A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication

✍ Scribed by O´Neill, Onoro

• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 157
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Communication is complicated, and so is the ethics of communication. We communicate about innumerable topics, to varied audiences, using a gamut of technologies. The ethics of communication, therefore, has to address a wide range of technical, ethical and epistemic requirements. In this book, Onora O'Neill shows how digital technologies have made communication more demanding: they can support communication with huge numbers of distant and dispersed recipients; they can amplify or suppress selected content; and they can target or ignore selected audiences. Often this is done anonymously, making it harder for readers and listeners, viewers and browsers, to assess which claims are true or false, reliable or misleading, flaky or fake. So how can we empower users to assess and evaluate digital communication, so that they can tell which standards it meets and which it flouts? That is the challenge which this book explores.

✦ Table of Contents

contents
Preface page xi
Part I Complex Communication 1
1 Presuppositions of Communication 3
Accessibility, Intelligibility and Assessability 3
Widening Accessibility: Spreading the Word 5
Some Limits of Digital Communication 8 The Wider Context 11
2 Acts and Content, Norms and Harms 15
Speech Acts and Speech Content 15
Norms or Harms? 17 Private Harms 19
Public Harms 21
Norms and Standards for Communicating 24
3 Communication and New Technologies 28
Norms and Practical Judgement 28
Ancient Norms for Communication 32
Socrates’ Warning 34
Readers, Listeners and Viewers 37 Traditional Intermediaries 41
4 Digital Hopes 44
The Promise of Connectivity 44
‘Breaking’ the Intermediaries 47
contents
Misgivings and Criticisms 51
Intermediaries and Democracy 53
Part II Norms and Standards in a Connected World 59
5 Duties and Rights 1: Freedom of Expression 61
Rights Before Duties: Historical Sketch 61
The Turn to Rights: Freedom of Expression 64
Communication or Expression? 67
Circumstances Alter Cases 68
Private and Public Harms 71
6 Duties and Rights 2: Rights to Privacy 75
Privacy Overview 75
The Point of Privacy 78
Data Protection and ‘Personal Information’ 80
Personal and Sensitive Information 82
Informed Consent and Personal Data 84
Privacy in Practice 86
Part III Politics and Connectivity 89
7 Power and Anonymity 91
A Turning Point? 91
A Profusion of Proposals 94
Accountable Communication and Anonymity 96
States and Corporations, Customers and Users 99
Anonymity and Privacy 104
Anonymity and Democracy 106
Intermediaries Again: Old and New 108
Platforms and Publishers 110
Limiting Anonymity, Extending Accountability 113
viii
contents
Notes 115
Some Suggestions for Further Reading 129
Index 132

✦ Subjects

Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication, empower users to assess and evaluate digital communication