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Preface to the Third Edition

No one was more surprised – and then, gratified beyond measure – by the successes of the first edition of this little book. And then came suggestions that a second edition might be in order – and then a third: well, what are surprise and immeasurable gratification squared and then cubed?

Many good comments from colleagues and students who have used the book indicate that “success” here means first of all pedagogical success. The book is designed precisely as a classroom text for use across a wide range of academic disciplines. My intention is that it should be accessible and useful for “the rest of us” – all of us who are neither technology professionals nor philosophically trained ethicists. The guiding assumption here (from Aristotle, along with many other global traditions) is that we are already ethical beings, already equipped with experience and capacities in ethical judgment (phronēsis). The aim is to provide a basic ethical toolkit for better coming to grips with the many ethical challenges that confront us all as consumers and citizens, even designers of a digital media lifeworld.¹ The broad strategy conjoins primary ethical frameworks and theory with specific ethical experiences in our digital existence – increasingly, as several examples argue, our post-digital existence.² And lots of practice by way of the “Reflection/discussion/writing questions” designed to provoke and guide reflection and discussion that apply the ethical insights and theories to central examples. On a good day, students and readers will thereby become more adept in using these ethical tools to more confidently and successfully take on newer challenges most certainly to come.

These structures and approaches apparently work – hence (again) a new edition. But to state the painfully obvious: things change fast in our technological world. This was certainly true for the three years between the first (2009) and second editions (2012): it is all the more the case for the subsequent six or so years. Quantitatively: ever more people in the world are connecting to the internet, increasingly via mobile devices. Along the way, the past six years have witnessed the increasing roles of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and an emerging Internet of Things (IoT), along with social robots and sexbots. Qualitatively: the optimism driving much of the development and visions of “the internet” from the early 1990s onward appears to have peaked around 2012 following the first-blush successes of the 2011 Arab Springs. Early enthusiasm surrounding these so-called “Twitter Revolutions” or “Facebook Revolutions” was soon tempered by the harsh realities of the Arab Winters of 2013 and thereafter. With the one shining exception of Tunisia, these democratization movements were brutally crushed, in part as regimes learned how to censor and manipulate social media. They further transformed these technologies into infrastructures of total state surveillance – including in ostensibly more democratic societies, as Edward Snowden’s revelations of the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programs documented.

Reasons for pessimism have continued to pile up. They include the Cambridge Analytica scandals and the resulting manipulations of the 2016 US elections and Brexit via fake news and filter bubbles, and the polar choice between US-based “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) and the emerging Chinese Social Credit System (SCS). While rooted in diametrically opposite ideologies, both treat us as Skinner rats in a Skinner cage: our behavior is closely monitored and thoroughly controlled through exquisitely refined systems of reward and punishment. Worse still: the SCS is increasingly exported and adopted by other regimes, fueling the dramatic rise of “digital authoritarianism” globally (Shahbaz 2018).

Fortunately, there remain middle grounds and bright spots. The European Union is expanding individual privacy rights via the new General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR 2016). The EU is likewise developing robust ethical guidelines for an emerging “AI for people” (Floridi et al. 2018). France and Germany are now confronting Google and Facebook with significant fines and anti-trust accusations, respectively (Romm 2019; Spencer 2019). Even the otherwise business-friendly US is moving to fine Facebook some US$5 billion for privacy violations (Kang 2019). Moreover, more and more people are looking beyond “the digital” for a better balance between their online and offline lives – discussed here with the concept of a “post-digital era.” Six years ago, “digital detox” and “mindfulness” were the vocabulary of a few who were dismissed as cranks and Luddites: now these are increasingly central themes among even the most techno-enthusiastic (Roose 2019; Syvertsen and Enli 2019).

These extensive, in some ways epochal, changes have demanded major revisions and updates in every chapter. This has meant “killing my darlings” – many darlings. Dozens and dozens of important references in the literatures, along with several case studies and pedagogical exercises, have been dropped in favor of newer material throughout – beginning with chapter 2 on privacy, as increasingly threatened by many of these more recent developments. The reference list is now c. 30 percent larger than its predecessor, and new topics have been added, such as “death online” in chapter 4 and sexbots in chapter 5, along with discussion of #Gamergate and more recent empirical evidence regarding the harms and benefits of violent and sexually explicit materials in games.

Virtue ethics has become even more central, including its increasing role in design of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and in EU policy development regarding AI. Affiliated developments in “ethical design,” including “slow technology” and the Fairphone as a case study, are added in chapter 4.

Of course, all of this will change – certainly dramatically, perhaps well before this book is printed. At the same time, as the ongoing applicability of these ethical frameworks and the success of this book’s approach attest, in some ways it is also true that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they remain the same. Hence my cautious optimism and hope that, as a teaching framework and introduction, this edition will continue to assist students, instructors, and general readers in gaining an overview of central ethical issues occasioned by (post-)digital media – and enhance our ethical insights and abilities (most centrally, our capacity for phronēsis) in ways that will help us all come to better ethical grips with these unfolding challenges in our daily lives.

Notes

1 Roughly: the whole complex of our lives as meaning-making and relational beings, thoroughly informed by our co-evolving technologies (Verbeek 2017; cf. Coeckelbergh 2017). 2 To use Karl Jaspers’s concept, our existenz – as centering on experiences of frailty, suffering, and loss, including death ([Jaspers 1932] 1970: 185, cited in Lagerkvist and Anderson 2017: 554f.). We do all we can to avoid confronting these experiences (e.g., by “amusing ourselves to death” [Postman 1985]); but contemporary existential philosophers such as Amanda Lagerkvist show how our digitally mediated experiences of existenz are essential to our fully realizing our freedom to discern and/or create meaning for our existence (Lagerkvist 2018; cf. Vallor 2016b: 247). Cf. Ess (2018a, 2019).