to throw out all previous ethical reflections and views and somehow try to start de novo – from the beginning. On the contrary, we will see several examples of how older forms of ethical reflection (perhaps, most notably, virtue ethics) – however transformed through their applications within digital media – are often key in helping us analyze and successfully resolve contemporary ethical dilemmas.

Nonetheless, as once-distinct forms of information are translated into a commonly shared digital form, this establishes one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of digital media – namely, convergence (Jenkins 2006). Such convergence is literally on display in a contemporary webpage containing text, video, and audio sources, as well as possibilities for sending email, remotely posting a comment, etc. These once-distinct forms of information and communication are now conjoined in digital form, so that they can be transmitted entirely in the form of 1s and 0s via the internet. Similarly, a contemporary smartphone exemplifies such convergence: as a highly sophisticated supercomputer, it easily handles digital information used for a built-in camera (still and/or moving video), audio and video players, a web browser, GPS navigation, and many other sorts of information. (Oh yes, it will also make phone calls.)

Digital media thus conjoin both traditional and sometimes new sorts of information sources. In particular, what were once distinct kinds of information in the analogue world (e.g., photographs, texts, music) now share the same basic form of information. What does this mean, finally, for ethics? Here’s the key point: what were once distinct sets of ethical issues now likewise converge – sometimes creating new combinations of ethical challenges that we haven’t had to face before.

For example, societies have developed relatively stable codes and laws for the issue of consent as to whether or not someone can be photographed in public. (In the US, generally, one can photograph people in public without asking for their consent, while, in Norway, consent is required.) Transmitting that photo to a larger public – e.g., through a newspaper or a book – would then require a different information system, and one whose ethical and legal dimensions are addressed (however well or poorly) in copyright law. But, as many people have experienced to their regret, a contemporary smartphone can not only record their status and actions, but further (more or less immediately) transmit the photographic record to a distribution medium such as Snapchat or an even more public website (e.g., as in revenge porn). The ethics of both consent in photography and copyright in publication are now conjoined in relatively novel ways. (In fact, technological convergences toward the end of the nineteenth century – specifically, the ability of newspapers to print photographs – occasioned some of the foundational arguments for privacy in the contemporary world. This innovation led to the demand for celebrity photos – and thereby intrusions into the lives of the famous that violated “the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency” (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 195, cited in Glancy 1979, 8).