On the one hand, social scientists (among others) can thereby use smartphones as primary conduits into the lives of their informants and subjects of study – often on a massive scale. Such research – especially as enhanced through Big Data collection and AI-/algorithmic techniques of analysis – has dramatically expanded our insights into just about every facet of human behavior (for an overview, Ling 2017). On the other hand, carrying these devices renders us immediately vulnerable to governmental and corporate surveillance, various forms of governmental and private actors’ hacking (e.g., the phone hacking scandal in the UK – CNN 2018), parental efforts to track their children (Gabriels 2016), partners’ ability to track one another’s sexual activities and infidelities (Danaher, Nyholm, and Earp 2018), to engage in sexting as well as revenge porn, etc. In particular, as we will explore more fully below, when such surveillance is not voluntary, our online and offline lives risk becoming more and more like those in a medieval village in which “everybody knows everything about everybody.” As the phenomena of “trial by Internet” and cyberbullying make clear, our increasing inability to hide or get away from those who seek to do us harm in such a medieval village – including, worst case, a self-righteous mob inspired by unproven allegations, for example, of sexual assault – opens up a number of critical ethical (and political) concerns (Jensen 2007).
Moreover, our personal data are being collected in ever increasing amounts through the emerging “Internet of Things” (IoT) – e.g., in the name of so-called Smart Cities which promise greater energy efficiencies, better traffic flow, etc., through constant monitoring of individuals and our devices (including, for example, our cars, our electric meters, our smart assistants, and so on), coupled with a growing web of cameras and sensors embedded in the environment around us. It is not difficult to see that the IoT thereby presents still more threats to individual and group privacy (e.g., Rouvroy 2008; Bunz and Meikle 2018, 123–5) – especially as the IoT threatens to easily morph into a total surveillance system, as exemplified in the Chinese SCS.
Thirdly, fluid and interactive digital media enjoy a global scope, which leads to still more urgent ethical issues. Our communications can quickly and easily reach very large numbers of people around the globe: like it or not, our use of digital technologies thus makes us cosmopolitans (citizens of the world) in striking new ways. We are forced to take into account the various and often very diverse cultural perspectives on the ethical issues that emerge in our use of digital media. So I will stress throughout this book how the assumptions and ethical norms of different cultures shape specific ways of reflecting on such matters as privacy (chapter 2), copyright (chapter 3), pornography, sexbots, and violence (chapter 5).
Finally, our engagements with digital media have consequences for nothing less foundational than our most basic conceptions of selfhood and identity – of who we are as human beings. To be sure, questions such as “Who am I – really?” and “Who ought I to be?” are among the most abstract and difficult ones we can ask as human beings. Indeed, outside of an occasional philosophy class or, perhaps, a mid-life crisis, we may rarely raise such questions with the sort of sustained attention and informed reflection that they deserve and require. But there are strong theoretical and urgently practical reasons for taking up such questions here. To begin with, the Medium Theory developed by Harold Innis, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong (1988), and Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), and, more recently, Naomi Baron (2008) and Zsuzsanna Kondor (2009), demonstrates strong correlations between our diverse modalities of communication and our sense of selfhood. These correlations begin with the stage of orality and what is characterized as a relational sense of selfhood: such a self is made up of and thus dependent upon multiple relationships – beginning with the family (as child, sibling, cousin, etc.) and then the larger social relationships that define one. The emergence of literacy appears to correlate with more individual understandings of selfhood – so much so that Foucault has characterized writing as a “technology of the self” (1987, 1988). Emphases on individual aspects of identity further emerge in conjunction with the printing press and the expansion of literacy-print, initially via the Protestant Reformation, and then as underlying both much of modern ethical theory and political theories justifying democratic regimes. With the rise of the “secondary orality” of electric media – beginning with radio, movies, and TV and then extending into the age of networked digital media – there appears to be a shift in Western societies (back) toward more relational emphases of selfhood and identity (Ess 2010, 2012, 2017a). There are also important middle grounds here – namely, conceptions of the self as a relational autonomy that conjoin more individual emphases on freedom (autonomy) and the realities of our relationships with one another: relational autonomy is applied, for example, in recent critiques of so-called Quantified Relationship (QR) apps (Martens and Brown 2018).
It is a commonplace in philosophy that our sense of human nature and selfhood drives our primary ethical assumptions and frameworks. In particular, we will begin exploring more fully below how questions of identity immediately interact with our most basic assumptions regarding ethical agency and responsibility. We will further see in our ethical toolkit (chapter 6) that our emphases on either more individual or more relational aspects of selfhood and identity are definitive for (more individually oriented) utilitarian and deontological ethics, in contrast with (more relationally oriented) virtue and feminist ethics and the ethics shaped by Buddhist, Confucian, and African traditions, for example. Like it or not, while questions of identity are, again, among the most difficult we can raise and seek to resolve, our responses to those questions are crucial if we are to make coherent choices regarding the ethical frameworks we think best suited to help us analyze and resolve the ethical challenges evoked by digital media.
Lastly, our assumptions regarding identity and selfhood have immediate significance for how we begin to think about the nature of privacy – specifically, if what we feel and think we need to protect is a more individual and/or more shared or collective sense of privacy (chapter 2). Similar questions hold for our understandings of who should have – and should not have – access to our intellectual property: i.e., whether we hold to more traditional (meaning, more individual and exclusive) conceptions of property, so that we transfer rights to its use to others only in exchange for monetary or other sorts of considerations, or to more inclusive notions of property, e.g. as an inclusive good to be shared freely, as we routinely do when giving copies of our favorite music and films to friends, for example (chapter 3). By the same token, our underlying notions of selfhood and identity will prove critical to our analyses of the issues surrounding friendship, death online, and democracy (chapter 4) and those evoked by pornography and violence in digital environments, including sexbots (chapter 5).