Evaluating Information Technologies Against the Criteria of Autonomous Control and the Enhancement of Self Esteem as Integral Features of Collaborative Content Creation
Four Communications Rights
Now what I am going to say about the social versus the personal is controversial in some quarters but I think commands majority opinion in our society. Many creatures are able to recognise and extrapolate from patterns but the patterns which we discern and extrapolate from uniquely are linguistic. For the purposes of hunting or gathering, procreating or protecting ourselves, we may be social in a utilitarian way like a herd of elephants but our being as social creatures is wider than that. If we are not social we are nothing or, more accurately, if the vast majority of us were not social, a minority could not survive as contractors out. If we were all hermits society would collapse but a thriving society makes it possible for there to be hermits.
As I take being social as a defining characteristic of human creatures, I expect our legal and moral structures to have concern for activities of a social nature, condemning certain acts and encouraging others; and so, in almost every society, they do.
As an extension of this, I expect that the things people make relate to our social function. From the beginning of written history, for instance, governments have constructed transport systems. They have also, unfortunately, manufactured arms but we expect each of these products to be regulated in a certain way; we want safe roads and railways (in fact we want safer public transport than private transport) and we also want arms production and distribution to be controlled. We differ as to the extent in both cases but there is consensus about these products.
Now what kind of consensus is there about information systems?
There are, in essence, two kinds of communications regulation: the first kind relates to what we say in what circumstances, including such matters as lying, slander, attribution, incitement, to pick a few concepts at random. The second kind concerns control of communications and includes such entities as, the confidentiality of mail, the control of the telephone system, the regulation of broadcasting and in countries like the UK, rules about the concentration of media ownership.
Having mentioned these aspects of communications, I am not going to go on to advocate without question a heavy legal structure governing ICT systems but I want to underline that the reasons that all these laws exist is because of the value we place on the integrity and openness of our information systems and that this, in turn, rests on an ethical base.
Again, although this varies from culture to culture, I think we can safely make a number of generalisations about the ethics of communication to which we would adhere in a democratic, multi-cultural society:
- First, Communication - the expression and reception of data, information, knowledge, opinion, experience is a right and on occasion may be a duty
- Secondly, Reach - we have a right to define the reach of our expression and the expression that reaches us
- Thirdly, Access - we have a right to access expression which others have defined as public or have defined as being destined for us
- Fourthly, Mutuality - these three rights arise because of our nature as social beings with a right to mutuality.