digital media ethics

In 1985, Italo Calvino wrote a series of lectures (later published as ‘memos’) in which he proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Though never a writer of electronic literature, Calvino has frequently been associated or referenced in relation to digital works. J.R. Carpenter’s web-based work The Gathering Cloud (2016) (hereafter TGC) exhibits Calvino’s values. TGC is informed by Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. Howard’s ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’ are used in Carpenter’s web-based work. Poetry is then superimposed on these repurposed illustrations. Situated ‘within’ the poetry, animated gif collages play. Where Calvino in his memos writes that he considers the virtues of the binary opposites of his values (i.e., weight, lingering, ‘flame’ exactitude, ambiguity, singularity, and inconsistency) no less compelling, Carpenter’s work suggests that Calvino’s values (or rather the absence or removal of their binary opposites) are not only preferable in terms of contemporary literary challenges, but an ethical imperative in relation to environmental impact as it relates to contemporary media, dissemination, and indeed everyday life. In this analysis of TGC, Calvino’s values will be discussed in relation to each of the work’s six sections (i.e., the ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’).

Earlier this year, poet-scholar John Cayley proposed that scholars and makers of electronic literature attend to the “delivery media for ‘literature’ that are, historically, taking the place of physical, codex-bound books” (John Cayley, 2017, “Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature,” electronic book review). Among those emerging delivery media are so-called Virtual Digital Assistants (VDA) like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri. Capable of interpreting and producing human language, these domestic robots speak in pleasant female voices, offering access to information, music, social media, telephony, and other services. Their terms and conditions inform the consumer that once the device is activated, it records everything that is being said. The proliferation of VDA bears wide-reaching ethical and aesthetic ramifications that scholars in digital media should attend to.

On the one hand, “we are willingly installing and paying for the last mile of the infrastructure needed for the ultimate surveillance society” (Robert Dale, 2017, “Industry watch: The pros and cons of listening devices,” Natural Language Engineering 23.6, 973). On the other hand, “the arrival of speaking and, especially, listening networked programmable devices…has, I believe, important consequences for literature and for literary — linguistic aesthetic — practices of all kinds” (Cayley 2017). Cayley’s digital aural performance The Listeners (2016) offers a lens to examine the poetics and ethics of VDA. The Listeners is housed in an Amazon Echo, a smart speaker system controlled via the Artificial Intelligence Alexa. An instance of what Cayley has called ‘aurature’ (a composite of aurality and literature), The Listeners complicates our understanding of audio performance art, as text is delivered by a synthetic voice. By aesthetically engaging the slight – yet noticeable – robotic monotony of Alexa’s speech, The Listeners challenges audiences to think about the nature of transactive synthetic language and the meaning of human / AI subjectivity.

At the same time, as the title The Listeners suggests, Alexa’s ability to ‘hear’ is a key feature in Cayley’s piece. In installations of The Listeners, Alexa’s ‘recording’ feature is active, which means that all transactions between speakers and The Listeners are “sent to the artist's Alexa app and the alexa.amazon.com website” (Cayley 2016). Along with the piece’s title, the recording function of The Listeners hints at the forms of social control enabled by technologies like Alexa. Alexander Galloway uses the term “reverse Panopticon” for a society which is characterized by “a multiplicity, nay an infinity, of points of view flanking and flooding the world viewed” (Galloway, Alexander, 2014, Laruelle: Against the Digital. University of Minnesota Press, 68). Alexa records not only her owners’ transactions, but also sends what she hears from guests and visitors to the owners’ account, allowing consumers to spy on each other. Like online practices such as “following” or “stalking” others on social media, Alexa constitutes a prime example of surveillance in a reverse panoptic society. In aesthetically engaging these ‘hearing’ abilities via Alexa’s transactive synthetic language, The Listeners brings computer ethics into conversation with new media poetics, offering trajectories for scholarly inquire into the ethical and aesthetic implications of VDA technologies.

An overview of digital media ethics (DME), confronting the challenges evoked by digital media. Including privacy issues, research ethics, copyright concerns, violent content in computer-based games, global citizenship, pornography, journalism ethics, and robot ethics.

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Source: amazon.com