The Heritage of WikiLeaks: A History of Information Ethics

ii

The Heritage of WikiLeaks: A History of Information Ethics

by

Jared Bielby

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts and Master of Library and Information Studies

Humanities Computing and Library and Information Studies University of Alberta

© Jared Bielby, 2014

iii

Abstract

From an already established praxis for the field of Information Ethics, the following thesis will

outline an ethics and a historical foundation for WikiLeaks through the exposition of a four-part

history of Information Ethics. It will first trace the historical development of the field of

Information Ethics and secondly sketch the development of a theoretical foundation for

collaborative information and knowledge studies as exemplified by the wiki phenomenon, a

model, as will be argued, that arises from library ethics. Situating the foundation of WikiLeaks

within the framework of the wiki model, it will address issues of privacy, intellectual freedom

and social responsibility, access to information, information literacy, anonymity, transparency

and intellectual property as being similarly foundational to wiki studies, library ethics, and

WikiLeaks, and will conceive WikiLeaks as inevitably arising from the same historical

dialectics as Library Ethics. The wiki collaborative knowledge model will then be addressed

from a platform of information theory and philosophical ontology, ultimately looking at the

wider philosophical consequences of the saturation of information, information control and

flow, message and messenger and information as moral entity, surveying the ontology debates

between Rafael Capurro and Luciano Floridi, and exploring the implications of information

accountability as commentated on by Slavoj Žižek and others.

iv

Acknowledgments:

I would like to acknowledge my supervisors, Dr. Toni Samek and Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell for

their invaluable guidance through out the writing of the following discourse, Dr. Samek for first

introducing me to the field of Information Ethics and for her matchless encouragement

thereafter and Dr. Rockwell for helping me expand my understanding of Information Ethics

into the realm of Digital Humanities. I would also like to thank both Dr. Rafael Capurro and

my colleague Christine Belley for months of inspired conversation, correction and irreplaceable

philosophical insight into the task at hand. Lastly, but far from least, I’d like to acknowledge

the support, patience and perseverance of my wife, Janeen Bielby, for without whom my

project fails.

v

Table of Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iii

Acknowledgments: ........................................................................................................ iv

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... v

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1: Information Ethics – Origins And Evolutions .................................................. 4 Overview ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4 Praxis ................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Origins .............................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Library Ethics ................................................................................................................................................................ 18 Evolutions ....................................................................................................................................................................... 23 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Towards a Unified Taxonomy ...................................................................... 30 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 30 Philosophy and Taxonomy ...................................................................................................................................... 32 Information In Formation ....................................................................................................................................... 38 Branches ......................................................................................................................................................................... 41 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Concerning Intercultural Information Ethics ................................................. 54 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 54 Roots ................................................................................................................................................................................. 55 Ethics, ICTs, and IIE .................................................................................................................................................... 59 Privacy and IIE ............................................................................................................................................................. 63 Information Pathologies .......................................................................................................................................... 67 Applications ................................................................................................................................................................... 71 Pluralism ......................................................................................................................................................................... 75 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 4: The Heritage of WikiLeaks ........................................................................... 79 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................................... 79 WikiLeaks and Ethics ................................................................................................................................................ 80 WikiLeaks and Information Ethics ...................................................................................................................... 86 Collaborative Information, Knowledge and Monopoly .............................................................................. 91 Information Entropy .................................................................................................................................................. 93 Libraries and Library Ethics ................................................................................................................................. 100 Information Literacy ................................................................................................................................................ 104 Accountability ............................................................................................................................................................. 110 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................... 118 Bibliography: .............................................................................................................. 121

Other Works Referenced: ........................................................................................... 127

1

Introduction

What is the ethical role of an organization like WikiLeaks? The original mission of

WikiLeaks was to throw open the shutters of information monopoly and secrecy, allowing free

flow of information into the public sphere. Upon initial consideration, WikiLeaks and its

founders seem to have taken a high moral ground, establishing their mission and subsequent

actions in critically assessed mores. However the question remains, even today, whether or not

WikiLeaks accounts for an ethics within its mission parameters. Since its inception in 2006,

WikiLeaks has been used as a vehicle for the unmonitored and unedited release into the public

sphere of numerous documents containing the most sensitive and privately held information in

the world. For four years WikiLeaks would serve as an open and anonymous portal of

publication modeled after the wiki concept, encouraging original source material news while

protecting the identities of the individuals submitting confidential information through it. While

WikiLeaks has since reverted to a traditional publication model whereby submissions are edited

and controlled, it continues to release numerous private and classified documents into the

public sphere yearly.

The following thesis will outline, through a four-part history of the field of

Information Ethics (IE), a means for exploring the phenomenon of WikiLeaks from a

theoretical perspective towards a praxis of applied ethics, establishing an ethics for WikiLeaks

by means of its formation amid cultural dialectics arising from specific roots in Information

Ethics, and will conceive WikiLeaks as inevitably arising from the same historical dialectics as

2

Library Ethics. Upon establishing its origins in Information Ethics, it will address WikiLeaks

within the current state of IE as an evolving and intercultural meta-discipline with an emphasis

placed on the ethical and philosophical implications of information and information theory in

contemporary information culture.

In order to gage the current practical and philosophical implications of determining an

ethics for WikiLeaks, the following thesis will first establish and define ethics under the rubric

of collaborative information and knowledge ethics as exemplified by an ethics for the wiki

phenomenon, where “content is created without any defined owner or leader…(where) wikis

have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users”

(Wikipedia, 2014). Secondly, it will be shown that collaborative knowledge sharing is not a

new phenomenon unique to a digital era, but is merely one piece in the ever shifting flow of the

life of information, as established by the history of information. Lastly, it will demonstrate,

using WikiLeaks and its shifting publication model as paradigm, that all information, however

originally collaboratively formed, is eventually monopolized and commodified through

controlling power structures. Placing WikiLeaks in its historical context, the following thesis

will outline how contemporary information culture, having only just recently shifted from a

model of monopolized information flow to collaborative information flow, is set already to

return, perhaps prematurely, to a state of information monopoly and control.

Thus, by means of exploration of the ontology debates between Capurro and his

working out of message and messenger (via the communication theories of Shannon and

McLuhan) and Floridi and his work on an information ecology, and explored alongside

applications of whistle-blowing and WikiLeaks, as debated by Žižek and other commentators,

the purpose of the following thesis is threefold. Firstly, it will review the current state of IE as

3

an evolving ‘meta-discipline’ (defined below), and will draw a history of the field, including

the establishment of an Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), of which will be outlined in

chapter three. Secondly, it will outline a foundation for collaborative information and

knowledge studies and will assign the study of WikiLeaks a part in the evolving taxonomy of

Information Ethics under the rubric of Collaborative Knowledge Ethics. Lastly, it will address

WikiLeaks within the parameters of information theory, via the history and philosophy of

information, where the ethics of information concern more than just privacy and access to

information, but also an ontological accountability to the state of information itself.

4

Chapter 1: Information Ethics – Origins And Evolutions

Overview

Information Ethics (IE) was born under the somewhat humble and yet privileged

tutelage of librarianship. It can be traced back to key figures expressing ethical concerns in

university-taught library courses. It was fostered and raised by individuals passionate and

insightful in the exploration of their field, individuals who in many ways were ahead of their

time, librarians whose groundbreaking work now bears the mark of a global legacy. Tracing the

evolution of the field back to its roots proves a fascinating endeavor, one revealing a tale not so

much of a burgeoning discipline, nor of a cross- or post-discipline phenomenon, but rather a

human tale of personal encounters with an informational world, a dialectic between thought and

conversation spurred into existence by individuals whose intricate journeys of concern for the

daily tasks of librarianship beg a grander philosophy, an authentic approach to understanding

the age old connection between humanity and information. Chapter one will follow the original

scholars of the field, their contributions, and the implications of their work towards a future

outlook of IE. It will trace the origins of Information Ethics from its humble beginnings in

Library and Information Studies and Cybernetics, through its ever-evolving history, and

ultimately explore its current philosophical processes.

While traditional librarianship, introducing the field of Information Ethics in the late

1980’s and early 1990’s, tended to focus on issues of privacy, censorship, access to

information, intellectual freedom and social responsibility, copyright, fair use, and collection

development; Computer Ethics, and thus Cyberethics (while including many of the above

5

concerns), placed a focus on ethical issues pertaining to software reliability and honesty,

artificial intelligence, computer crime, and e-commerce (Froehlich, 2004). Journalism and

Media Ethics, having now also adopted the language of ‘Information Ethics’, concerns itself

with issues as diverse as conflicts of interests, fairness, and economic pressure (Smith, 2001).

Bioinformation ethics explores issues of information pertaining to technologies in the field of

biology and medicine where the traditional concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ

donation, euthanasia, and cloning form the basis, where questions are posed regarding rights to

biological identity, the use of DNA and fingerprints, and equal rights to insurance and bank

loans based on genetics (Hongladarom, 2006). Business Information Ethics is the convergence

of two separate fields of applied ethics, those being Information Ethics and Business Ethics,

that addresses concerns of the provision of goods and services, how those goods and services

are provided, and what impact they have (Floridi, 2009).

Thus, traditionally demarcated through the above taxonomy, the field of IE has become

a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the

philosophy of information. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to define.

Praxis

A history of the field would be incomplete without first at least a periphery review of

the praxis of IE, being the concerns and processes of the field. And while the directions of IE in

their various incarnations are for the most part related, critical subtleties do exist. An

understanding of the various strains of IE will lay the foundation for understanding its history

6

and evolution. A quick overview of the field reveals a number of foundational pillars along

with their applications.

While on one hand, Information Ethics can be viewed as spanning and evolving into

and through several separate ethical disciplines, it can be noted that many of those supposedly

separate disciplines are merely re-envisioned approaches to the evolution of information itself,

and are collectively covered under the rubric of Information Ethics. A pertinent example of this

is the adoption of IE into the field of Computer Science, a synthesis that forms Computer

Ethics. Computer Ethics in turn, synthesizing with the expanding concerns of ethics and the

Internet as well as implications towards artificial intelligence, has synthesized into Cyberethics.

Thus while Cyberethics would claim to stand as a field of concern in its own right, the claim

can be made that Cyberethics has simply replaced Computer Ethics to compensate for evolving

technology, means and implications (Sullivan, 1996).1

Drawing a history of the taxonomy of the field concerns itself also with what can be

deemed the scions of Information Ethics versus adopted disciplines within Information Ethics.

Adopted satellite fields traditionally include the above noted fields of Business, Media and

Journalism Ethics, areas of information dissemination dealing with aspects of the ethics of

information that don’t necessarily pay homage to Librarianship, the esteemed grandparent of

the field, but that have been grafted into the ‘family’, so to speak, through converging ideals.

While one can argue that computer ethics arises out of library ethics, since the traditional

concerns of library ethics evolved alongside the use of computer technology in libraries,

computer ethics also originally arose independently out of computer and IT related disciplines.

1 While a thorough review of the history of Computer Ethics would at this juncture offer great

7

The implications of such subtleties consist of more than mere semantics, and are addressed

below.

The above synopsis quickly outlines what might be considered the traditional spectrum

of, at least, the applied ethics of the field, and doesn’t include the more theoretical branches of

Information Ethics. One quickly becomes aware looking into the breadth of the field, however,

that as far as even the applied ethics spectrum goes, the above outlines only, as stated, a kind of

traditional overview of the field in its original formation. One could argue, and many do, that

numerous other facets form, evolve from, and fall within the parameters of the field. As

Elizabeth Buchanan asks: “Where is the discipline of information ethics? It is increasingly

diffused. It is, simultaneously more important than ever” (Buchanan, 2011).

While Information Ethics now crosses paths with every conceivable discipline, an

argument for interdisciplinary and meta-disciplinary foundations that will take shape

throughout the below treatment of the field, the concern of the present history of Information

Ethics as a discipline will focus on specific developments within its applied and theoretical

aspects, those of which can be captured under the umbrella of the specific discipline of

Information Ethics itself. However, the reader should note that the below discourse will not

exhaustively cover all developments arising from and through Information Ethics.

Accordingly, an overview begins by exploring the founders of the field and their

contributions to it, starting in the 1940s with Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics (Wiener,

1948). It looks towards the work of Robert Hauptman and his reflections on confidentiality and

bias of information in a founding article by Kostrewski and Oppenheim as an origin for the

field (Hauptman, 1988). Thus the field is established by Hauptman, who along with Martha

Smith and Rafael Capurro, first bring the concerns of Wiener’s cybernetics to light in the

8

1980’s with the formation of the field’s founding literature. As outlined below, upon such

foundations, the field has since evolved rapidly into several disciplines, referred to by Froehlich

as a multi-threaded phenomenon, and encompasses, among other disciples, the multi-faceted

scope of the Internet, computer science, management information systems, media, journalism,

business, and more (Froehlich, 2004). On the side of activism, Information Ethics includes,

according to Toni Samek, concerns of intercultural relations, liberty and law (Samek, 2010).

Relevant in its own right, as also advocated by Samek, are the concerns of Information

Ethics and education, regarding both the education venture itself, but also the specific

relevance of IE within the University. The first courses taught in Information Ethics were

offered at the University of Pittsburgh, soon to be followed by Kent State University, both

Universities eventually offering Master’s level degrees in Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004).

However, as early as 1990, Information Ethics was being taught in South Africa at the

University of Pretoria (Buchanan, 2009). Soon after the pursuit of Information Ethics became a

legitimized venture, according to Froehlich, Information Ethics was taken on by faculties in

Computer Science, the second major contributor to the field following Library and Information

Studies, and a number of critical and seminal publications from the side of Comp-Sci soon

formed a foundation for Information Ethics literature under the rubric of ‘Computer and

Information Science’, including major texts by Richard Severson’s The Principles of

Information Ethics (Severson, 1997), Marsha Cook Woodbury’s Computer and Information

Ethics, (Woodbury, 2003), and Deborah G. Johnson’s Computer Ethics (Johnson, 1985).

The definition of Information Ethics remains in flux, the field itself referred to by Smith

as a life-world in process, a “socially constructed reality” (Smith, 2001). The implications for

an inclusive definition of Information Ethics are many, venturing into the realms of

9

philosophical dialectics, metaphysics and hermeneutics, a fact recognized early on by Smith,

Floridi, and Capurro, key pioneers of the field. As Smith notes even in the field’s infancy, the

philosophical implications are as vast as are the implications of a society facing an unchecked

technological revolution. Her concern, even then, was that society will not be prepared “to deal

with the social, economic, and moral challenges that technological changes present” and that

“the human spirit may be exhausted by the information overload and the intrusions of a wired

society with technologies uncritically employed” (Smith, 2001).

Praxis aside, the nature and phenomenon collectively called Information Ethics must be

addressed philosophically and theoretically in order to understand the sudden and widely

established recognition of the need for such an endeavor. The necessity for an Information

Ethics at a basic level is quite simple, and is a recognized and growing concern across an

information society. The fact is this: the nature and use of information through viral

technologies and our interaction with it, now commonly referred to in the field as Information

and Communication Technologies, or ICT’s, is on the cusp of outgrowing the ability of its

users to understand and control it.

Such a phenomenon looks to the viral and exponentially intricate nature of information

exposed, the breach of ontological walls that previously separated one human being from

another, of the quickly disappearing choice of privacy, and perhaps individualism, and the

audacious question of whether privacy and individualism should even exist. Information Ethics

asks questions that previously had no need to be posed, such as, “Is privacy a human right?”

but does not assume an answer, rather instead exploring the socially constructed world created

through and by information exposure. Information Ethics questions not only the concerns of

ethical interactions with information, personal or otherwise, but also the nature of ‘self’

10

(Capurro, 2005) and information entity (Floridi, 1999), of self as information entity, responding

to, and existing among, other information entities.

Critical to the above ontological premise is a far reaching debate that posits philosopher

Rafael Capurro’s “self”, envisioned through Heideggerian hermeneutical ontology, against

Luciano Floridi’s metaphysical “information entity” within the infosphere (Floridi, 2001). The

two are not synonymous ontologies. It is against such a daunting and far-reaching spectrum of

ideologies that information scientists and information philosophers struggle to even establish

praxis. One place to begin, as with many things, is at a place of origins.

Origins

Inquiring into the foundation to Information Ethics takes us back several decades to the

1940s to Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics, who in 1948 published his groundbreaking

book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. We begin

for the purposes of the following history with the work of Robert Hauptman, the most common

starting point with regard to a narration of the field of IE. A primary text, Ethical Challenges in

Librarianship, written by Robert Hauptman, is often cited as the first written account of the

field, introducing ethical concerns for information (Hauptman, 1988). According to Martha

Smith, who with Hauptman is a pioneer of the field, Hauptman was the first to use the term

‘information ethics’ in his work (Smith, 2001), though further exploration reveals an earlier use

of the term by Capurro, as outlined below.

Hauptman’s concern at the time was for ethics as they pertained to librarianship, but

according to Froehlich, who has written on the history of Information Ethics, there was no

11

focused attention given to Information Ethics as a field in its own right at the time that

Hauptman began including the subject matter in his teaching (Froehlich, 2004). Hauptman,

after his original publication on Information Ethics, would once again bring up his concerns a

couple years later in Ethical Concerns in Librarianship: An Overview, where he incredulously

notes the lack of concern for an information ethics, as ironically immortalized in his overview

of the situation, where he states that, “As an MLS candidate, I was surprised by this lack of

interest in ethical concerns, and so I devised what is now a rather infamous experiment”

(Hauptman, 1990). 2

One of the pillars of Hauptman’s legacy is his creation of the Journal of Information

Ethics in 1992, where his above concern takes form in what has become the founding journal

for the field. Thus while a basis of literature was established early on, it wasn’t until later when

specific courses in Universities were introduced to address Information Ethics as an integral

component of librarianship, as outlined above, that the concerns began to spill over into other

information disciplines including Information Technology.

The first true venture into the then unknown realm of Information Ethics reaches further

back than even Hauptman where we find references made to issues of confidentiality and bias

2 As is widely exemplified among entry-level students coming into the field of

Librarianship, Hauptman’s infamous experiment involved pitting professional ethics against social ethics, and for the first time exposing the dichotomy of intellectual freedom and social responsibility. The experiment saw Hauptman query a number of librarians on requirements for constructing small explosive devices capable of blowing up a suburban home. Not a single librarian refused to help him based on personal objections and ethics, but instead held steadfast to established ethics in librarianship, attempting to provide him the information he needed. It was in reflection of this experiment, as Hauptman notes, that there was an exponential rise in publications concerning ethics in Librarianship (Hauptman, 1990). Much of the controversy among library and information ethicists surrounding Hauptman’s ‘infamous experiment’ concerned not the irresponsible actions of the librarians involved but rather the perceived incredulity of Hauptman that they would do otherwise. While Hauptman, even today, holds closer to the ideal of social responsibility than to an unchecked acceptance of the right to access to information, many information ethicists and librarians hold steadfast to the ideals of intellectual freedom, despite the cost.

12

of information in an article entitled Ethics In Information Science, written by Barbara J.

Kostrewski and Charles Oppenheim. The article outlines concerns over the quality and bias of

information provided by vendors to clients and customers. In the article, the authors are aware

of the burgeoning requirement for an information ethics, as simply stated, “There is a need for a

code of ethics for information scientists, and information scientists need to be far more aware

of ethical questions.” (Kostrewski and Oppenheim, 1980). Ahead of their time, the authors are

perhaps the first to advocate for an ethics in information. One wonders to what extent these

authors could have possibly known that their humble concerns would one day become a

leading, globally infused, worldview, one which would shake and then redefine the very

foundations of philosophy itself.

As noted above, Hauptman was not the first to combine the implications of ethics in

information into the single term Information Ethics. A further review of the founding literature

in the field reveals the use of the term, hidden away in an early article written by Rafael

Capurro. Capurro first uses the term, in German, while referencing the Kostrewski/Oppenheim

article noted above. It was Capurro, as far as can be determined, who was the first to introduce

the term "Informationsethik" (“Information Ethics”) into the literature in his Zur Frage Der

Ethik in Fachinformation Und –Kommunication in 1981, stating, “Man kann die Frage nach

einer Informationsethik im Bezug auf Forschung, Lehre und Praxis stellen, wie Kostrewski und

Oppenheim es in ihrem Übersichtsartikel ‘Ethics in information science’ gemacht haben.” (One

can raise the question of an information ethics in terms of research, teaching and practice, as

Kostrewski and Oppenheim have made it in their review article "Ethics in information

science") (Capurro, 1981).

13

Martha Smith, a true pioneer of the field, is in many ways the founder of Information

Ethics. Of her numerous works, her original Information Ethics stands as the most thorough

review of the evolution of Information Ethics from it’s origins up until the article’s publication

in the mid 1990’s (Smith, 1997). Smith reviews the realm of Information Ethics and its growth

through the 1990’s in another paper written a few years later by the same title where she notes

the crux of the concern for an “Information Ethics” as the discrepancy between the rapid

increase in technological communications and the uncritical acceptance of such innovations by

professionals and laypeople alike.

Smith first started exploring Information Ethics in the late 1980s. In trying to develop a

model to visualize her theory, she looked to the newly established field of computer ethics for a

point of comparison. While computer ethics encapsulated the direction and the idea that she

had in mind for Information Ethics, she knew that her vision entailed more. As she states in

looking back on her career, “The scope I had in mind was larger and included not only what

was then called “information” but also the world of knowledge including the philosophy of

knowledge” (Smith, 2011). It was in light of reviewing the philosophy of knowledge that she

first discovered the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science. From here she

went on to develop her initial model of “five working categories”: Access, Ownership, Privacy,

Security, and Community, the first theoretical model for an applied ethics for the field.

In her article, The Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and

Meaning, Smith reflects back on her career and experience in the context of offering insight

from the early years of the field towards those who would take up the torch. While insightful

beyond her time, Smith did not have a smooth career. By the very nature of groundbreaking, of

pioneering, she encountered resistance at every turn. Her colleagues often reacted with fear,

14

disinterest and resistance to her ideas and she soon learned to balance deliberation with silence

when necessary. Through her career, Smith would be passed on for tenure in several

appointments. She would be accused of teaching “Sunday School”. Her original vision was so

poorly received that her detractors were not even able to objectively and properly qualify her

work. Thus she had to fight to even use the term “Information Ethics” when even her

supporters insisted she use the term “Library Ethics” instead. Based on her reflections, it is

perhaps both disheartening and encouraging to conclude that in order to do what she needed to

do she had also to sacrifice much of what she wanted to do (Smith, 2011). Her sacrifice is both

exemplary and affirming of the philosophical standards and ideals underlying the very

foundations of Information Ethics and of freedom itself. These same ideals, as explored

throughout this thesis, will take the reader from the foundation of library ethics in modern

librarianship back through thought and time to ancient Greece where Information Ethics finds

its earliest origins in the agora of Athenian democracy through parrhesia, an idea of freedom of

speech that posits the authenticity of ethics in the vulnerability of the speaker.

Perhaps to the new initiate stumbling into the current evolution of Information Ethics,

one might assume that the entire phenomenon is constructed and directed entirely by Floridi

and Capurro, two key players whose thought seem to dominate the field, and whose works

consistently play off of, critique and reference the other. There is no better example of the

intricacy and complexity of the field than as demonstrated by the interchange between these

two Information Scientists / Philosophers, and the numerous papers written in response to their

understanding of Information Ethics through terms of hermeneutics and the metaphysical.

Where Capurro introduces angeletics to the field (the study of messengers and messages), and

15

works within the philosophical considerations of a hermeneutical approach, Floridi works

within his post-analytic philosophical framework of information ecology and infosphere.

In order to accurately assess a history or evolution of Information Ethics, one must first

comprehend the foundations of information itself, which was the initial task of Capurro as far

back as 1978 with his doctoral dissertation on the Concept of Information. In his formative

work, Capurro explores the evolution of our understanding of information, from the early

Greco-Roman idea of eidos and morphé to Aquinas’ medieval informatio to the eventual

undoing of such objective concepts of information (information as giving form to something)

towards a modern communicative theory of information (Capurro, 1978/2009). As such,

Capurro’s doctoral and post-doctoral work in the late seventies and early eighties paved the

way for an anthropological foundation for Information Ethics through the application of his

Hermeneutik of information science.

Now a leader in the field, Capurro first revealed his hermeneutical approach en masse in

a series of lectures in Sweden in 1985. Following those original lectures, Capurro brought

together the ideas from the lectures and from his post-doctoral thesis into his Informationethos

und Informationsethik, where he sums up his hermeneutical approach, stating that “The

information habits of a group or society ("information ethos") and the critical appraisal of

moral norms in this field ("information ethics") are the key concepts of these reflections.”

(Capurro, 1988). The conclusions of Capurro’s Hermeneutik define the field in many ways, as

reflected under the “Foundations” page of the International Center for Information Ethics,

where this hermeneutical epistemological framework for the field is reflected in the

differentiation between morals, ethics and law, where morals are customs and traditions, ethics

the critical reflection on those morals, with law encapsulating the legal formalization of ethics

16

as norms, a differentiation that has been explored extensively throughout the history of ethics,

beginning with the Greek philosophers (ICIE, 2014).

Of all Capurro’s contributions to the field, his paramount contribution is in his concept

of angeletics, one of the more significant evolutions of the field, being a theory of messages

and messengers that while complimentary to his original Hermeneutik, presupposes

hermeneutics. Where hermeneutics deals in matters of interpretation, angeletics expands on the

communication theory of Shannon and McLuhan, expounding the precedence and import of

message before interpretation. As Capurro explains it:

“The question, 'what is a message?' opens a new perspective not only with regard to media studies but also to the study of signs and their interpretation. Angeletics is a research field at the crossroad of media studies, semiotics, and hermeneutics. Each interpretation presupposes a process of message transmission. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, not just an interpreter of these messages. The message-bearing nature of communication is what angeletics aims to analyse. But any process of message transmission presupposes indeed a hermeneutic situation in which sender and receiver have some common basis of understanding. In other words, angeletics operates with the sender/receiver difference based on the belief that understanding or, more generally, that a selection process between two systems is possible. Hermeneutics operates with the difference between pre-understanding and interpretation based on the belief that what is object of the process of interpretation has been successfully transmitted, i.e., offered to the receiver as an object of selection. Semiotics is concerned with the whole process by which a sign, what it intends to signify and what the interpreter is supposed to select are viewed as a dynamic, self-organising structure.”

Somewhat later to enter the field than Capurro, but just as influential in his efforts at

redefining information as a foundation to the field, especially as it pertains to one of its more

significant evolutions or reiteration of information itself, the Philosophy of Information, is

Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford.

Floridi finds his entry into Information Ethics through his search for a new methodology to the

17

problem of the foundation of the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology). In his formative

book, Scepticism And the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies,

Floridi approaches epistemology from a metatheoretical perspective, asking whether an

epistemology is even possible that does not negate itself through logical fallacies. This

methodology is Floridi’s answer to what he deems the failure of analytic philosophy. Regarding

his venture he muses, “I have wandered from the history of ideas to information technology,

from formal logic to the social sciences" (Floridi, 1996). Out of this pursuit, Floridi explored

Popper’s objective knowledge, knowledge not dependent on a subject, which Floridi calls

semantic information, the beginnings of what would later form the basis to his constructionist

philosophy, the philosophy of information (Floridi, 2005).

In his Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics, Floridi

solidifies his approach by terms of information entity and information entropy. According to

Floridi, at a foundational level all things constitute an information entity and all information

entities are deserving of and accountable to moral entitlement. In an informational interplay

within what Floridi terms the Infosphere, each act either contributes to or detracts from the

inclusive “good”, as represented in terms of information entropy. It is from this position that

Floridi’s methodology manifests as an environmental ethics, and whereby Floridi’s concept of

Infosphere arises. Floridi comprehends the task of ethics as a recognition and regulation of

information processes, a recognition in which he regrets as being overlooked and looked down

upon by traditional philosophers, an ailment resulting from, as it were, the interdisciplinary

nature of computer and information ethics, exemplified by Floridi as “everybody’s business,

but nobody’s concern” (Floridi, 1999).

18

Library Ethics

While the above history outlines the parameters of Information Ethics as a distinct

discipline, the field finds its primordial roots in library ethics whose concerns far predate the

inception of Information Ethics, finding their own official origins, at least in the professional

sense, in 19th-century librarianship, and their unofficial origins (the crux of the following

thesis) in a tradition of library ethics that stretches back to ancient Greece.

While the inception of library ethics into an official code was first laid down in 1930,

the consideration of ethics by the American Library Association (ALA) dates back to 1892

where a utilitarian motto was adopted to represent the charge of the ALA, characterized as

“The best reading for the greatest number at the least cost” (Preer, 2008). That basic utilitarian

philosophy remains in place to date, though it has been modified over the years to

accommodate changing interpretations of its language. Even so, and criticized by David

Woolwine for its absolutist language, the Bill of Right’s mandate still suggests an allegiance to

strict utilitarianism, a dangerous scenario that opens the door to the very abuses it so fervently

tries to negate. Namely, and especially in our contemporary age of government surveillance

and national security, a utilitarian creed of the greatest good for the greatest number becomes a

gateway to authorities controlling information, invading privacy and restricting access, all

based on “the greatest good” of national security. Woolwine posits that a new philosophy is

needed that revamps or replaces the Bill of Rights with a creed more in line with postmodernist

idealism (Woolwine, 2007).

19

Tying Information Ethics to its origins in Library Ethics is the shared foundational

philosophy of the interplay between intellectual freedom and social responsibility. As

Hauptman posits, “Ethical dilemmas arise when two positive necessary dicta conflict with each

other. In librarianship this may occur when the demand for information clashes with an

iconoclastic advocacy of individual decision making, the human necessity to bear

responsibility, to be accountable for one’s actions” (Hauptman, 1990). This interplay could not

be better demonstrated than between the polarization of Hauptman’s views and the otherwise

prevailing views of most intellectual freedom advocates. While Hauptman places personal

ethics (which he equates with societal or ‘common sense’ ethics) before professional ethics, the

general trend in Library Ethics, perhaps more so than any other discipline of applied ethics, is

to hold steadfast to a professional code of ethics before and if necessary, against, one’s own

ethics and personal beliefs. As Preer captures in her Library Ethics, “An ethical mandate to

separate personal beliefs from professional responsibilities is inherent in providing the highest

level of service and the freest access to information” (Preer, 2008, p. 134).

Despite to which bearing one favors in the above gradation of ethics, it is of paramount

importance for the information ethicist to observe Hauptman’s original essay, Ethical Concerns

in Librarianship, namely for the stage it sets for the foundation to the field of Information

Ethics, some of those foundations whose applicability is even now only truly coming to light in

a post-WikiLeaks culture of government surveillance. It should be somewhat humbling to see

Hauptman predict the dialectical directions of an information-based society and a need for

information ethics decades before its current culmination in the WikiLeaks controversies. In the

above noted essay Hauptman somewhat uncannily envisages the WikiLeaks phenomenon in his

exploration of the dichotomy of the ethical spectrum, concluding that, “one’s personal or social

20

ethic should supersede the ethic that journalists have created for themselves”, whereby “Their

ends (discovering information) do not justify the means (acting in an uncivilized or illegal

manner)” (Hauptman, 1990). Hauptman remains true to his original take on the matter, judging

the activities of WikiLeaks an “abomination” and explicitly asserting that, “offering the world a

treasure trove of unvetted proscribed documents embarrasses, harms, and kills” (Hauptman,

2011).

It is no coincidence, as will be outlined in further chapters, that the field of Information

Ethics has seemingly come full circle in the WikiLeaks phenomenon. It will be argued,

however, that the concerns of the field have not come full circle, per se. Nor is it simply a

matter of history repeating itself. Despite certain schools of thought that would argue against

the uniqueness of the problems now faced by our contemporary information culture, the

increased exposure to information is a distinctive experience. Rather than coming full circle,

WikiLeaks is symbolic of the culmination of factors leading to an imminent singularity in

human / information relations. WikiLeaks, the pivotal factor in the present project, is both a

phenomenon and a symbol of fulfillment and dialectical inevitability, encapsulating not only

the tradition of library and information ethics in their entirety, but also the contemporary

dialectical expression of an information-based culture.

While the American Library Association (ALA) and the Canadian Library Association

(CLA) mandate strict ethical codes for library and information professionals, unlike law, where

one can be disbarred for not adhering to, there is no legal requirement for librarians or

information ethicists to follow such codes, nor normally are there prescribed professional

consequences for not doing so. To complicate the situation, the applied ethics of information in

any given scenario, even when applied according to the same set of professional codes using

21

the same mandates, becomes muddied depending on what side of any particular issue one is

standing on. As Hauptman states, “The problem is that correct action is apparently variable

depending on one’s allegiance” (Hauptman, 2009). While such an aphorism is likely true for

ethics in any field, it not only becomes overtly obvious in library and information ethics, but

also in many ways defines library and information ethics at a foundational level.

A look towards the early makings of library professionalism points to an intimate

meeting that took place in Philadelphia in 1876 when the first members of the American

Library Association initially met to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a professional

organization for librarians, founding librarianship as an established profession that in time

would allow for a formal statement of fundamental and centralized ethics. As noted by Preer,

the establishment of the ethical values of Librarianship took shape in real world practice during

that time and as influenced within the cultural horizons of the industrial age and mass

urbanization, cumulating with the ALA’s first professional code of ethics in 1938 (Preer, 2008).

It is thus within the above dynamics that history establishes a common base for both

Library Ethics and Information Ethics, addressing the intricate relationship between the spread

of common knowledge and the drive towards eradicating exclusivist monopolies on

information and access to it. From the early American experience of libraries and increased

public access to information, a professional ethical foundation was sought and established

under similar parameters as those currently at play within the dynamics of the contemporary

digital age. In establishing a history for Information Ethics and ultimately an ethics for a

collaborative knowledge based epistemology as demanded by phenomena such as WikiLeaks,

and WikiLeaks representing a phenomenon, it is thus towards the industrial age and even

further that one must look. In many ways, our current digital society with its void of ethics and

22

questions concerning said void as revealed through matters of technology and information

control is the culmination of what began in the industrial revolution with the onset of mass

production, including the increased distribution of printed information (and this, of course, an

evolution of a post-Gutenberg world). However, as will be outlined below, the foundations of

library ethics, as we understand them today, far predate even Gutenberg, the industrial

revolution and 19th-century professionalism.

While addressing what has been established as Library Ethics under the ALA and

other institutions, one must, in seeking to unearth the origins needed to navigate the entirety of

the evolutions of the field, apply to one’s search an ‘archeology of ideas’ or a historical

geology3 taking the exposition further back and further inward in order to understand the

dynamics involved in the formation of Information Ethics, and thus collaborative knowledge,

including the phenomenon of the wiki and finally WikiLeaks itself. While such an exposition

looks first to the 19th century, it retreats further to ideas of freedom and access as fortified

through the events of the French Revolution, and then further still towards matters of

censorship as exemplified by the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the 16th century.

Further still, slowly threading its way back through history, the traces of library ethics find their

place also in mediaeval Islam in which many ways the modern library most accurately

emulates, the Islamic libraries lending out books for loan periods of one day at a time, and

finally, at least for the purposes of this overview, library ethics turn to ancient Greece itself, to

the very origins of western thought, looking towards ideas of freedom of speech in the Greek

concept of parrhesia, and to Plato's criticism of writing and the implications thereof.

3 Rafael Capurro, in conversation, October 28, 2013.

23

While the numerous advocates for library ethics and the tales of their struggles paint a

fascinating, enlightening and colorful history, the details of such cannot fully be illuminated in

the current treatment. The reader is however here directed to Fred Lerner’s the Story of

Libraries for a complete education. The critical point to take from the above is an awareness of

the cultural dialectics, the rise and fall, the waxing and waning of the interplay between

humanity and an informational world that now predicates a digital informational culture as

portended in the concerns of Information Ethics. As noted above, the events and concerns of

the digital age are not new; they are however cumulative in the fulfillment of the historical

conflicts between intellectual freedom and information monopoly, a dichotomy whereby a

detailed analysis of the wiki phenomenon and collaborative knowledge ethics encapsulates the

historical entirety of the tumultuous relationship outlined above.

Evolutions

Current directions in Information Ethics are redefining the scope of the field while

building bridges between disparate and seemingly separate aspects of its semantic spectrum.

Fascinating implications present themselves towards the evolution of that which currently does,

and which can be, encapsulated beneath the umbrella term ‘Information Ethics’. It remains to

be seen what precise form these evolutions will ultimately take, if indeed there ever is a point

where we can put the definition to rest. Where Librarianship has given birth to Information

Ethics, Information Ethics has given birth to the Philosophy of Information and angeletics, new

foundations to ontology and communication theory, spearheaded by Capurro and Floridi, and in

turn, explorations of the Philosophy of Information and angeletics have come full circle to

24

readdress the traditional concerns of librarianship through exploring the philosophical

implications of librarianship, namely the relationship between information organization,

cataloging, classification, epistemology, and ontology, and all of this precipitated at an

intercultural scale (Herold, 2005). It would appear that as the various strains of the numerous

and ever growing disciplines within this yet ambiguously defined field slowly coalesce into a

recognized and common sphere, the relationships between those disparate pieces will become

ever more intimately entwined, greying borders of black and white into a unified kaleidoscope

of semantic possibilities.

It is however all too easy to become swept away with all of this, and in our excitement,

forget the foundations of the field, the foundations that Hauptman fought to establish so many

years ago. With all of the grandeur of the construction of this philosophical Parthenon, one

such foundational pillar is weakened, often unkempt and neglected, the structures of which it

supports threatening to collapse under an ever-increasing thought-load. Thus, least we get

carried away with our task, it becomes incumbent on each of the above players to acknowledge

that ever critical piece of the puzzle, namely education, as hinted at above, without which, the

project fails. It is perhaps somewhat inconceivable that more than twenty years after

Hauptman’s call for the teaching of Information Ethics courses in Library and Information

Studies, there yet remains a void in the very place where the field found life. Though, as

mentioned above, select universities in the US and globally have taken up Hauptman’s call,

there remains a seemingly willful ignorance on the part of many Library schools to include in

their curriculum a course dedicated solely to Information Ethics. Ironically, and despite the

above political landscape, it is education that has arisen as the leading concern in the field of

Information Ethics, at least as exemplified in the literature, a fact revealed through the metadata

25

analytics of Dr. Ali Shiri of the University of Alberta in his Exploring Information Ethics: A

Metadata Analytics Approach, a study that will be explored further in chapter two of the

following thesis.

Despite the lack of a home for Information Ethics in education, there are advocates as

such, who like Hauptman, work from their positions as professors in Library and Information

Studies to push for and make aware the need for the study of Information Ethics especially as it

pertains to Librarianship. One such advocate is Toni Samek, a professor teaching out of the

University of Alberta, whose legacy as the founding player in the creation and advocacy of

Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility equals that of the formative players of

Information Ethics as a whole. In recent years, Samek has taken up the torch of Hauptman, and

advocated for the further inclusion of Information Ethics in education as a critical element in its

own right, but also as critical to Library and Information Studies. Building off of established

pillars in her own branch of Information Ethics, Samek applies her experience in the formation

and teaching of her course Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility to highlight the

necessity of Information Ethics in higher education (Samek, 2010). Her part in the creation of

the Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Association for Library and Information Science

Education (ALISE) sets the stage, but most universities and library schools are not yet prepared

to heed the call. Professors like Samek bring the idealism of Information Ethics back to the

front line, where concerns for Intercultural Information Ethics become a form of activism, often

against the very structures of the University institutions themselves, institutions that knowingly

or unknowingly repress the very advocacy they ought to be supporting. According to Samek, it

is no coincidence that Information Ethics is lacking in the institutional framework. Noting that

academic freedom is dependent on tenure and job security, Samek relates the contracting of

26

instruction and the systematic elimination of full time professorships as directly applicable to a

hesitancy about free speech, thus defeating the quest of Information Ethics at its very core. The

problem here of course translates to matters of education. As Samek put it, “the working

conditions of faculty are the learning conditions of students” (Samek, 2010).

Concerns for ethics in an information-driven world have saturated all facets of society

and culture. One might say that the field of Information Ethics has gone ‘viral’ in recent years,

globalizing at a speed unmatched by any singular phenomenon in history. Information Ethics

has taken up residence even within the halls of the United Nations itself under UNESCO and

“info-ethics”, a term adopted by UNESCO to refer to their own brand of intercultural

information ethics, where the main concerns center around topics such as the digital divide, the

information rich and the information poor, and cultural alienation (Capurro, 1998).

Luciano Floridi reflects back on the transformations in the field over the ten years that

he has contributed to it. Now one of leading philosophers in the field, Floridi notes a two-

pronged evolution of the field stemming from information and communication technologies

(ICTs). On one hand, he notes the various growing dependence in all fields of ethical research

for an Information Ethics, as he puts it, “from business ethics to environmental ethics, from

medical ethics to the ethics of nanotechnologies, from the ethics of cyberwar to the ethics of e-

research.” And on the other hand, he recognizes the conceptual expansion and dialogue within

Information Ethics, crossing paths with numerous philosophical traditions spanning, as he lists

them, “Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Spinozism, Deontologism, Consequentialism,

Contractualism and Buddhism, as well as analyses and discussions of metaphysical,

epistemological and logical topics” (Floridi, 2008).

27

The implications of these evolutions are staggering, considering the partnerships formed

between philosophy and praxis in Information Ethics, and considering the speed at which they

have formed. Under the heading of “Information Ethics” we are now looking at a globally

concerned, socially constructed “life-world” (to employ Smith’s terminology), that spans a

vision beginning with advocacy for free access to information in librarianship and ending with

philosophical studies in information phenomena based in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg

Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, both of whom are primary influences in Capurro’s thought and

writing (Takenouchi, 2004). With information scientists and philosophers such as Capurro and

Floridi pushing the envelope at every turn, ever advancing in thought and application the realm

of that which entails Information Ethics, one considers the near futile task of actually defining

the field. But perhaps, as many philosophers would point out, a field that can’t be nailed down

is the only kind of ‘field’ that is relevant, that defined epistemologies are dead scholasticism,

even to the point of irrelevancy.

Conclusion

Despite the uncertainties and yet unresolved foundations of the field of IE, it is difficult

to argue that Information Ethics as a field is not relevant, in all its facets. Studies in the field are

growing exponentially in ways that are barely traceable, all towards a holistic understanding of

the nature of the world as informational, with loaded implications towards responsibilities that

we ourselves have as agents of an informational ontology. But even with this said, the

recognition of the relevance of information ethics in all disciplines, in an ironic sort of way,

perhaps nullifies Information Ethics as a discipline that stands apart in it’s own field, since the

28

adoption of Information Ethics globally, corporately, scientifically, and philosophically, into all

aspects of life, has restructured our understanding of our entire world.

Such contemplations are sobering when placed against the digital evolutions of

information societies. While one might consider Information Ethics outside of the current

applications of the field, the scope of Information Ethics is established around two

considerations, those being the proliferation of information, and the digital vehicle in which it

resides. Digital ontology states that “the ultimate nature of reality is digital,” a premise that

Floridi disagrees with, who favors instead an informational ontology where “the ultimate nature

of reality is structural” (Floridi, 2009). Whether or not the ontological debate is ever laid to

rest, and whether or not one agrees to such definitive conceptions of reality, it cannot be denied

that the quest to define and classify Information Ethics in its own field of study becomes ever

more complicated as it coalesces into a state of digital zeitgeist. If everything is Information

Ethics, as Vlatko Vedral’s theory of Quantum Information would suggest, then as Elizabeth

Buchanan points out, nothing is Information Ethics, a stance that she herself disagrees with

(Buchanan, 2011). Perhaps only time will tell if Information Ethics is a field of inquiry, or

simply the recognized zeitgeist.

Spanning everything from the overarching philosophies of Capurro and Floridi to the

more imminent advocacy of Samek’s access and responsibility, Information Ethics has grown

into a global phenomenon, and whether merely a discipline or a new ‘world spirit’, Information

Ethics has now taken front stage in, for, and sometimes against all aspects of society, from

education to government, from access to privacy, encompassing day to day “ethical questions

about relationships in society among people” (Samek, 2010), to the inquiry into self as

ontologically informational. Even as the current project towards a history of the field takes

29

form, new directions are coalescing among the ever changing horizons of thought and

experience, opening doors for further avenues to a world defined by, and responsible to,

information.

30

Chapter 2: Towards a Unified Taxonomy

Overview

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is

ultimately unattainable, and yet the challenge to do so becomes an obligatory ongoing

prerequisite. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable

practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to what Charles Ess, in

referring to Luciano Floridi’s information ecology, deems ‘philosophical naturalism’ (Ess,

2009). As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse

categorization, but it is this dialectical understanding that necessitates the task. Chapter two

outlines, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information

Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. In the following discourse,

the assumptions behind the current classifications of the field are questioned. Beginning with

the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning

the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael

Capurro and Luciano Floridi, the following chapter explicates how any such attempt to develop

an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete. The historical attempt in

the field of IE to categorize the field into six sub-fields of applied ethics will be explored, those

six sub-fields being Computer Ethics, Cyber Ethics, Media Ethics, Library Ethics,

Bioinformation Ethics, and Business Information Ethics, and an endeavor will be made to

explicate their origins as well as to highlight possible evolutions in the taxonomy of the field. It

will explore whether Floridi’s Philosophy of Information is affirmed in its metaphysical claim

31

to philosophical naturalism in light of the outcome of an evolving field. It will also address

Capurro’s foundation to Information Ethics as a type of meta-ethics encompassing all fields of

ethics dealing with information.

Perhaps for many, the evolution of the field of Information Ethics from its inception

(either in 1948 or the 1980s, depending on one’s perspective) to its current state feasibly paints

a sort of runaway scene, whereby the application of ethical praxis to the real life concerns of

information and communications technology have all but been hijacked and subsumed into

grander philosophical deliberations about the nature of reality and being. Where once the

literature and scholarship of the field addressed head-on the concerns of intellectual property,

privacy, freedom of access and social responsibility (concerns that most people could follow

and understand), the present state of Information Ethics seems conceivably elitist, fallen prey

perhaps to ivory tower scholasticism. The debate, some might surmise, has escaped the house

and is no longer accessible by those to whom it concerns, and is now, as worded by Charles

Ess, a “difficult debate between Floridi’s Philosophy of Information as a philosophical

naturalism and the Heideggarian components of Rafael Capurro’s intercultural information

ethics” (Ess, 2009). And so, to the uninitiated eye, where once Information Ethics boasted a

call to action, it has betrayed the pursuit of worldly good in favor of a sort of cosmic

ontological reconciliation of informational entities. And while this grand standing works

wonders for philosophers, the average worker might wonder if there is any room left for action

on the part of the rest of us.

The above scenario is of course an age-old clash between laity and scholarship, and is

certainly not unique to Information Ethics. The dialectical nature of the debate is in fact

inevitable, cyclical in nature, and a ‘necessary evil’. Like any concern of any age, initial action

32

on the part of the laity is eventually and inevitably taken up by philosophers and analyzed, and

in turn taken back by the people to be put into action, and through this dialectical struggle,

‘common’ knowledge is made better for it. The concern here regarding an evolving definition

of the field of IE is not in fact whether ‘scholasticism’ has stolen the cultural zeitgeist and

owned it, (nor will any suggestion here be made that the pursuit of philosophy is merely an

exercise in ivory tower futility!) Rather the evolution of the field of IE raises a concern of a

different sort, that of the possibility of a cohesive taxonomy.

Philosophy and Taxonomy

The attempt to draw any taxonomy of Information Ethics, let alone a unified and agreed

upon taxonomy, proves almost fascinating in its near futile nature. In addition, because all

fields and professions have in recent years come face to face with the necessity of their own

information ethics due to the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies

(ICT’s), the concept of Information Ethics as a separately defined domain becomes on one

hand, ridiculous, but in actuality, more telling than ever. The best practice to date, according to

those committed to the task, is to work within a framework for the field rather than a formal

taxonomy (Mathiesen, 2004), though formal taxonomical studies attempting to cover the field

are slowly coming to light such as Dr. Ali Shiri’s Metadata Analytics approach towards

exploring Information Ethics, outlined below. The transient nature of the field was recognized

even in its inception in the early 1980s, as Capurro notes in regards to the content of the

Kostrewski-Oppenheim paper, oft cited as the first paper to explore “Information Ethics”:

33

“…the editor critically remarks that it is difficult to identify its aim, since the argument goes off in all directions. This dispersion should come as no great surprise if one considers that the authors, as they themselves at the very beginning remark, are discussing questions which until then, i.e. until 1980, were not found on the front pages of the current information science literature.” (Capurro, 1985).

If there is one thing that can be said for the task, it is that time proves more difficult the

task of doing so. In other words, it appears that as over time we further try to categorize the

field of Information Ethics, our grasp on our characterizations slip further from us. It appeared,

in the eighties and early nineties, that it might be possible to eventually land within some form

of disciplinary parameters, but as the field and nature of Information Ethics grew to encompass

ever broader facets, each successive attempt at putting together a taxonomy only revealed a

wider battle field, more complex than previously imagined. The struggle to capture the

magnitude of the field is perhaps best exemplified by Sanford Berman’s proposal to the

Library of Congress Cataloging Policy and Support Office (2007) that "Information Ethics" be

added as a subject heading. The LC form that was instead approved and established reads:

"Information Technology--Moral and Ethical Aspects (UF Information ethics)”4, a heading that

designates the entirety of the field to what is otherwise explored under “Computer Ethics” and

exemplifying perhaps the limited understanding of the scope and magnitude of what

Information Ethics actually entails.

Representing an idea concerns philosophers and librarians. Perhaps in light of this it

should be no surprise that IE begins in librarianship but currently appears detained by

philosophy, the implications of which could warrant a separate thesis. But where does

taxonomy of information itself begin? And what exactly does classifying classification look

4 Sanford Berman’s original proposal: http://www.sanfordberman.org/headings/inforethics.pdf

34

like? (What is the meta of metadata?) Those familiar with the field of IE and its current

directions will here experience a type of cognitive dissonance in the attempt to envision a

taxonomy of taxonomy, conjuring nightmarish Aristotelian visions of the struggle to categorize

all known things. Further contemplation should allow for at least an abstract awareness of the

difference between the undertaking of the philosophy of information and any Aristotelian or

even Platonic comparison. Categories and “form” are one thing, the re-envisioning of Being

itself quite another (…and thus, fittingly, in a single paragraph, one plummets from

librarianship into the abyss of philosophical inquiry…).

Looking toward Library and Information Science is, logically, the place to begin when

addressing taxonomical concerns of any matter. One can begin with a typical subject analysis,

as one would do in librarianship, which asks first to identify the overall discipline or branch of

knowledge under which the matter at hand best fits. From here, an attempt is then made to

consider the perspective audience of the matter, in this case the ‘to whom it may concern’ of

IE. A hierarchal breakdown then follows, subjecting the discipline to important concepts and

most frequently encountered concepts, followed by title, subtitle, headings and so forth.

Metadata, the newest philosophical envisioning of cataloging and classification, takes

taxonomy out of the stuffy environs of libraries and paints it sexy for the ICT generation,

positing numerous and necessary arteries for digital access and flow. And to be fair, there are

many arguments for the validity of fluidity in classification over traditional information

ontologies (not to be confused with philosophical ‘ontology’). However, at the end of the day,

both traditional taxonomies and metadata schemes don’t quite capture the nature of Information

Ethics as they might other ‘disciplines’.

35

Perhaps the biased nature of taxonomies becomes exposed in Information Ethics. As a

helpful reference point to the nature and limitations of informational ontology, one might

consider a couple of the most familiar examples of traditional classification failure, as per

Shirky’s 2005 talks, those being the controversial cases of the Dewey Decimal Classification

(DDC) ‘200s’, and the Library of Congress (LOC) LOC D. The first reference is to the

embarrassing, but yet addressed, bias of religion in favor of western Christianity within the

DDC, the second to the overwhelmingly prejudiced consideration of History in the LOC

(Shirky, 2005).5 Namely, it becomes quickly apparent that all classification eventually fails at

least to some extent, or at least has done so to date. Secondly, the recognition of the fact that

classification fails holds huge ethical implications towards “truth” and information, and thus

epistemology. What is truth? The question is the oldest question known to intellectual being.

The usual answer, or at least the contemporary one, is that truth, to a large extent, is that which

exists in the eye of the beholder, in our case the ‘beholder’ being any contemporary cultural

climate that determines, whether scientifically or non-scientifically, the ethical value of an idea.

Reflection on taxonomy reiterates the question in a less abstract framework, but ironically, in

its exposed biases, comes up with the same answer. Both of the above stated taxonomical

categories are still in use.

5 A number of important considerations become pertinent in the above examples. Eight subcategories of Christianity under the heading of religion, followed by a ninth category covering “other religions” is very telling of the seemingly biased and arbitrary nature of bibliographic taxonomy. Likewise, of the seventeen world-wide geographically-based categories, thirteen cover Europe, one the former Soviet Union, one for Asia, one covers Africa, with the next to last category covering Oceania (the final category allots a place to “Gypsies”), where the Balkan Peninsula is equivalently categorized with Africa and Asia at the bottom of the list.

36

As misinformation is one of the facets that the field of Information Ethics deals with, it

becomes disconcerting on two levels to consider the egocentric nature of declaring an absolute

and authoritative taxonomy for the field. While it is necessary to work within terms of

categorization in order to interact with the world around us (there is no other way to interact

with it), history has yet to impress on us the biased and arbitrary nature of the process. And

thus, as Information Ethics attributes its childhood to the Information Sciences, and strives in

adulthood to consider the ethical dilemmas of misinformation, a bad taxonomy is like a dark

family secret no one entertains. By nature of what Information Ethics is, any taxonomy for the

field must be conceptualized in ideas that entertain inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary

possibilities. In light of this, it will be shown that the family tree of Information Ethics begins

and ends in Librarianship, but allowing for certain taxonomical relationships, having more

often to contend with the adoption of a great many other disciplines, thus grafting into itself (as

a ‘field’) concerns, ideals, and ‘categorizations’ that do not originally trace their roots to the

field of Information Ethics.

There was awareness even in the eighties of the need for further definition of the field in

terms of the ‘yet-to-come’, a concern for things that could not yet be fully visualized, but were

nonetheless surely waiting for us on the horizon. In what was one of the first attempts to apply

an informal taxonomy to the field, Computer and Information Ethics (Weckert and Adney,

1997), one reads about how “computer and information ethics might be (1) all of computer

ethics and all of information ethics, or (2) the intersection of computer and information ethics,

that is, just those issues that concern both.” This somewhat ambiguous schema, whether

intentional or not, leaves the door open to further interpretation. The last chapters of the above

book dealt with further projections towards the implications of ethics in regards to such things

37

as virtual reality, mind and machine. Setting the ground for the very in-depth and very

necessary work of Floridi and Capurro, the authors asked, “Can they (machines), in principle,

be developed to a stage at which they should be treated as moral agents? This is one of those

issues, mentioned at the beginning of the book, that has not arisen as a practical problem yet,

but in all probability will…” (Weckert and Adeney, 1997). The query was an accurate

projection of not only the concern and debate over the potential ‘being’ and moral agency of

machine, but of the current ontological debate that questions whether or not machine, as

information, is any less an ontological entity than animal.

We discover the true origins of information and computer ethics in Norbert Wiener’s

work, who in 1948 published his groundbreaking book Cybernetics: or Control and

Communication in the Animal and the Machine and two years later another book called The

Human Use of Human Beings, followed by a third publication in in 1963 called God and

Golem, Inc. Wiener explored, far ahead of his time, the ethical concerns that face ICTs today.

With Cybernetics, Wiener was already aware of a burgeoning field that was in many ways the

forbearer of Information Ethics. Wiener was also so acutely aware of the lack of a taxonomy

for the field that he felt it necessary to release an official statement on the matter, coining for

the new field the official designation of Cybernetics and relaying the Greek etymology behind

the term, saying that he “had already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems

centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or

living tissue,” and that he was “seriously hampered by the lack of unity in the literature

concerning these problems, and by the absence of common terminology, or even of a single

name for the field.” (Wiener, 1948).

38

Information In Formation

Where then do we find a unified taxonomy for IE? One can access Wikipedia where a

quick search for Information Ethics reveals a categorization of the field into the six separate

official branches of applied ethics, those being Library Ethics, Media Ethics, Bioinformation

Ethics, Business Information Ethics, and Cyber Ethics, Computer Ethics, informing the reader

that these six sub categories form the basis to information ethics (Wikipedia, 2013).

Interestingly, however, the only other place in the literature of Information Ethics that these six

categories are listed together as a seemingly taxonomic foundation of the field is on the

homepage of ICIE (International Center for Information Ethics) website itself, where the six

sub-categories are only listed as examples of the type of questions that are raised in applied

Information Ethics, and they are not even there expounded on, but merely listed as examples.

Being a cautionary tale, one finds in this the perfect example of how Wikipedia can be

misleading when used as an authoritative source, whether in terms of taxonomy or otherwise.

While acknowledging the diverse scope of the field, the Wikipedia entry misleads the

information seeker into believing firstly that a taxonomy of the field has been agreed upon, and

secondly that the field is limited to these six areas, a supposition not informed by the site of the

International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE, 2013). Furthermore, while the Wikipedia

entry gives a nod towards the literature of the field, quoting the “main, peer-reviewed,

academic journals reporting on information ethics” as “the Journal of the Association of

Information Systems, the flagship publication of the Association of Information Systems, and

Ethics and Information Technology, published by Springer” (Wikipedia, 2014), neither of

which are in fact the main academic journals of the field, (though they certainly contribute to

39

it), and neither of which originate with the field. Not listed on Wikipedia however are a number

of journals that are foundational to the field, those being the Journal of Information Ethics, and

the International Review of Information Ethics. The philosophical and/or ethics reader should

here be musing over the perhaps disconcerting fact that Wikipedia now monopolizes the state

of “information” in the world, for better or worse, in much the same way that corporate media

monopolizes “news”. It takes a critical thinker to successfully navigate the influences of both,

and to come out on the other side unbiased by exposure to either.

To further critique the Wikipedia coverage of Information Ethics, one must consider its

uninformed if not biased direction towards Floridi’s metaphysical interpretations of the

foundations of the field while altogether ignoring Capurro’s hermeneutic foundations, an irony

lost on the novice reader who would not recognize the six ‘official’ branches listed on the same

Wikipedia page as a direct copy and paste from Capurro’s ‘field’ foundations page at ICIE.

While the Wikipedia entry, at least at the time of the current research (2014), states that

“Information ethics is related to the fields of computer ethics (Floridi, 1999) and the

philosophy of information” (italics mine); the same entry, in 2008, as critiqued by Capurro in

his paper, On Floridi's Metaphysical Foundation of Information Ecology, stated, “Information

Ethics is therefore strictly (italics mine) related to the fields of computer ethics (Floridi, 1999)

and the philosophy of information,” the correction at least recognizing, however subtly, that the

field’s philosophical foundations are not limited to Floridi’s information ecology. In both cases,

the entry cites Floridi’s Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics

as the only definitive source. While the matter comes across as mere semantics to the novice

reader, the implications are in fact critical in assessing a taxonomical foundation for the field,

which in turn colors the evolutions of the field.

40

In 2003, Martha Smith oversaw the Wikipedia entry on Information Ethics take shape.

Coming from a collaborative effort of her students, it was a student by the name of Cathay

Crosby who wrote and posted the content of the class project to Wikipedia, establishing a

foundation to the field online that same year. In her 2011 reflective article entitled The

Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and Meaning, Smith notes that none

of the original work remains in the Wikipedia entry from the original posted article. She asks

some very pointed questions, the very same questions that will help form the thesis to part four

of the following history of the field as reflected through the WikiLeaks phenomenon and wiki

studies.

Smith takes us to task. She asks, regarding the original Wikipedia article, “Where did it

go? Who replaced it and why? Did somebody wipe out our article intentionally? Should the

field be represented on Wikipedia? How do sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and

LinkedIn, and others promote scholarly connections and knowledge?” (Smith, 2011). Indeed, in

the hands of what guardians or keepers does information currently reside? Has information

ceased to belong to authoritative power structures, becoming an uncomfortable abyssal blank

slate that necessitates an existential accountability? If so, perhaps it is in light of this that

collaborative knowledge societies, uncomfortable in such an abyss, offer no resistance to the

return to information monopolies, being the original place of peer-reviewed knowledge, and

ironically, also no less the foreseeable place of collaborative knowledge structures in their final

stages where open-access models such as Wikipedia and WikiLeaks fall to the inevitable vices

of control and monopoly, slowly coalescing from the anti-establishment into the new

establishment.

41

Branches

Returning to the supposed six-branch categorization of the field of IE, one must consider

alone the taxonomical implications within the organization of the six branches. The first

taxonomical anomaly apparent in the above stated categories is the lack of a static definition for

any of the particular categories, and the obvious crossover between the branches. While ICIE

would limit computer ethics to the realm of computer science, implying an isolated sort of

ethics for the back room comp-sci sub-culture, it then allots cyber ethics the branch to take up

the slack for the responsibility of interconnectedness, as though it alone should carry the task

on its shoulders. Even then, according to ICIE, cyber ethics is merely “information ethics in a

narrower sense”, as though by default the whole of Information Ethics were restricted to the

Internet alone (ICIE, 2013). Capurro himself would be the first to advocate that Information

Ethics encompasses more than the Internet. And on the other hand, perhaps Computer Ethics is

a more fitting category for that which begins and ends online (One questions too whether or not

anything truly begins or ends online, but that is a debate for another time). Here too, we do not

find a unified taxonomy.

However, as this chapter’s intent is to explore a possible taxonomy, even historically, of

IE, the snapshot of this categorization into the six sub-fields of applied ethics should indeed be

explored, perhaps in ‘wayback machine’ style, if only to look at the categorization of the field

as it stood in one moment of time. It is also noteworthy to explore these six sub-fields in their

own right since, though not exclusive to defining IE, they are currently, and always will be,

very relevant areas to the field.

42

Library Ethics, a fitting place to begin, focuses mainly on intellectual freedom and the

right to access of information. It advocates an access to information as being a basic human

right, and views that right as preceding all other rights, positing any other rights as unfounded

without first providing free access to information (Samek, 2007). It bases its ethics in the

Library Bill of Rights, founding its philosophy centrally through the American Library

Association as the final authority in matters of Librarianship, the Bill of Rights being, “the

library profession’s interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution”

(Intellectual Freedom Manual, 2006). But on the same token, Library Ethics and the field of

Librarianship are constantly challenging assumptions of the field, holding the ALA accountable

to itself and its mandate, holding discussions over round tables about central ethical issues

pertaining to intellectual freedom.

Central issues in Library Ethics involve concerns such as censorship and challenged

materials, and the right to access banned materials. It promotes its philosophy actively by

encouraging the display of banned or challenged books and by making those materials

accessible to the public (Intellectual Freedom Manual, 2000). It makes an effort to regularly

assess its collection specifically in terms of missing or damaged offensive and banned

materials, since library collections are routinely and regularly sabotaged by special interest

groups seeking to reshape library collections in their own image for the ‘betterment’ of society

as per a so-called moral majority (ALA, 2000). It is not however limited to collections. It also

looks at the tensions surrounding Internet access in libraries, where considerations of Internet

filters and the right to access information freely and in public spaces often comes to head with

differing ideas of public ‘appropriateness’ by a variety of social groups that simultaneously

represent what ideas of ‘public’ should and does demand. It also considers equitable and

43

unbiased access to library spaces for all groups regardless of sex, gender, race, belief or

intention, specifically in regards to the public use of library meeting rooms where the precepts

of librarianship represent and condone equitable access to public spaces (ALA, 2000).

Paramount to the debate is the actual law (i.e. the end of the line of argument), where

even intellectual freedom is restricted, at least as far as (legal) access to information goes.

Where the law, on one hand, perhaps restricts advocates of intellectual freedom to prescribed

legal boundaries, it also allows for public open access to materials and information (whether

text, photographic or video) that are deemed publicly inappropriate by sometimes majority

sized public groups. As per typical example, the law prohibits access to pornography on

publicly viewed computers, yet allows for viewing of sensualized or sexualized images that are

not, according to law, deemed pornographic, but which may yet be considered ‘pornographic’

by special interest factions such as religious, family friendly or conservative groups. Notable in

the debate is whether or not, despite the law, open online access to illegal materials should be

made available (i.e. not filtered) in light of the principles of non-censorship and intellectual

freedom (sporting merely friendly ‘reminders’ in terms of service agreements that such illegal

materials not in fact be accessed). And since even the most intelligent of Internet filters cannot

block only those materials which are illegal, thus censoring otherwise legal materials in the

process, however publicly offensive, the question becomes one of whether or not such filters

should be used in a public library where the founding principles of librarianship and

specifically the ALA espouse intellectual freedom and access to ‘information’, however

interpreted.

Cyberethics and computer ethics have recently found peace in the same house, despite

whatever ambiguities may yet exist on Wikipedia. Don Gotterbam, in The Life Cycle of Cyber

44

and Computing Ethics, reviews the obscurities in the literature, concluding that “Cyber Ethics

as a discipline is derivative from Computer Ethics”. In fact, to avoid any unnecessary

taxonomical discomfort, he cleverly declares in his introduction that he shall henceforth “just

refer to the total sets of issues in computer and cyber ethics as C-ethics,” two birds, one stone

(Gotterbam, 2001). Cyberethics, or C-Ethics, deals with technologies of a digital and

computing nature (not to be confused with Information and Communication Technologies, or

ICTs, whose scope reaches beyond digital and computing technologies), and the ethical issues

arising for the individual user as well as for society, in the knowing or unknowing application

of each new technology.

C-Ethics is limited, as a field, to computers and computer specific technologies, but

excludes other technologies that would be included in the broader scope of Information Ethics

(Moor, 2000). The ICIE, in categorizing Cyberethics as “information ethics in a narrower

sense”, was after all correct in its summation, since C-Ethics deal primarily with issues of

privacy, rights, and security, but on a scale limited to digital and computing technology.

Typical ethical issues dealt with in C-Ethics include P2P file sharing, website linking, online

privacy (both for and against), data mining, workplace surveillance, computer crime, and even

facial recognition systems (Spinello, 2001).

Leading the cause of social responsibility in computer ethics was the Computer

Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), an international organization initiated in 1981

and only recently disbanded in 2013. The organization promoted a replacement of the

traditional philosophy of the ethical imperative with the concept of social responsibility,

looking critically at assumed mores in the computer and ICT industry, and was in many ways

complimentary to the philosophy of ICIE, as well as to Samek’s advocacy of Intellectual

45

Freedom and Social Responsibility in the field of Librarianship. In the years that CPSR was

active, they founded several annual and ongoing conferences including the Directions and

Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC) symposium and the Community Information

Research Network (CIRN) annual conference. In addition, they introduced, and have awarded

annually since, the Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility.

Media Ethics begin with an awareness that journalism and media play a large part in

shaping worldviews in society (CIME, 2013), and as such demands a journalists responsibility

in ethical discourse through personal commitment and choice towards a proactive handling of

media and journalism (Islamabad, 2013). It contends with issues as diversified as conflicts of

interest, fairness, and economic pressure (Smith, 2001). Of primary concern to Media Ethics is

the purity of the source, especially in journalism where credibility sustains the field. Credibility

also requires speed of dissemination of information, where being the first to disseminate

information is everything to the journalist. Ethical concerns around dissemination in an

efficient and truth worthy manner, however, require fact checking, but the competition is high.

Ethics should determine quality in the field, not just speed (Spence, 2008).

As such, where the Media Ethicist focuses mainly on ensuring access to information

free of corporate and governmental control, they must also express a concern for the rampant

and unchecked flow of misinformation prevalent in a digital culture where culture itself

determines, no less biased than corporate or government agencies, the interpretation and

dissemination of information. As Spence states:

“Reports can be uploaded to the Web nearly instantly as news unfolds, but often without safeguards such as copy-editing and fact checking. The haste with which many news gatherers post their reports on the Web naturally challenges our confidence in the

46

accuracy and completeness of their coverage. In these cases, the worry is often that competition drives the rate at which one publishes rather than the confidence reporters and editors have in the completeness and accuracy of their stories” (Spence, 2008).

One perhaps sees here a conflict within the wider scope of the foundations of

Information Ethics. Whereas in Library Ethics, the advocacy of unbiased access to information,

credible or not, becomes the prime directive, Media Ethics seemingly posits a responsibility

towards credible information only. From their mandate one reads, “Our driving emphasis is that

media professionals take responsibility in shaping society” (CIME, 2013). One wonders

however about the implications behind such a statement. Does the terminology of this mandate

place media ethicists in an authoritative position to determine “truth” from “non-truth”, and

then ensure that only true information be released into the infosphere (to use Floridi’s

terminology), shielding an impressionable culture from “wrong” interpretations? Is there truly

such a thing as just reporting it as it is or does it come down to reporting it as we see it?

Quite telling and somewhat disconcerting, one reads from the CIME newsletter in

Plagiarism: Addressing the Skeleton in the Closet how:

“Throughout history, the news media has tasked itself with telling the truth, even when the government, majority or authorities do not wish the truth to be heard. The advent of the Internet and its role in facilitating the free flow of information has strengthened the need for an ethical media to interpret the mass of information, decipher truth from fiction, and deliver the facts. However, the recent endless barrage of plagiarism incidents threatens to undermine the public’s trust in the international media establishment” (Gray, 2013).

A good example of concern in Media Ethics is the above noted scenario that posits

Wikipedia as both an authoritative and un-authoritative control of information flow. While

scholarship maintains, perhaps rightfully so, that authoritative flow of information should stem

47

from peer reviewed scholarship into the wider contexts of culture, culture has taken

“information” into its own hands, creating a middle-man that supplants information before the

so-called natural process of dissemination can take place. Where once we had a cultural faith in

information preceding communication, we now face a culture that has hijacked not only the

credibility of information but also the credibility of credibility itself. Dissatisfied and impatient

with the slog and staunchness of authority and “high-brow” scholarship, culture has re-

interpreted not only information, but the very idea of information, taking taxonomy, ontology

and epistemology into its own hands (unaware, of course, of what those foundations are) and

creating the wiki phenomenon, which in turn gives birth to such phenomena as Wikipedia and

WikiLeaks. It will be highlighted towards the end of this thesis that the above are really only

one phenomenon, manifestations of the same thing - affordance to a digital culture in the very

process of tearing down the power structures that in form it.

And yet even here the conscientious reader should be considering the possible ironies

and double standards posited in this very assumption of peer-review as incontestable, and

should be addressing the red flags of censorship implied within, at least coming from a library

ethics point of view. Does not even the scholarly control of information through peer-reviewed

avenues constitute a form of censorship? It is not unthinkable that bias, chance, and ideology

guide the process. A large portion of the peer review process involves not just fact checking but

also capitalizing and prioritizing based on ‘suitability’, where only the ‘very best’ work (based

on what parameters?) sees the light of day. As will be highlighted further on by Nathanial

Enright, capitalism quickly turns information into a commodity (Enright, 2011). The best peer

reviewed journals are also the most stringent, and rigorous competition weeds out everything

but the ‘best’ submissions. In such a scenario it isn’t long before prestige becomes the

48

motivating factor in publication. And what better sign of gross censorship than a drive towards

ego before subject? As Casadevall and Fang point out, “The prestige of a journal has become a

surrogate measure for the quality of the work itself. (Casadevall and Fang, 2009).

Moving onward, Bioinformation ethics, as the name suggests, explores ethical issues of

information as it pertains to technologies in the field of biology and medicine. While inclusive

of traditional informational concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ donation, euthanasia,

and cloning, it also asks questions about the right to one’s own biological identity, about the

non-voluntary use of one’s DNA and/or fingerprints by policing agencies, about equal rights to

insurance and bank loans despite bad genetics, and concerns over the privacy of said genetics

(Hongladarom, 2006). The field of Bioinformation Ethics may inaugurate the largest strides in

the advance of the field of Information Ethics, the reasons of which cannot be dealt with in this

thesis. Suffice it to say, the field of Bioinformation Ethics, born from Bioethics, has already

taken up residence in a new Information Ethics context that brings together Computer Ethics

and Bioinformation Ethics under the new rubric of Bioinformatics. Though largely unexplored

thus far, the concerns therein hold huge implications in light of the tenets of Floridi’s

Philosophy of Information.

Business Information Ethics is also the convergence of two separate fields of applied

ethics, those being (somewhat intuitive and obvious) Information Ethics and Business Ethics.

The abstract to Floridi’s Network Ethics: Information and Business Ethics in a Networked

Society sums up the convergence as such:

“This paper brings together two research fields in applied ethics – namely information ethics and business ethics– which deal with the ethical impact of information and communication technologies but that, so far, have remained largely independent. Its goal

49

is to articulate and defend an informational approach to the conceptual foundation of business ethics, by using ideas and methods developed in information ethics, in view of the convergence of the two fields in an increasingly networked society.”

Floridi clarifies the conglomeration of the above applied fields as inevitable, another evolution

in the wake of ICTs, where an ICT networked society becomes “increasingly porous” as

barriers in all fields begin to collapse (Floridi, 2009).

Having explored the various so-called divisions of Information Ethics in their current

historical context, one sees that developing a taxonomy based on those subjects alone proves

difficult if not impossible. While any particular branch crosses over with another, one must

contend at the same time with an evolving prototype in either branch, either as the branches

evolve in their own right, or evolve into each other. All the same, the best attempt to date at a

taxonomy for Information Ethics, and perhaps the first, is Shiri’s work in metadata analytics. In

his Exploring Information Ethics: A Metadata Analytics Approach, Shiri systematically

explores Information Ethics through the explication of the metadata records of relevant

publications in the Scopus multidisciplinary database. His objective is to “shed light on the

history, volume, variety and topics of publications on ‘information ethics’” (Shiri, 2014). He

asks a number of pointed questions: What are the publication trends for articles on Information

Ethics? Who are the top authors of Information Ethics articles? What disciplines and domains

have been concerned with research on Information Ethics? What are the active countries in

research on Information Ethics? And what are the most frequently used terms and topics in the

titles abstracts and author keywords of article publications (Shiri, 2014)? Though Shiri clarifies

that the above quantitative study is both non-exhaustive and preliminary, he exemplifies a yet

unexplored methodology towards a unified taxonomy for the field, namely the exploration of

50

metadata records as outlined by both author and indexer, ultimately very telling of trends in the

categorization of both the field and of external references to the field.

Using data visualization and text analysis tools that include Automap (Carnegie Mellon

University), TAPOR, OpenRefine, Google Books Ngram viewer, IBM’s Many Eyes (IBM),

and Datahero, Shiri was able to graph and analyze the field at a level of complexity that no one

to date has done. Evaluating the numerous graphical and statistical results from the study, Shiri

was able to redefine the traditional six taxonomical sub fields of Information Ethics into an

evolutionary representation of the field, pointing towards current and future directions and

refocusing the traditional concerns of the field to contemporary relevance. Shiri’s taxonomy

thus includes nine conclusive thematic facets for the field, those being global, technological,

medical, legal, privacy and security, educational, business, informational, and philosophical,

and breaks those nine into further facets that cover the entirety of the field to date.

While Shiri’s own observation of the trends point to the most relevant growth of the field

as belonging to three branches, namely health, education, and business, where education is the

only new taxonomical arrival not already included in the six traditional categories, it will be

posited here that his research is also very telling of, and confirms that issues of privacy and

security, as well as the legal parameters surrounding privacy and security have risen in

relevance as taxonomical foundations in their own right rather than being merely sub-

categorized as concerns of the traditional six categories of Cyber Ethics, Computer Ethics,

Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Library Ethics, and Bioinformation Ethics.6 This is not

surprising at all, and makes perfect sense in light of both the nature of the field and also the

6 While the significance of the raw data of Shiri’s work cannot justifiably be represented

herein, the reader is encouraged to affirm the above analysis by accessing Shiri’s original material.

51

current culmination of the concerns of the field in our contemporaneous post-WikiLeaks

surveillance society. The one other ‘new’ branch that rises to prominence in Shiri’s taxonomy

is Education. Such a seemingly innocuous point in actually very telling and should inform

reflections of the entirety of the current evolutions of the field, namely in terms of awareness,

personal accountability, and knowledge of information, the crux of the present thesis that will

take shape in chapters three and four pertaining to collaborative knowledge ethics and the

WikiLeaks phenomenon. Shiri’s taxonomy also quantitatively confirms for us two things that

are taken for granted in the field, firstly, that the field is multi-faceted and trans-disciplinary, a

meta-ethics, as per Capurro, and secondly that it is evolving.

Conclusion

Perhaps even a few years ago one could agree with the supposition that Information

Ethics could be divided into the above six branches, however a thorough review of the latest

literature will reveal what Elizabeth Buchanan terms the collapse of disciplinary specificity,

where the exposure of classical issues of information ethics across the board becomes explicit,

including such things, as Buchanan lists them, “data integrity, ethical research practices,

privacy, autonomy, identity, trust, reality, data sharing, data manipulation, fragmentation,

orientation,” and so forth (Buchanan, 158). It shouldn’t escape the cognizant reader that

Buchanan throws ‘reality’ right into the middle of the mix, as though a tongue in cheek gesture

towards the irony of the matter, as though to query, after all is said and done, what should

reality cover, if not everything?

52

Buchanan paints a picture of disciplinary homes where she places the various other fields

of applied ethics comfortably in their allotted niches - computer ethics with computers,

business ethics with business, and so forth – but she demonstrates in doing so the extent to

which Information Ethics comes out a misfit, at least in its traditional sense, having had barely

a “rocky home in library and information studies” (Buchanan, 2011). She points out that very

few accredited library schools actually offer, even now, courses in Information Ethics. Her

contention is that most institutions believe that an ethics education is implicitly included in the

deal, whereas, she notes, nothing is further from the truth, and ethics is but an “afterthought” in

any given information science curriculum, negating the understanding necessary to even

establish a taxonomy. How is it feasible to find the taxonomy of a field that doesn’t even have a

proper home? In response to the above inquiry, Geoffrey Rockwell notes that, “Often applied

ethics attach to professions. IE is exploding as the information professions explode”.7

The ‘field’ is broad indeed, as Toni Samek writes regarding the teaching of Information

Ethics. Samek states that “the broad information ethics teaching terrain is inextricably linked to

diverse understandings of life, liberty, the law, and the state; justice and injustice;

communication, information, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; education,

knowledge, and power; equality, equity; universal access to information; human rights and

moral dilemmas; and, multicultural landscapes, immigration and mobility patterns”. ‘Reality’

is not thrown into that mix. Reality is that mix. Indeed, what is truth? The truth of the matter is

that the “information professional” is no longer exclusive to the field of Library and

Information Science, or even to the six categories listed with ICIE but is in fact now necessarily

an equal factor in all disciplines and/or fields.

7 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation. September 2014.

53

Having looked at the possibility of taxonomy within some of the various evolutions and

branches of applied Information Ethics, the hope for a categorization of the field escapes us,

which is as it should be. Though Floridi unlikely fully envisioned at the inception of his form of

the philosophy of information just how the details of the metamorphosis of Capurro’s six

branches of applied Information Ethics would ultimately play out, his PI is affirmed in its

metaphysical claim to philosophical naturalism in light of the outcome of an evolving meta-

field, and thus the assertion that “everything is fundamentally information” no longer seems so

far fetched (Ess, 2009). The evolving direction of the field and the impossibility of any

cohesive taxonomy bear witness to the universal claims of Floridi and Capurro. As supported

by Capurro, Information Ethics is a type of meta-ethics encompassing all fields of ethics

dealing with information. Information Ethics can be seen simply as an approach to a

professional engagement of information across all fields. Indeed, perhaps the birth of

Information Ethics is, as suggested by Mark Alfino, that moment when ethicists recognized en

masse, ethical concerns and problems within the professional world coming together under a

common denominator, that common denominator being information (Alfino, 2012, p. 14).

54

Chapter 3: Concerning Intercultural Information Ethics

Overview

Having explored the origins of Information Ethics as well as a brief projection towards

its evolutions, and having delved into the taxonomical parameters of the field, recognizing the

impossibility of the task due to the meta- and trans- disciplinary nature of IE, a history of the

field looks next to the phenomenon of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE) as the most

significant development of the discipline. While the preceding chapters capture the history of

the field as developed by western philosophers and as realized through the lens of European,

North American, and other first-world susceptibilities, part three looks to the significance of an

intercultural understanding of the effects of information and communication technologies on

the larger world over the last few decades and the various world view responses to such

developments.

As Capurro notes, IIE endeavors to draw out both the philosophical and applied

differences between what might be considered the technological confluence of international

concerns and the technological confluence of intercultural concerns, whereby the crossroads of

the digital with environment and ecology, global politics and economies, and cultural and

ethnic tradition calls for an address of how ICTs are altering localized ways of being-in-the-

world (Capurro, 2007). Thus, differing from other international addresses, the task of IIE

focuses on the digital shaping of lebenswelt and zeitgeist as the ground for shared experience in

55

the world, and is positioned in the working out of what Luciano Floridi calls the infosphere and

by what Rafael Capurro refers to as digital ontology.

Roots

As has been noted by the founders of IIE, the task of realizing an Intercultural

Information Ethics outside of the so-called developed world remains open, inadequately

attempted, or at the very least undefined (Capurro, 2004). At the same time it must be

acknowledged that an ethical consideration of ICTs external from a western ethical worldview

certainly exists, albeit in many cases only in its infancy or in some cases, as in Africa, barely at

all (Britz, 2013). The very drive towards developing an Intercultural Information Ethics is, at

its roots, a biased postulation of western or otherwise developed countries that deem the need

for it, where a western cultural platform assumes an advocacy of IIE as supporting universal

rights. Thus the task of IIE is somewhat duplicitous, but consciously so. IIE endeavors, despite

the double standard in doing so, to understand and advocate that what one culture deems a

fundamental right may not even be desired by other cultures. However, in its own defense, IIE

posits that even if differing worldviews do meet at similar crossroads, they do so on their own

terms. The complexity as such is best explicated by Johannes Britz, who, underlining Africa as

a referent to the task, states that we are either referring to the idea of teaching IE to Africans, or

to “an ethical reflection by Africans on the information ethical problems facing Africa” (Britz,

2013) – two completely different things.

IIE posits that perhaps even the need for an information ethics is grounded in western

sensibilities. To not perceive a need for information ethics is not the same as to not understand

56

it. History reveals the vices of western presumptions being forced on the world, and such

cautionary tales should guide any exploration of intercultural matters. One cannot demand a

cultural investigation of the implications of Information and Communication Technologies or

the ‘Information Society’ by individual societies any more than one can demand the acceptance

of democratic principles by those same cultures. On the other hand, since western and first

world cultures are initially responsible for the advent and proliferation of ICTs, it can be argued

that there is a place for stewardship if not at least accountability and responsibility on the part

of western and other first world cultures towards the advent and current ‘state’ of ICTs.8 It is in

the above tension that one encounters IIE, a tension that one must remain sensitive to also in

considering a history for the field.

Capurro, while being one of a handful of key players in the development of the field of

IE, is also responsible for first bringing together the disparate reaches of the field’s intercultural

infancy into a collaborative whole in 1999 through the establishment of the International Center

for Information Ethics (ICIE), an organization, association, and center for publication that sees

scholars from around the globe coming together on the practical and philosophical nature of

Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004). ICIE focuses on establishing an international basis for

collaboration in teaching and research in the field. It was through the efforts of ICIE that the

first realization or formalization of the idea of an intercultural information ethics arose,

specifically formalized by an international symposium that took place in 2004, culminating in

the first official publication on Intercultural Information Ethics in the field, ‘Localizing the

Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural Perspective’.

8 Christine Belley, in conversation, 2014.

57

That symposium, graciously sponsored by VolkswagenStifung, is certainly ICIE’s

greatest legacy to date. Dedicated to intercultural perspectives, the first formal shaping of IIE

was therein established through the praxis of the field of Information Ethics. Of foremost

concern at the symposium was the recognition of the above noted western-rooted bias in the

foundations of philosophy, and thus in Information Ethics as well; a concern that nurtures

numerous questions for Intercultural Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004). Since the

symposium, and perhaps notably before it, a growing global awareness of the foundational

necessities of a unified intercultural philosophy beg consideration, noting the futility of any

attempt at developing an Information Ethics without first recognizing and then reconciling

westernized philosophical monopolies to the exclusion of, for example, Buddhist philosophical

world views.

Worth quoting at length in its entirety is the below concise summary of the totality of

the field of IIE by Capurro. As Capurro states:

“We need an intercultural debate on information ethics in order to critically discuss

the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information technology. This would open different paths of theory and practice that would weaken the ambitions of information technology, no less than the pretensions of moral codes and ethical thinking, and open at the same time different kinds of strategies when dealing with the digital divide. This debate presupposes a patient and respectful philosophic dialogue that should not take place under a consensus compulsion of reaching universality also because universality remains, to put it in Kantian terms, a “regulative idea” that cannot be reached by any kind of moral codes. The role of ethics is to enlighten or weaken not only local moralities but also the pretension of universal principles with regard both to their unquestioned presuppositions and especially as far as they are practically misused for local interests. This is not a plea for moral relativism but an incentive to enlighten our minds and lives with regard to the open space of thought and the groundless world we share, which allow us to remain in an endless process of intertwining society, nature and technology, looking for flexible norms that regulate rather than block such a process” (Capurro, 2008).

58

The history of Intercultural Information Ethics as a separate discipline of its own (apart

from even the wider scope of IE) and the inter-discovery of fragmented pockets of localized

explorations in ICT based information ethics is a short history only a decade old. The origins of

IIE begin in Africa. The consideration of both academic and practical matters concerning IIE

was first initiated by Rafael Capurro, who, through the International Center for Information

Ethics in 2004, opened up the first intercultural dialogues regarding the crossroads of culture

with information and communication technologies. However it wasn’t until 2007 when, in

partnership with UNESCO, the International Center for Information Ethics took the burgeoning

discipline, and in a series of conversations regarding the nature of an Information Ethics for and

from Africa, moved the discussion from a merely academic venture into the hitherto unfamiliar

realm of hands-on applications.

As the possibility for an IE for Africa was first explored by members of ICIE, it quickly

became apparent that some initial work on the examination of ICTs in terms of improvement of

quality of life already existed, at least in Africa, namely through the UN supported African

Information Society Initiative (AISI) that as far back as 1996 looked to addressing the

intersections between culture and technology. Thus in many ways, Africa was already further

ahead in terms of an information ethics then other areas of the world. By the time the

international information ethics community found their counterparts in Africa, AISI had

already formalized a pointed E-Strategies program that looked at IC Infrastructure at national,

sectorial, village and regional levels and a specific ICT programme, as well as addresses of

information and knowledge capacities in the aggregation and dissemination of information

from indigenous perspectives (Capurro, 2008b).

59

In many ways, IIE owes its heritage to Africa, and initial conversations surrounding IIE

find their roots therein. Since the initial establishment of the field of IIE between ICIE and

Africa, numerous commissions, partnerships and conferences have been founded in Africa and

by Africa towards an international address of Intercultural Information Ethics. Africa is now

one, if not the, leading partner in IIE, boasting numerous initiatives in IE, centralized by ANIE,

the African Network for Information Ethics, an organization that arose out of the above

mentioned initial conversations with ICIE. The history of African Information Ethics is

compound, and is elsewhere elaborately covered in detail, consisting of a rich history that

cannot be covered herein. For further enlightenment, the reader is directed to explore Capurro’s

Information Ethics for and from Africa.

Ethics, ICTs, and IIE

How does one escape personal bias, the biases of a western or classist worldview, or for

that matter, any worldview, and more precisely, how does an ethicist set aside their western

philosophical worldview in order to not only compare and contrast, but to actually perceive

through the lens of another’s view? Ethics, as a discipline, is deeply entrenched in western

history, tradition and culture, and the uncritical application of day-to-day presuppositions about

the nature of reality, of being, of “right” and “wrong”, appear so automatically and are so

subconsciously engrained that the exercise of moving into an externally objective stance seems

unlikely. And thus, as abstracted by Britz, while the field of Information Ethics as historically

developed under a western worldview can be exemplified in three main notions, those being the

freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and freedom of the press (Britz, 2013), a

60

direct overlay of such foundations at a global scale is a gross misrepresentation of the subtleties

of other cultural and historical worldviews and the numerous ways of interpreting the world.

The prospect of bridging the ontological, phenomenological and experiential horizons that

separate self and other is explored below, and the question is asked whether or not such an

event is possible, or perhaps even desirable.

The above enigma is one of the founding concerns of ethics at its basic level. But herein

lies the problem. While ethics as a philosophical tradition (whether we are referring to the

western tradition – ancient Greece onward, or an eastern tradition – Confucianism, for

example), explores the very question, it can only do so within the parameters of its own

tradition. While the western tradition, for example, has attempted to assess its own localized

nature of morality, critiquing its biases in detail, establishing what is referred to as descriptive

ethics (asking the question – what it is that people think is “right”) and from that what is

referred to as normative ethics, a critical exploration of morality (what people aught to do), but

recognizing even therein the biased nature of the task, thus delving into applied ethics (how

does one put a critical morality into practice?) and finally into the realm of meta-ethics (an

exploration of the biases behind the terminology itself - commonly typified as “what does

‘right’ even mean?”)9, the entire process speaks yet to a specific cultural horizon, namely ethics

as per Greco-Roman, Christian, and otherwise western traditions, and the question of

objectivity persists.

The World Summit on the Information Society envisions an Information Ethics through

a truly global-centered approach that addresses the most critical elements of a fair and equitable

9 As explored by the National Open University of Nigeria course syllabus for Comparative

Ethics In a Pluralistic Society, online, accessed April 17, 2014.

61

globally informed citizenship. Its eleven key principles, as listed in its Declaration of

Principles, explore: the role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for

development, information and communication infrastructure, access to information and

knowledge, capacity building, building confidence and security in the use of ICTs, enabling

environment, ICT applications, cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local

content, media, ethical dimensions, and explorations of international and regional cooperation

(WSIS, 2003, 2005).

However, as noble as the above agenda is, encompassing the vast array of potential

dynamics involved in the development of an equitable global citizenship, it is ultimately still

only idealism, and as many would be quick to emphasize, idealism and action are not the same

thing. As per the First Regional Conference for the Asia and Pacific Region on the Ethical

Dimensions of the Information Society, 12-14 March 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam, Peter

Malcouronne comments in regards to such globally centered principles as those highlighted

above, specifically regarding the Asia Pacific region:

“Ethnic diversity in the Asia Pacific region is unequalled. We have hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Shinto, Sikh and Buddhists; we live under feudal kings, socialist prophets and capitalist roaders. Our differences pose unique regional challenges to reaching a consensus on Information Society Ethics. Would we be able to reach a consensus amongst ourselves? And if we did so, the concerns of our region are likely to be very different to those, say, of Europe. Indeed is a meaningful International Code of Ethics possible, even desirable?” (Malcouronne, 2008)

ICTs have the potential to both support and undermine efforts towards developing an

equitable global citizenship. While the advantages of ICTs connect and enable global dialogue,

awareness and education, they also enable the widespread abuse of privacy, autonomy,

62

anonymity, and security (Capurro, 2013). The greatest and most relevant example of such

abuses centers around issues of surveillance, now the complex contemporary face of IE in

general and IIE globally. While democracy ideally realized should enable trust, the mere

presence of ICTs, never mind the abuse of them, potentially undermines the foundational

cultural and psychological stalwarts behind democracy itself where the dynamics of the

distribution of political power and the ‘rule of the people’ become ambiguous, resulting in a

distrust of power structures in general. As Charles Ess notes, “privacy is important as a means

to develop a sense of self and personal autonomy first of all – along with the intimate

relationships, and other capacities and abilities important to this singular autonomy. Thereby,

privacy funds the basic elements required for participating in a democratic society – i.e.,

personal autonomy/freedom and then the capacity for dialogue, debate, etc.” (Ess, 2006).

A post-WikiLeaks society reveals the insidious nature of power monopolies and their

relationship to the life cycle of information. While ICTs allow governments to protect their

citizens from ‘terrorism’ (often a convenient demonization of dissidents and oppositions), the

means to doing so can become a vice at a moments notice where the mass “monitoring” of

individuals for national security purposes becomes a gross erosion of anonymity. From both

psychological and philosophical perspectives, such an erosion undermines more than simple

privacy, but threatens also the dignities of being, undermining also the prerequisites of

autonomy at their core (Ess, 2006).

On the other hand, in an ICT saturated society, the traditional checks and balances of

the media and anti-establishments become swollen and cancerous, the paradigm example being

the WikiLeaks phenomenon and its fallout, whereby the exposure of vast amounts of

information becomes immeasurably unprotected, saturated and unaccounted for by both citizen

63

and government.10 Not only then do ICTs potentially inaugurate distrust, alienation or even the

negation of established information guardians, but they also dissolve borders both literally and

metaphorically, (from national borders to borders of nationalism), ultimately abstracting

information to such an extent that an accountability to information ecology disappears all

together. At this point both the establishment and the anti-establishment become equally

unbearable behemoths.

Privacy and IIE

The complexity of the definition of privacy is wanting. The foundations of the very

concept of privacy cannot be substantiated in common evaluations. Ess explores the variance,

highlighting the traditional cultural understanding of privacy in countries such as Thailand and

China where any semblance of an individual’s drive towards privacy is reflective of shame and

disgrace where assuredly deviance underlies even the need for privacy. The closest idea to a

western appreciation of privacy in Thailand is the idea of a collective privacy as per the group

unit, i.e. the holistic sacredness of family as protected from the wider society, thus a special

protection of the secret-familiar. In China, the influences of Confucianism emphasize the same.

A culture of shame is built on such. As per the analects: "Lead the people with administrative

injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will

be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through

10 While privacy is one of the founding pillars and most critical debates to IE, it will be

posited here that the issue of privacy was not fully understood in its fullest, especially (if at all) at an intercultural level, until the arrival of WikiLeaks, the argument for which will be presented in part four below.

64

roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order

themselves harmoniously" (Analects II, 3). In contrast, Ess underlines ideas of privacy in

Japan where the Buddhist worldview encourages the rejection of one’s connection to self

through the practice of denying one’s self its privacy, all toward the goal of purification from

self (Ess, 2006). Such acts encourage a disclosure of shame and secrecy, a necessary act that

frees the self. By such cultural terms, there is neither the need for, nor the expectation of,

privacy, though through the proliferation of ICTs, traditional values in Asian countries are

slowly transforming under western influences, adding a complexity to an already relative

intercultural face-to-face (Ess, 2006).

Toru Nishigaki of the University of Tokyo weighs in on the nature of Information

Ethics in Japan. Nishigaki highlights that Information Ethics in Japan, to date, is concerned

mainly with maintaining the status quo of society, and stresses that there is no drive in Japanese

Information Ethics as there is in its western counterpart towards redefining the human being,

instead looking simply towards how ICTs should be incorporated into already established

cultural norms and expectations. He differentiates however, this general application of

Information Ethics in Japan from his own understanding of the consequences of ICTs on

Japanese society (Nishigaki, 2006). Rather, Nishigaki takes a critical look at the western

ontological presuppositions of a coherent self and contrasts it to the eastern idea of no self,

juxtaposing the two perspectives through the praxis of Information Ethics towards the

possibility of a “middle way”. Where western ontology considers the wellbeing of self as

primary, in contrast, Buddhist philosophy does not adhere to any confirmation of a coherent

self, looking instead to an ethics where, as in China and Thailand, the relationship between the

individual and the community takes precedence (Nishigaki, 2006).

65

Capurro explicates the difference by noting that, just as in the west, where the questions

of technological reformations concern the preservation of the ontological self in light of the

proliferation of ICTs, the eastern perspective asks how ICTs are affecting the preservation of

the community instead (Capurro, 2008). As Nishigaki qualifies, the Buddhist perception sees

self as “something that should be denied, not appreciated”. The world of Buddhism is already

abyssal to begin with, and emptiness is not seen, as per western sensibilities, in negative terms

(Nishigaki, 2006). Selfless being in Buddhism is not an undesirable condition to be dreaded, as

per the nihilist western interpretation of such, but rather the state is a natural one to be sought,

whereby selflessness allows for codependence, again dissimilar from the negative western

interpretation of such. As Nishigaki confirms:

“The Buddhist idea of ‘‘codependent arising’’ maintains that all things under the sun arise in a codependent relationship with each other. Nothing in the world exists in complete independence and isolation from others. Buddhist philosophy of the Madhyamika school (or the middle-way school) of Mahayana Buddhism asserts that since all things under the sun arise codependently, it is utterly meaningless to try to choose between subject (or mind) and object (or the world) as two alternatives, and therefore the ‘‘middle way’’ is important (Nishigaki, 2006).

To obfuscate the matter, Adams, Murata and Orito whose paper, ‘The Japanese Sense of

Information Privacy’ is supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, contend that the idea

of privacy has always existed in Japan, but that the cultural fluctuations of technology and law

have distorted the traditional cultural Japanese norms of privacy. As stated:

“In keeping with this recent trend to demonstrate that the Japanese do have concerns about privacy, we claim that there is a strong sense of information privacy in Japan which has long been a part of the culture, and in this paper we will draw on the sociological and psychological literature to provide an analysis of the mechanisms

66

contributing to the origins of the Japanese sense of information privacy, and in particular the social pressures leading to the recent adoption of laws on the protection of personal information. It is our contention that this legal development is not indicative of a new emergence of privacy concerns within Japanese society, but a response to the failures of social norms that previously guaranteed such privacy. These failures have been brought about by economic and technological shifts” (Adams, Murata and Orito, 2009).

Whereas a western initiated IIE develops an awareness of cultural variations of privacy,

one must be alert to the fact that while exploring ‘other’ cultures, it becomes all too easy to

forget one’s own place in culture as a product of culture, critically assessing the implications

thereof, for both better and worse. The question can also be asked – why should it be assumed

on the part of the ‘westerner’, a priori, that a bias exists against other cultures simply because

of a partiality towards one’s own cultural worldview, or vice versa?11 The matter is certainly

dependent on education, but perhaps at the end of it, it becomes not a matter of bias but instead

choice. It becomes also too easy to fall prey, in our contemporary globalized society, to

scapegoating through ‘west bashing’, decrying the ills of first world inflicted injuries. As the

globalized community, through the information society, is now ‘openly’ aware of the dark

history and continued influence of western weight and the oppressions imparted on the world

from the west, intercultural accountability becomes easily misplaced through misguided blame

where the ‘west’ becomes all too often conveniently and uncritically demonized. It certainly

works both ways, and as Nishigaki aptly points out in his exploration of Information Ethics in

Japan, “It is possible to say, therefore, that in a sense the West now stands in need of Eastern

ethics, while the East stands in need of Western ethics” (Nishigaki 2006, 238).

11 Christine Belley, in conversation, July 1st, 2014.

67

Information Pathologies

Capurro notes regarding both the definition of privacy and the impending state of

information overload at an intercultural scale that we yet “lack a systematic pathology of the

information society” (Capurro, 2012). This lack of a systematic pathology regarding

information overload and definitions of privacy could concern everything from the lack of an

awareness of current information monopolies to ideas of the saturation of information to the

dissolution of information including concepts of information entropy, and all of it resulting

ultimately from a lack of collective and individual accountability to the state of information,

information ecology, digital ontology, or, to use Floridi’s terminology, the infosphere. It can

thus be argued that, central to information society pathologies is the fallout of the sudden loss

of borders via ICTs between previously defined frameworks and the sudden and sometimes

violently globally exposed abyssal nature of ethics, morality and truth as being anything but

universally grounded, and that any common agreement on global ethical discourse must depend

on a fluid and moveable ethical code separated from any ‘natural’ or divinely established moral

praxis.

The above constructivist framework is not new to philosophers or to information

ethicists. Rather it is the starting point to information ethics, especially as it pertains to

Intercultural Information Ethics, a starting point as established in the original working out of

the definition of information for the field of IE by Capurro and others, based on a Heideggerian

ontological framework, especially for IIE as brought to life in Capurro’s work in

communication theory, specifically in his monumental angeletics. The dichotomy between

68

message and communication, as established in the western continental tradition of philosophy -

culminating in hermeneutics as worked out ontologically by Heidegger and perhaps

penultimately illuminated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, as well as demonstrated through the fields

of cybernetics and communication theory, informationally represented by theorists such as

Shannon, Weaver, Wiener, and McLuhan - such a constructivist framework offers the praxis

and phronēsis of Intercultural Information Ethics from western sensibilities, but as such the

representation of other philosophical methods is left wanting.

Tadashi Takenouchi approaches the task through what he terms hermeneutic

information studies or hermeneutic informatics (Takenouchi, 2004), an approach that captures

the study of information in terms of communication and dialogue, based on Heidegger’s

original re-envisioning of being-in-the-world, his dasein, where among other implications of

self and being, the recognition that an understanding of the relationship between philosophy

and language precludes ever returning to any and all preceding experience, including the Greek

understanding of logos, and while unable to return to experience and understanding as having

already been, it is also not possible simply to move on from or synthesize it, as perhaps Hegel’s

model would allow for. Thus here one encounters the hermeneutical circle, a basic

hermeneutical premise positing that any understanding as a whole is established by reference to

the individual parts, but in turn, any understanding of each individual part must be referenced

back to the whole, and that this iterative process becomes the ongoing dialogue that allows the

truth of a matter to emerge.

Heidegger’s groundbreaking work, eventually taken up by his own student, Gadamer,

whose fusion of horizons offers one means to navigating the above noted abyss, providing a

means to addressing if not at least exploring, this systematic pathology of an intercultural

69

information society, propels the task forward.12 However, as Capurro himself notes first off

regarding Gadamer’s direction, “the idea of 'horizon' (Greek: horizein=limit) is an old one”,

and secondly that “Gadamer's concept of 'fusion' of such horizon is somehow ambiguous”13.

The fusion of horizons is an idea that remains open to assessment, but one that in theory would

allow for a phronēsis, or a ‘practical wisdom’, that permits one to both participate in and reflect

upon otherness, despite the boundaries of time and the divisions of culture, by first critically

incorporating and then negating the biases that would otherwise serve as nothing more then a

mirror of the projections of one's own biased methodologies.

Heidegger and Gadamer regenerate hermeneutics (hermeneutics originally limited to

the study of the interpretation of biblical texts), reinterpreting the hermeneutical circle and the

fusion of horizons as an answer to the basic idea that truth is not housed in a ‘correct’

explication of an ‘author’s’ intention, i.e. an exegesis. Rather truth is encountered in the

receiver’s interpretation of the text itself, where the interpreter plays a part in the historical

process of interpretation, ideas of author and text being expanded in modern hermeneutics to

real world actors and real world ‘texts’. With Heidegger, the hermeneutic circle indicates the

back-and-forth between dasein and our comprehension of the world where the hermeneutic

circle demands an existential accountability on the part of each individual (Ramberg, 2013).

Gadamer’s fusion of horizons is a dialectical model that simultaneously negates both the

12 Even using the above terminology of pathology, indicating the need for a ‘study of the

diseases’ of information implies an ingrained assumption, namely that there is a question to be answered, and presuming in the first place that there is a problem that needs to be solved. While writing about an IIE must consciously maintain, as much as possible, a distance from such assumptions, recognizing the philosophical bias that necessitates such a stance to begin with (a bias not necessarily explicate in all cultures regarding the implications of ICTs in the world), it yet remains the only point at which a western-based IE can start from. This tension perhaps illustrates the condition of Gadamer’s fusion of horizons.

13 Capurro, in conversation, email: Around the World, June 8, 2014.

70

egocentric objectification of self and the universality of a closed system. As such, and while it

remains true, as Locke states, that “no man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience”,

and picking up from Schopenhauer’s critique and observation that “every man takes the limits

of his own field of vision for the limits of the world," (Schopenhauer, 2007), we are presented

with the possibility that each of us neither exists under a universally closed horizon nor in an

entirely existentially objective one.

Charles Ess speaks to the above noted foundational tenets of Intercultural Information

Ethics in terms of Ethical Pluralism. The beforehand conclusions regarding the ungrounded

nature of ethics inevitably leads to a situation where any stand on ‘truth’ and ‘ethics’

whatsoever becomes an impossibility, since it appears now that truth only exists in the eye of

the beholder. Ess notes, regarding truth and cultural differences, that:

“A first response, in the face of these irreducible differences, is that of ethical relativism. Such relativism, of course, pits itself especially against an ethical dogmatism – the usually ethnocentric belief that universal ethical standards indeed exist, that these are known to a particular person and/or ethnos, and that these standards must indeed be acknowledged as universally legitimate, i.e., as normative for all people in all times and all places. This dogmatism simply condemns all different views, claims, approaches, norms, etc., as wrong because they disagree with the one set of putatively universal truths and values. The resulting intolerance of all such different norms and claims inspires precisely the relativist effort to establish and justify tolerance towards a wide diversity of views, beliefs, practices, and cultures. The relativist can do so, however, only at the cost of actively denying the possibility of ethical standards and norms that may be compelling and legitimate for more than the individual and/or specific ethnos” (Ess, 2006).

How then does one come to terms with cultural truth? Ess points out that to succumb to

relativism is as good as abandoning any hope of arriving at an Intercultural Information Ethics.

Of the many possible implications of Ess’ above noted concern, one might consider foremost in

71

the case of relativism the emergence of the neglect of being, the loss of accountability to self

and other, a negation of the effort to face-to-face with anyone or anything outside of one’s own

‘field of vision’. Such a state may be referred to as cultural alienation. From a traditional

western perspective, the consequences of such a state to the individual self are devastating,

placing each individual as a type of ‘madman’ living in isolation with no other to reflect self,

and no way of grounding self as a reflection of otherness. Yet while the dissolution of self from

the western perspective is devastating, the Buddhist worldview, as per the preceding

arguments, seeks it. What are the implications of such disparity? Is the western conclusion truly

constrained to nihilism? Can Buddhism offer insight? Such questions are yet to be addressed,

or are currently being surveyed in the field and will formulate the evolving directions of

Intercultural Information Ethics.

Applications

Such philosophical digressions are certainly worthy of exploration, but an immediate

application of the concerns of relativism and intercultural encounters must be surveyed first.

The very crux of information ethics and thus IIE begins and ends with the prevalent, pervasive

and interconnected proliferation of information and communication technologies on a global

scale, requiring, as Ess sums it up, “agreed-upon technical standards in order to function.” It is

this simple fact, a fact that turns out not to be simple after all, which dominates the concerns of

the field. It is from here that all other concerns in Information Ethics arise. Of all the above

addressed presumptions and biases thus far outlined, the presumption that undergirds all of our

concerns comes down to a matter of functionality. While this may seem an odd pivotal point in

72

our deliberations on the nature of communication and ethics, it becomes critical to grasp that

without a basic awareness of how the functionality of ICTs (globally) assume their own built in

biases, IIE fails at a basic level.

An example of such functionality and of the philosophical deliberations of bias in ICTs

made tangible is exemplified as embedded somewhat perniciously in the very structures of both

the computer hardware and software of Information and Communication Technologies

themselves. The fact that all computer code, at least until very recently, is programmed in Latin

characters, in English, is not insignificant. Pondering the implications therein, the reader may

further consider recent scholarship that looks at how computer code - the ‘DNA’ of front-end

digital interconnectedness - is not only biased in language and script, but also by the subjective

signature, style and experience of the individual programmer. An exploration of some of the

subtleties of how one programmer codes script compared to another are disconcertingly telling,

and like any textual analysis, a lot can be gleaned about programmer biases based on the

inflections of the code itself. As per Friedman and Nissenbaum:

“From an analysis of actual cases, three categories of bias in computer systems have been developed: preexisting, technical, and emergent. Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints or considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use (Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996).

The exploration of alternative language coding options is still in its infancy, even two

decades onward, and the obstacles to any alternative are many, encompassing the fact that if

nothing else, English, as a linear languages adapts well to the hardware ‘direction’ of

computers. This is not by accident since “the computer”, at a very basic mechanical level, was

73

built around English linguistic structures. The immovable limits of intricately established forms

of hardware beg exploration. As expressed by Mark Bielby in response to the matter, “can you

imagine coding in Chinese or Japanese ideograms? Reading from right to left or bottom to top?

Or typing backwards in Arabic? There are many functional problems in trying to expand this

box…(where) apart from the fact that people have basically accepted English as the working

computer language”.14 Where English linguistic symbols are restricted to phonetic

representations, Asian linguistic symbols, for example, are semantically layered semiotic

statements in themselves. Consider the quagmire of unpacked semiotic dissonance in trying to

code backend ICT applications in symbols of “meaning” and “stories” that require previously

established historical and often mythical context? As per the Wikipedia entry on the matter,

“An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa "idea" + γράφω gráphō "to write") is a

graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by

familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to

a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms” (Wikipedia, 2014).

At the time that Friedman and Nissenbaum weighed in on the matter, ICT and Internet

use were yet novel. There was no known concerted effort to explore bias in computer systems,

and information ethics as a field was just on the horizon, but Friedman and Nissenbaum

believed even then that the exploration of computer and programming bias was critical. They

concluded regarding computers, even then, by “suggesting that freedom from bias should be

counted among the select set of criteria—including reliability, accuracy, and efficiency—

according to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged” (Friedman and

Nissenbaum, 1996). An equitable representation of interculturally influenced backend

14 Mark Bielby, in personal conversation, 2014.

74

technologies is perhaps a viable prospect. However, for the time being, one must wonder, based

on contemporary tendencies towards capitalist driven ends, to what extent programmers

perpetuate the control of information itself and thus also cultural standards by encouraging

English-based keyword search monopolies. Consider what goes into the creation of algorithms.

Just as perilous, if not more so, than the deliberately biased inclusion of preferences into

algorithms are the unaware culturally engrained biases of the programmer. In such a case, more

damage is inflicted not through malevolence, but through ignorance. While perhaps such an

unawareness cannot be avoided, as per Locke’s observation again that no one’s knowledge can

supersede her or his experience, an accountability to equally represented knowledge forums

and influences is a thing that can indeed be addressed.

Thus, slowly and insidiously, western bias has become established also in the physical

structures of a world established over time on certain cultural power structures. It is too late to

turn back, to reinvent “the box”, so to speak. Evan as we deliberate on the possibility of an IIE,

our physical world through computer-restricted “linguistics” is systematically negating and

reforming in a digital image the subtle nuances, and in fact the very foundations, of human

culture. Care must be taken to avoid promoting a kind of relativism that negates differences.

Rather, it becomes more critical than ever to highlight the vast differences of tradition and

thought that exist in the world, placing localized ways of being-in-the-world on an equitably

enabled global platform, uniting both localization and globalization, observing that the

dissolution of borders through ICTs and digital citizenship is the result not only of globalization

but perhaps even more so of localization.

75

Pluralism

It would thus seem, as per the above illustration, that simply equally allowing cultural

distinctiveness, linguistic and otherwise, is the starting place to an intercultural information

ethics. However Ess goes beyond the above standard by advocating for a pluralism that looks to

a multiethnic global city where the avoidance of such compromises is critical, specifically, the

move beyond mere tolerance or token inclusion, the consequence of which results in nothing

more than a state of ignorance. This kind of blind tolerance and its vices are not new to a

postmodern multicultural society, and as both Ess and Floridi point out, was a form of

pluralism known in ancient Greece as modus vivendi pluralism, a multiplicity that, rather than

allowing for the co-existence of cultures as it claimed to do, almost inevitably ended in forced

conflict (Ess/Floridi, 2006). The Greek modus vivendi, or ‘way of living’, is equivalent to the

modern scapegoat of the abdication to accountability commonly exemplified by the ‘agree to

disagree’ apothegm so prevalent in our present overwhelmingly rapid clash of cultures.

If such pluralism is destined to end in violent conflict, then the modus vivendi model

creates a scenario that, much like any ‘Band-Aid solution’, only postpones the inevitable. If we

surmise that the modus vivendi model seems most prevalent with the rise of suddenly and

vastly multicultural historical moments, the Hellenistic/Greco-Roman clash of cultures and our

own modern globalism being prevalent examples, and that from a psychological perspective,

modus vivendi is at a basic level a type of fear-based discrimination where the knee jerk

reaction to the fear of otherness (fear of the unknown) ends with either seclusion or, if put up

against a wall, lashing out violently, then Ess and Floridi make a valid observation that the

return to the use of force is the only possible conclusion to such pluralism.

76

Thus, rather than advocating a pedantic pluralism, Ess explores the move to a place of

authentic sharing, a type of pluralism he defines by a state of shared multiplicities. Ess notes

that if mere tolerance of differing values inevitably leads to ‘ghetto’ like divisions within a

global city, resulting again in a form of cultural alienation which inevitably leads to conflict

through force in the end despite such tolerance, then pluralism must look towards a value

structure built around not just agreements of difference, but also on a sharing of differences that

avoids the fragmentation that so often accompanies ‘tolerance’ (Ess, 2006). Ess looks towards

models of connection and ‘complimentarity’ in what he deems an active engagement that

results in both sides connecting through self and identity (identifying) but doing so without the

negation of ‘irreducible differences’ (Ess, 2006). The goal is irreducibilily not irreconcilability.

Thus, if one can abstract Ess’ understanding of pluralism into a simple equation, it might be

posited that modus vivendi is to irreconcilability as complimentarity is to irreducibilily. Based

on Ess’ thought, it appears that the difference between the two modes of pluralism center

around three facets, accountability, encounter, and edification (education). Or in Ess’ own

terms, “complementarity relationships preserve and enhance the irreducible differences that

define distinctive individuals, cultures, and civilizations” (Ess, 2006).

Ess draws the charge of an intercultural information ethics further in, looking to the

origins of western tradition and philosophy itself in order to escape the western tradition, or at

least to offer perspective, engaging Plato and Aristotle as forbearers of the above pluralism

whereby Plato’s cybernetes (the origin of Wiener’s Cybernetics, and thus of Information

Ethics) and Aristotle’s phronēsis (practical wisdom) offer more than just a methodology to IIE,

but also a common starting place for IIE through parallels to eastern, specifically Confucian,

thought. Ess quotes Joseph Chan as making the crucial point regarding the similarity between

77

what Plato and Aristotle understood as practical wisdom and what the Confucians deemed rén,

the Confusion virtue of shared humanness or shared experience that focuses on the connection

or relationship between two subjects of an action. As Chan summarizes the manifestation of

rén, “If after careful and conscientious deliberation, two persons equipped with rén come up

with two different or contradictory judgments and courses of action, Confucians would tell us

to respect both of the judgments” (Chan, 2003, 137). This deliberation is the very act of Greek

phronēsis, where rather than employing an uncritical tolerance, and thus avoidance of

differences that creates a cultural ‘peace’, instead an accountable engagement is pursued and a

pointed and deliberate encounter results in a mutual edification of Self and Other based on

irreducible differences, not irreconcilable differences.

Conclusion

While traditional Information Ethics assumes a western founded philosophy and an

intrinsic positive value to ideas such as privacy, complimented by democratic and capitalist

concerns of ownership and rights, and assumes a fundamental and existential self, IIE is

confronted now with the undoing of everything that IE has thus far established under its

western tutelage, including the value and nature of self! If given the space and time to revaluate

the structures of the field, an IIE might be easier navigational terrain. However, the culmination

and conjoined effects of media and ICTs, functions that are necessary and critical in of

themselves (from a western perspective), through being swept up in the storm of exponential

self-perpetuating affordances, allow for a malignant dissemination and experience of

information as in the case of WikiLeaks and other en-masse exposures of and access to

78

information, culminating in a premature synthesis of cultures and forcing the hand of natural

dialectics in perhaps very unnatural ways. While the larger scope of IE readily looks to wider

implications of the address of the en-masse arrival of ICTs, pause must first be afforded to

working out an IIE whereby the sudden sharing of a cultural-techo world awaits a fair

advocacy.

79

Chapter 4: The Heritage of WikiLeaks

Overview

Recently enlightening the realm of Information Ethics are all of the consequences,

ethical dialogues and politics of that which currently resides under, and from, the WikiLeaks

phenomenon, where ‘WikiLeaks’, for the purposes of the following thesis, is more than the sum

of its parts, being a symbol for an information society, and the culmination of the entirety of

western philosophy, idealism and history, an audacious claim that will be argued below. A

thorough exploration of WikiLeaks first as a progeny of the concept of the wiki, or

collaborative knowledge, is addressed, and a platform is established through what can be

termed wiki studies and from it WikiLeaks studies, and secondly, a pedestal is raised upon

which WikiLeaks is placed as both a symbol and dialectical manifestation of information

culture. It will be argued that the phenomenon underlying the materialization of WikiLeaks is

both the inevitable result of and encapsulation of the social dialectics and information

pathologies arising from a contemporary information society whose roots reach back through

western history to the politics and philosophies of ancient Greece. It will be reasoned that

collaborative knowledge and Wiki Studies as envisioned through the technological and

philosophical praxis of the field of Information Ethics becomes not only an applied branch of

the field, but representative of the entirety of the Information Ethics prerogative.

Forming the above argument, it is posited that the exploration of an ethics for the

WikiLeaks phenomenon can be included in the corpus of applied ethics within the field of

80

Information Ethics via practical and theoretical roots traced through Library Ethics as much as

Media Ethics, where Library Ethics is the grandfather of the field of Information Ethics. As

such, part four advocates a place for the study of Collaborative Knowledge Ethics, symbolized

by WikiLeaks, among the established but evolving corpus of Computer Ethics, Cyber Ethics,

Media Ethics, Bioinformation Ethics, and Business Information Ethics as an original ethics of

Information Ethics. Defining WikiLeaks within a Collaborative Knowledge Ethics thus draws

on philosophies of Intellectual Freedom, Social Responsibility, Access to Information, and

challenge to Censorship, and compares and contrasts the ALA Bill of Rights to the mandate of

WikiLeaks as being the same mandate (Zimmer, 2011).

WikiLeaks and Ethics

WikiLeaks, upon its inception, took the main concerns of the field of Information

Ethics, those being privacy, ownership, and so forth, and violently catapulted them into both a

subcultural and intercultural pandemonium, baring a wanting comprehension of the meta-

ethical landscape of the founding concerns of IE, a vacuity that comes to light in Intercultural

Information Ethics, one that was scarcely perceivable beforehand but through WikiLeaks is

now exposed in all its fragilities and failings, imploring a resolution to an assumed end, namely

the unfounded reality of the various considerations and definitions of privacy, self, information

or lack thereof. In typical western fashion, we (who?) tend to think of the WikiLeaks

phenomenon in capitalist terms only, i.e. a clash between intellectual property and intellectual

freedom. It is however both naïve and dangerous to do so. While the crux of WikiLeaks from

the perspective of first world cultures is limited to addressing merely a singular and rather

81

superficial question in comparison, namely whether or not Snowden, Manning and Assange are

criminals or heroes, the rest of the globe, faced with the reality of a post-WikiLeaks world, is

beset with numerous considerations of a day-to-day existence under a new and often uninvited

brutality of an ICT driven reality, more so, as will be argued, then previous to the inception of

WikiLeaks.

As the name suggests, WikiLeaks was originally founded on a wiki publication model,

a model that allowed for a non-moderated and anonymous submission of otherwise inaccessible

documents. However, while WikiLeaks originally represented itself under a wiki format, it can

be questioned whether or not it legitimately falls under the wiki label since it has not and likely

will not achieve the collaborative flow and function of established wiki models such as

Wikipedia. As longtime Wikipedia writer Pete Forsyth states,

“WikiLeaks doesn't have very much to do with wikis at all. I don't think any broad consideration of wikis would benefit by considering WikiLeaks. There are certainly ethical questions around WikiLeaks, but they are very different from the ones around wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. As I understand it, WikiLeaks benefited from a perception of being driven by a broad community, and probably chose its name for that reason. But the perception, I believe, is far from the reality.”15

Whether legitimately a wiki or not, WikiLeaks discontinued its wiki model in 2010,

replacing it instead with a traditional publication model, thus closing volunteer edits and

submissions. While closing its open access structure, WikiLeaks and its whistleblowers

continue to process numerous classified documents annually, but under censored conditions,

15 Pete Forsyth, in conversation, Quora, March 10, 2014. https://www.quora.com/Has-any-

philosopher-or-philosophy-analyzed-the-nature-of-the-wiki-phenomenon-including-Wikipedia-WikiLeaks-If-so-what-are-we-looking-at

82

abdicating on their founding objective to provide open unmediated access to information. As

admitted to on their homepage, “When information comes in, our journalists analyse the

material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society.” The

questions must be raised. Who are the journalists analyzing said information? What are their

biases? And ultimately, how does the analysis of the information present once interpreted by

WikiLeaks? What is WikiLeaks version of the ‘significance to society’ of any particular piece

of information? Also admitted to on the WikiLeaks homepage, “Our news stories are in the

comfortable presentation style of Wikipedia, although the two organisations are not otherwise

related. Unlike Wikipedia, random readers can not edit our source documents.” Such

considerations come into play in developing an ethics for WikiLeaks.

The wiki argument aside, WikiLeaks, for better or worse, has had far greater an impact

globally on challenging, changing, and spotlighting the place and nature of power structures

pertaining to the life cycle of information control than any other collaborative knowledge

model. Despite the contention by some that WikiLeaks does not qualify as meeting the

standards of wiki collaboration, it yet stands as a paradigm of the nature of the ebb and flow of

knowledge access, exemplifying a phenomenon whereby all information, however initially

equally accessible to all citizens of the world sharing a common globe, eventually becomes

monopolized, restricted, censored, or controlled. While the following thesis explores an ethics

for WikiLeaks in terms of its actual existence as a website and an organization, a parsing of

the term ‘WikiLeaks’ itself herein represents an equation whereby the first half of the term,

wiki, stands in for ‘quick collaborative knowing’ and Leaks underscores a phenomenon of

‘uncontained’ or ‘escaped’, encompassing a cultural phenomenon that can be both represented

83

and parsed in the terminology of ‘WikiLeaks’, the exploration of which hopefully becomes

clear with the concluding arguments below.

The WikiLeaks saga has, since its inception, opened the door to an unprecedented

philosophical and ethical quagmire regarding the nature of information and information control.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has demonstrated, if unintentionally, that while the

mission statement of WikiLeaks is seemingly forthright, an established ethics for its

foundations and operation is lacking. What is the ethical role of WikiLeaks? Assange himself

has acknowledged the iniquities of the uncritical release of confidential information, though he

believes that the potential devastating consequences meted out on innocents pales in

comparison to the lives saved due to the actions of WikiLeaks and whistleblowers. Assange

also claims that the proof of burden remains on the opposition to prove that any innocents have

yet been affected by the WikiLeaks releases (Khatchadourian, 2010).

The question of the need for an ethics for WikiLeaks may thus present as incongruous

considering the very detailed ethical and moral mandate already worked out and advocated for

by Assange himself. Why the question at all? Whether one agrees with the WikiLeaks mandate

or not, the entire project is seemingly built on ethics. According to WikiLeaks, as stated on its

homepage, the “broader principles on which (WikiLeaks) is based are the defence of freedom

of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the

support of the rights of all people to create new history.” The ethical discourse supporting the

venture is certainly there. According to common interpretations of the WikiLeaks mandate,

information wants to be free, particularly when the information in question pertains to the

government.

84

To begin to understand where and why one might question the lack of an ethical

foundation for WikiLeaks, one must first address the common appropriations and assumed

moralities of WikiLeaks. It would be fair to acknowledge that a WikiLeaks ethics, as

established by WikiLeaks, would claim a.) That the more information that is available, the

more efficient societies are at making collectively beneficial democratic choices, and b.)

Whenever information can assist citizens of democratic states to make informed choices and

politically engage in the decisions that affect them, that information should be openly available

and transparent, and c.) WikiLeaks exists to offer alternatives and opposition to mainstream

information access and control. Thus, information leaked by WikiLeaks serves society and the

individual pursuit of knowledge and WikiLeaks is therefore an ethical entity.16

Despite its grandstanding, a critical assessment of WikiLeaks, it mission and its

history reveals a seemingly contradictory (or even non-existent) ethic in regards to how its

administrators handle their prerogative. While their own mandate requires transparency in what

they themselves do, as well as obviously their expectation of the institutions and authorities

they critique, their history reveals a tale of internal dissonance, while the restructuring of

players and mandates seem to signal a less than concrete ethical foundation and even a less than

thought out organizational structure behind the WikiLeaks directive (Bates 2010, Spiegel

2010). However, the purpose of the following discourse is not so concerned with the above

conflicts per se, but rather with the wider implications of information and knowledge control,

as scripted through WikiLeaks, and the fallout of such.

As the administration of WikiLeaks has in recent years seemingly taken on an ethical

awareness of the consequences of the un-critical release of vast amounts of sensitive

16 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation, email, August 16th, 2014.

85

information, and have not only placed parameters on their publication model, but have also

begun to “scrub” sensitive elements from documents such as the names of individuals prior to

release, all towards maintaining social responsibility, and in addition have taken to pre-

moderating submitted material, choosing to release some material while not other documents

(Zimmer, 2011), one must question a number of things. Namely, can WikiLeaks, with a

minimalist and largely voluntary staff, be expected to reasonably and in a timely manner pre-

moderate such vast amounts of information prior to its release? And more importantly, can

WikiLeaks maintain their own mandate towards the defense of freedom of speech and media

publishing if their own structure falls into the fray of censorship and bias? But most

importantly, the question must be asked: what does the manifestation of WikiLeaks symbolize,

culturally and philosophically? What does ‘WikiLeaks’ mean? The move from the open wiki

model to a controlled model, in itself, embraces numerous implications indicative of a wider

philosophical inquiry, as will be expounded upon throughout this thesis.

While privacy is one of the founding pillars and most critical debates to IE, it will be

posited here that the issue of privacy was not fully understood in its broadest terms, especially

(if at all) at an intercultural level, until the arrival of WikiLeaks. No single ‘symbol’ has

singlehandedly altered the landscape of global and local considerations of the philosophy of

privacy or of information itself more so than the zenith of factors that make up the WikiLeaks

phenomenon and its fallout. WikiLeaks is both a symbol and a dialectical manifestation of the

malignant but inevitable consequence and result of the pressurized and premature ‘forcing’ of

an otherwise natural ebb and flow of the life of information, encompassing a theoretical and

historical lineage of the entirety of the founding concerns in Information Ethics as preceding

WikiLeaks. The heritage of WikiLeaks is a complex one, its parentage not yet revealed. The

86

attempt to do so will be the concluding task of drawing the current history of Information

Ethics.

WikiLeaks and Information Ethics

WikiLeaks’ ethics (as established by WikiLeaks) and Information Ethics cross paths in

three places. Firstly, they intersect at the place of critical analysis on the part of information

ethicists of the presumed moral and ethical foundations to WikiLeaks’ self established ethics.

The Euro-centric presumption that more information is better for society and individual citizens

prefaces WikiLeaks’ ethics, as it prefaces Information Literacies (expounded on below),

foundations that are not shared interculturally.17 Secondly, they intersect on common

foundations of the philosophy and application of emerging Information and Communication

Technologies (ICTs). As per the ‘How WikiLeaks Works’ section of the homepage of

WikiLeaks, “WikiLeaks has combined high-end security technologies with journalism and

ethical principles. Like other media outlets conducting investigative journalism, we accept (but

do not solicit) anonymous sources of information. Unlike other outlets, we provide a high

security anonymous drop box fortified by cutting-edge cryptographic information

technologies” (WikiLeaks, 2014). Thirdly, WikiLeaks and IE intersect in their common cultural

heritage, namely the same cultural dialectics that precede both Media Ethics and Library

Ethics, where while both media culture and library culture are two pieces of a foundation for a

WikiLeaks Ethics, it is with Library Ethics that the present thesis is concerned. The exploration

17 Geoffrey Rockwell, in conversation, email, August 16th, 2014.

87

of a theoretical foundation for a WikiLeaks Ethics is scarce, and more so as far as established in

the praxis of Information Ethics. All the same, some initial progress has been made. A brief

overview of the different approaches to a WikiLeaks Ethics in IE is offered below.

Kay Mathiesen opens up the discussion with her "Wikileaks and Methods in

Information Ethics" where she reviews the question of WikiLeaks ethics against established

philosophies, including utilitarianism as well as Kant’s categorical imperative, critiquing any

return to utilitarian ideas of the greatest good for all and universal standards since it is unclear

in regards to WikiLeaks and an ICT based society exactly what the ‘interests of all’ are, as well

as to the abyssal, or ungrounded nature of morality in an intercultural era. She advocates

instead for a multi-factor ethics that, similar to Ess’ Pluralism, looks to addressing a balance

through specific addresses since “there is not one principle or value to rule them all”

(Mathiesen, 2010).

Like Mathiesen, David Woolwine also critiques the ALA’s use of utilitarianism for its

absolutist language, where the Bill of Right’s allegiance to strict utilitarianism presents a

dangerous scenario that opens the door to the very abuses it so fervently tries to negate.

Namely, and especially in our contemporary age of government surveillance and national

security, a utilitarian creed of the greatest good for the greatest number becomes a gateway to

authorities controlling information, invading privacy and restricting access, all based on “the

greatest good” of national security, where national security is in the best interests of all.

Michael Zimmer, one of the leading scholars of the field of Information Ethics, was

the first to draw together the mandates of WikiLeaks and the ALA’s Bill of Rights as being the

same mandate in his ‘WikiLeaks and Information Ethics’ (Zimmer, 2013), the premise of which

supports much of the remainder of this thesis. Zimmer’s research into WikiLeaks highlighted

88

early on the transforming nature of WikiLeaks and its relationship to information flow and

information control. As gleaned from Zimmer, it can be argued that three distinct stages, or

philosophies, arise from the life of WikiLeaks. These three stages can be seen in terms of the

life cycle of information control, highlighting the impact of power structures as they attach

themselves to the various stages of information flow, couched in a chronology of anti-

establishment and establishment.

Zimmer contrasts the original purpose of WikiLeaks, whose “primary interest is in

exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the

Middle East”, a very anti-establishment sentiment, to a second-stage evolution (which

corresponds chronologically to WikiLeak’s switch from the original wiki publication model to

the more traditional moderated publication model) which clarifies that “The broader principles

on which our work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the

improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to

create new history”, a very noble goal indeed. Thus the subtle transformation in the intent and

goals of an anti-establishment to a moral convention rises and posits already the insidious

nature of information as power, where power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The last stage of WikiLeaks is, of course, the complete transformation from anti-establishment

through an eventual moral imperative to a new establishment, a cumulative stage perhaps not

yet obvious in the life of WikiLeaks, but one which all the same becomes inevitable, as per

similar examples of the relationship between power and information highlighted throughout

history. This third stage, while emphasized through WikiLeaks, is symbolic of the nature of the

modern collaborative knowledge model and the power structures contained therein, from

Wikipedia to concepts of open source and ‘copyleft’.

89

Patrick Backhaus and Gordana Dodig Crnkovic of the School of Innovation, Design

and Engineering at Mälardalen University, Sweden have presented an excellent assessment of

WikiLeaks and ethics, viewing an ethics for WikiLeaks through the lens of three different types

of ethical approaches, the Utilitarian Approach, the Virtue Ethics Approach, and lastly, what

they deem the ‘Information Ethics’ Approach. Approaching WikiLeaks from a Utilitarian

approach, according to this assessment, Backhaus and Crnkovic consider both sides of a

utilitarian application. Regarding the consequences of the WikiLeaks release of classified

publications, they note first that transparency leads to a better understanding, thus allowing for

an informed opinion or education of the largest number of people to the mutual benefit of all

involved. On the other hand, noting the potential threat to national security, the release of

damaging information can “lead to a society with decreased institutional integrity which may

eventually result in self-censorship, decreased communication, more technical restrictions and

so in less freedom.” In their Information Ethics approach, they too have deemed the task of

finding a WikiLeaks Ethics as necessitated within the praxis of the field of Information Ethics,

specifically through an application of similar foundations as those laid out by Capurro and

Floridi. As they state, it is through “The Information Ethics Approach (that) we can study how

information is revealed/communicated in the networks of agents.”

However, perhaps most relevant to the below task in the intersection of WikiLeaks

and Information Ethics in Pramod K. Nayar’s WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures, and

Digital Parrhesia, where a cultural and intercultural focus is afforded WikiLeaks. As per

Nayar, WikiLeaks “cannot be identified just with an individual Julian Assange, even though he

pops up as soon as one opens the website. Assange is a messenger, he is neither messiah nor the

message. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he has become identified as the ‘face’ of WL.

90

However, to do this is to personalize-individualise what is really a cultural phenomenon”

(Nayar, 2010). Such an insight supports the premise of the following thesis. As Nayar states,

WikiLeaks “locates itself in a global cultural apparatus: the universal movement for Human

and related Rights. What WL represents is a new culture of information that dovetails into two

other cultural practices: whistleblowing and parrhesia (truth-telling)” (Nayar, 2010).

The connections between the concept of parrhesia and Information Ethics are, perhaps

unbeknownst to Nayar, the very foundations to the field as established by Capurro himself long

before a common knowledge of Information Ethics even existed. As Capurro now states,

“Information ethics has a long and a short history. The long history in the Western tradition

goes back to the question of parrhesia or freedom of speech in ancient Greece” (Capurro,

2005). Parrhesia advocates, as worked out through the long history of western philosophy, both

an ontological foundation to “information” and an existential accountability. Capurro reminds

us “Parrhesia is thus not just based on what one believes to be the truth but implies a personal

as well as a public commitment to this belief. The knowledge of the believer is linked to his or

her being” (Capurro, 2005). Thus one begins to understand where an ethics for WikiLeaks

dwells, and how the claims of Assange find a possible grounding.

Following Nayar’s insights, an ethics for WikiLeaks is herein established on an

existential accountability, and is founded, as was western philosophy per ancient Greece, on the

well established Greek concept of parrhesia, the idea that ethics must be situated in the

ontological vulnerability of its speaker, where to speak boldly exemplifies an authenticity in the

face of personal exposure and/or sacrifice, not just of life, but of being itself. And while being

becomes intimately associated with its “informing”, information ceases to exist outside of an

ontological forming of its being as intimately connected to the informer. In other words,

91

information only exists in the moment of its speaker, of the dialogue itself, of it being spoken.

‘It’ (a mere potentiality) is otherwise a non-entity, not even constituting data and remains un-

informed and abyssal, a concept explored further in information theory and in Capurro’s

angeletics. As Capurro says regarding the subject of information, “Her being must be of the

kind to make possible such a parrhesiastic utterance” (2005).

A WikiLeaks Ethics is thus situated in a historical framework of information flow and

the power structures thereof, and timely manifested in a moment of unguarded information

where accountability not only becomes a choice but a necessity. Where collaborative

knowledge and WikiLeaks are both manifestations of a culture of appropriated knowledge, an

Information Ethics becomes ungrounded, demanding at the failure of all else, the necessity of a

personal account to information as being.

Collaborative Information, Knowledge and Monopoly

Cunningham’s Law states that ‘the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is

not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer’. The reference is to none other than Ward

Cunningham, inventor of the wiki concept. The implication implies an outcome of dialectics,

in this case the tendency towards an evolution of debate as inevitably resulting in

collaborative knowledge, where thesis and antithesis result in synthesis, the living

manifestation of Hegel’s dialectic. Cunningham first introduced the wiki in 1994, the term

‘wiki’ the Hawaiian term for quick, a very apt and telling label revealing an accelerated turn

in the nature of knowledge and information flow where the exponential increase in the speed

of the synthesis of information points towards not just quick knowledge building, but

ungrounded information flow.

92

Scholars in the field of Information Ethics first weighed in on assessing the nature of

the wiki in 2004 when Anja Ebersbach and Markus Glaser wrote an article on the wiki for the

International Journal of Information Ethics (IJIE) entitled Towards Emancipatory Use of a

Medium: The Wiki, a descriptive article that attempted to define and assess the philosophical

and social nature of the wiki. Criticizing popular ideas of alternative media inspired by the

advent of the Internet and specifically the wiki, Ebersbach and Glaser insightfully foresaw the

nature of collaborative knowledge building as a temporal stage in the life of information

rather than an end. They remind us that the concept of collaboration defining the wiki is not

really that new other than the expediency of its utility, nor is the transformation from

collaboration to monopoly and control. Referring to the misled and idealist hopes that first

arose alongside the concept of the wiki, they point out that “with commercialisation, there also

came centralization and control” (Ebersbach and Glaser, 2004). Both Wikipedia and

WikiLeaks, as unrelated as the two are in popular scholarly opinion, qualify.

Collaborative information and knowledge models encapsulate the contemporary cultural

postmodern understanding of knowledge as freed from authoritative and peer reviewed

standards. The nature of collaborative information and knowledge models such as the wiki

concept, wikipedia, wikimedia, open source, big data, copyleft, crowdsource, social media,

knowledge commons, creative commons, and collective intelligence are telling of the nature

of information dialectics, information monopoly and established power structures.

Collaborative knowledge models are the contemporary face of information dissemination and

control, a product of cultural dialectics that first attempts to free information, only to

monopolize it in the end, a pattern not exclusive to the digital age. To understand the above

cyclic nature of power structures, we start by comparing two supposedly opposite standards of

93

authoritative knowledge, those being on one hand the traditional peer reviewed journal and on

the other hand the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. While the traditional

argument would posit that the peer-reviewed journal is representative of highly qualified

information, it would insist that collaborative information and knowledge, as per the wiki

phenomenon, is neither qualified nor quantifiable. However, the argument will here be made

that both peer-reviewed information and collaborative information are susceptible to the same

cyclic nature of monopoly and control and that the state of transparency of either at any given

time is a matter of the waxing and waning of cultural dialectics. Whereas peer-reviewed

information circles become closed systems of dead scholasticism where information often

becomes nothing more than self-serving affirmations of already established parameters, so too

is the wiki phenomenon, as exemplified by Wikipedia, while on one hand a catalyst to

information dissolution through saturation, on the other hand a monopolized product of a

select few (Mehegan, 2006).

Information Entropy

From the preceding context, the following discourse will propose that the concerns of

Collaborative Knowledge Ethics and WikiLeaks Studies are not just with matters of privacy,

intellectual freedom, access to information, anonymity, transparency and intellectual property,

but also with negligence and accountability on the part of both government and individuals to

the state of information, a state that under pathological conditions encourages and allows for

information dissolution in the absence of information guardians or keepers. Whereby

negligence towards both self and information encourages and allows for information

94

dissolution, or, using the language of the Philosophy of Information, entropy of the infosphere,

a full existential accountability to self and information will allow for a recovery of what Floridi

deems the infosphere, and an understanding and engagement of Capurro’s information

pathologies can begin to take place.

Spence’s argument for the fifth estate is telling in terms of the dissolution of

information, whereby every citizen becomes a journalist. What happens to Information when

every citizen is a journalist and all information is available en masse to be disseminated? If one

posits that all citizens cannot disseminate all information, can the exposure of all information

still inform? Can it still in form? One of the field foundations for understanding information is

that of metaphysics (in forming) where questions are asked about the nature of form and

knowledge. Another approach to information theory asks about interpretation. Can saturation

and thus dissolution negate the formation of ideas through a failure of dissemination and

interpretation? As stated early in part one, such a scenario becomes conceivable when

information ceases to belong to authoritative power structures, becoming an uncomfortable

abyssal blank slate that necessitates an existential accountability. It is in light of this absence

that collaborative knowledge societies, uncomfortable in such an abyss, offer no resistance to

the return to information monopolies, since the return to a denial of self becomes all the more

easier. The nature of such questions is a large part of both IE and IIE.

Floridi’s Philosophy of Information (PI) introduces information ecology as a prima facie

philosophy. His Philosophy of Information is founded on ontological principles that recognize

the moral agency of all information entities, not only human beings. Charles Ess considers

Floridi’s naturalistic philosophy as marking a noteworthy era in the development of the six

decade long legacy of Information and Computer Ethics, where the all-encompassing system of

95

Floridi’s ecology based Philosophy of Information brings together both western and eastern

philosophical traditions while at the same time reconciling various theologies with secular

worldviews under the umbrella of ethical pluralism; no easy task, by any means (Ess, 2009). In

Floridi’s PI, ‘Information’ holds a privileged position as “primary ontological category and

constituent” (Ess, 2009). Floridi holds that “moral actions are the result of complex interactions

among distributed systems integrated on a scale larger than the single human being”, and that

moral actions either add to or prevent the entropy of the infosphere (Floridi, 2008, p 198).

Can Floridi’s Information Ethics Group (IEG), an institutional foundation for

Information Ethics, created in 2001 to bring together theoretical concerns of the field and

provide a necessary foundation for an ethics for WikiLeaks? The IEG, a partnership between

the Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of

Oxford, purposes to establish a theoretical field for addressing all of “computer science,

information science, ICT studies, information theory, computer/information ethics, logic,

epistemology, philosophy of science, and the history of ideas” (IEG, 2014), establishing it as

the Philosophy of Information (PI). The IEG has since its creation, subsumed ‘Information

Ethics’ as a field into the larger scope of the new field of the Philosophy of Information.

However, the Philosophy of Information, at least from a chronological perspective, and

arguably from a theoretical perspective, is an evolution of Information Ethics. The theoretical

foundations of the Philosophy of Information, by its own mandate, “to develop a clear

understanding of the nature, scope and life of information” (IEG, 2014), is, as highlighted by

Capurro, a reworking of the roots of Information Ethics itself. As Capurro states in his essay

On Floridi’s Metaphysical Foundation of Information Ecology, “Floridi placed information

ethics within the larger horizon of the “philosophy of information” (Floridi 2004, Herold 2004),

96

a field whose roots, at least as far as the concept of information is concerned, go back to core

concepts of Western philosophy in Ancient Greece, namely idea, eidos, morphe and typos.

(Capurro 1978, Capurro and Hjørland 2003).”

Like the internal battles of WikiLeaks itself, the field of Information Ethics (especially

as regards the Philosophy of Information) is also divided in its foundational precepts. Capurro

challenges Floridi’s assumption of an autonomous infosphere by reaffirming an abyssal and

hermeneutical revealing of information and Being against Floridi’s metaphysical foundation,

opting instead for an ontology that requires an ethics similar to what Levinas describes as the

face-to-face, or the responsibility to Other (Capurro, 2006). Capurro points out that Floridi’s

ontology of Infosphere lacks cohesion, and that the concept of ‘information ecology’, pre-

existing Floridi’s Infosphere, is “a dimension of everyday life of millions and even billions of

people, and hence it is not a particular “sphere” separated from it” (Capurro, 2008). As noted at

the beginning of this thesis, ontology in Information Ethics is currently being worked out in an

ongoing debate (and “perhaps irresoluble” debate, according to Ess) between Floridi’s

philosophical naturalism in information ecology and Capurro’s Heideggarian based

Intercultural Information Ethics. Ess believes that it is within the dialectical nature of this

debate that the future development of Information Ethics resides (Ess, 2009).

How does and should ideas of information entropy as used in IE, per Floridi and

others, be applied? Is Information Entropy in IE synonymous or not with the classical

understanding of information entropy in terms of Shannon’s mathematical theory of

communication? Is information entropy in IE compatible with Capurro’s theory of Message

and Messenger? Angeletics and the Philosophy of Information, as adjuncts of Information

Ethics, open the door to ontological and metaphysical re-interpretations of Being (Capurro,

97

Floridi, 2007, 2009), but in what terms, philosophically or mathematically do we begin the

process? Where the Philosophy of Information attributes all information entities, not only

human, with an equal moral obligation towards the determination of universal entropy, through

positive or negative interactions (Hongladarom, 2008), angeletics looks at message and

communication as inevitably arising from the historical dialectics of a hermeneutical process. It

will be posed, for arguments sake, that information entropy, for the purposes of this thesis,

means the loss of value in data as potential information through a process of saturation where

dissolution, as the result of an increase in speed and exposure of data, inhibits or prevents the

communication of information.

Perhaps key to the question of WikiLeaks and information dissolution is a notion

posited early on in the development of field of Information Ethics, one that could be said to

have influenced its current and complex philosophical dialectics, a notation made by Capurro

on Langefors’ infological equation, arising out of Capurro’s original lectures from 1985, where

as quoted from Langefors by Capurro in his Epistemology and Information Science, Langefors

states:

“If data are what is handled by computers and information is what is to be served to people, then information is totally distinct in kind from data. Information is of the same kind as knowledge and data must form sentences in some language. Data inform if they bring about changes in the knowledge of the users. This will only happen if the data (or sentences) are formed in correspondence with the knowledge structure (S) of the user. Data, or sentences, do not 'contain' information, they only 'represent' information fragments and the information becomes established only if these fragments are brought into connection with a knowledge 'whole'” (Langefors 1982).

Floridi talks about “a substantial erosion of the right to ignore: in an increasingly

porous society, it becomes progressively less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by

98

the easily predictable events and hardly ignorable facts. And therefore an exponential increase

in common knowledge: this is a technical term from epistemic logic, which basically refers to

the case in which everybody not only knows that p but also knows that everybody knows that

everybody knows..., that p. In other words, (a) and (b) will also be the case because meta-

information about how much information is, was or should have been available will become

overabundant. From (a) and (b) it follows that, in the future, ( c) we shall witness a steady

increase in agent’s responsibilities. ICT’s are making humanity increasingly responsible,

morally speaking, for the way the world is, will and should be.”

The use and understanding of the concept of entropy in Information Ethics becomes

convoluted, best illustrated in the various debates between Capurro and Floridi on the matter.

Floridi understands entropy as “a metaphysical term (that) means Non-Being or Nothingness.”

Floridi’s entropy, as Metaphysical entropy, “is increased when Being, interpreted

informationally, is annihilated or degraded.” Capurro in turn notes that “Floridi believes that he

discovered the notion of information (and its relation to 'form') and even the philosophy of

information”. Capurro states that, “With regard to entropy and some key metaphysical concepts

such as "Non- Being" the critical reader might remember that these are really not new issues,

neither in science nor in philosophy” (Capurro, 2008).

Does the speed and increased exposure of ‘data’ bring about saturation to such an

extent that data (as potential information…but not even data until it is interpreted as such)

becomes ungrounded in our capacity to receive it, and thus not able to be communicated,

causing information entropy or the dissolution of information? Is there even such a thing as

‘raw data’, or does the basic form of data itself require an ontological connection to a ‘speaker’

in order to exist? A common theme among information and computer scientists is the inevitable

99

singularity of machine intelligence surpassing the intelligence of its creator. Is it conceivable to

understand that singularity as being the point at which the sum of all information created

surpasses the totality of our ability, as creators of said information, to re-interpret it and thus

communicate it? Perhaps Capurro’s cultural alienation is the face of message dissolution,

whereby grounded information becomes unaccounted for, becoming again a mere potentiality.

Is cultural alienation, due to an abdication of accountability to our information, the first step

towards message dissolution?

Introducing two possible relationships between accountability and information entropy,

those being monopoly and saturation, it is here posited, exemplified within the collaborative

information and knowledge model and WikiLeaks phenomena, that it is information dissolution

through saturation that best exemplifies the condition of message dissolution, affirming that it

is neither monopolized knowledge nor collaborative knowledge that initiates the dissolution of

information, but rather a personal abdication of accountability to information through cultural

alienation. Defending information saturation as the catalyst to information entropy, WikiLeaks,

as exemplified in the above synopsis, functions as a symbol for an Information Ethics whereby

an accountability of self to the infosphere becomes central. The question is thus asked:

Ontologically, as information entities, how is accountability to self and other maintained in

light of information entropy due to information dissolution? Through information overload,

does Floridi’s ‘information entity’ get placed within a paradoxical conundrum where it can no

longer be in order to become? When through speed of exposure, of coming-into-being (its ‘in

formation’), information (as data) can no longer touch the ground; can no longer become static,

then what can be said about accountability to information? (Floridi, 1999, 2002, Floridi and

Sanders, 2001, 2002).

100

Libraries and Library Ethics

Looking at Floridi’s information ecology, Capurro’s theory of message, and Samek’s

dialectic of intellectual freedom and social responsibility, the concluding task of this thesis is to

outline a heritage of WikiLeaks and to thus establish an ethics for WikiLeaks as founded in

traditional Library Ethics, where WikiLeaks is a reflection of library ethics, libraries ideally

being a mirrored reflection of society itself both past and present, and WikiLeaks the inevitable

conclusion to the choices of each individual in our information society rather than merely the

choice of a handful of dissidents who expose government information.

As demonstrated previously in part two of our history, the move from librarianship into

philosophy and back again is largely what defines the field of IE. As such, one of the most

pertinent questions addressed within Librarianship is the very philosophical inquiry into

whether or not every issue is a library issue (Berry, 2011). It is posited here that the existence

of Libraries should not, as presumed, represent the mandate of an institutional ideology, that of

libraries, nor are they a depository for materials or technologies based on a prescribed

collections directive, but rather the library is a unique phenomenon that stands out among all

other societal institutions. The library is a mirrored representation of society. Ideally, the library

is society in its entirety, both past and contemporary. Within such a context, the continuity

between WikiLeaks and Collaborative Knowledge Ethics will be traced back through concerns

in Librarianship and Information Ethics, establishing WikiLeaks Studies and collaborative

information and knowledge Studies properly at home within Information Ethics.

101

Opinion on the actions of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is widespread, not only

between the opinion of government and citizen, but also between the players of the field of

Information Ethics. Robert Hauptman calls WikiLeaks activities an “abomination” explicitly

asserting, “offering the world a treasure trove of unvetted proscribed documents embarrasses,

harms, and kills” (Hauptman, 2011). On the other hand, Edward Spence writing in the

International Review of Information Ethics unequivocally states that according to “national and

international journalism codes of ethics, Julian Assange, in his assumed role as a social

journalist, has committed no wrong, at least no moral wrong, in disseminating documents

concerning diplomatic classified information, if the dissemination of such information was in

the public interest” (Spence, 2012). At two ends of the spectrum with any number of shades of

grey in between the issue cannot be resolved by those whose place it is to address it, namely

information ethicists.

But therein lies the crux of the matter and a presumption unaccounted for, a

presumption that uncritically assumes and places the WikiLeaks phenomenon at home within

the scope of Information Ethics, as though the establishment for such a placement has a priori

been determined. It is the above scenario, a spectrum of not only disagreement, but also vast

dissimilarity in approach between information ethicists and the matter of WikiLeaks that

exposes the need for an established praxis and framework for a WikiLeaks ethics. It is through

the lack of a common methodology that such difference arises, whereby the very vice that

ethics so vehemently tries to avoid resurfaces in light of WikiLeaks, namely the uncritical

application of morals, whereas Information Ethics is established on a platform of critical

application between morals, ethics, and law, the foundations of which are outlined under the

field foundations at the International Center for Information Ethics. The objective of the

102

following dialogue is concerned with establishing WikiLeaks Studies as primarily finding its

place within the realm of Information Ethics, both through Media Ethics and Library Ethics, the

later heritage being where our thesis is concerned, and it will be shown that it is through the

scionship of Library Ethics, from which Information Ethics arises, that an ethical WikiLeaks

finds its heritage in the traditional dialectic as represented in Samek’s intellectual freedom and

social responsibility. The long heritage precipitates first the collaborative information and

knowledge phenomenon, and secondly WikiLeaks itself. The continuity between WikiLeaks

and Collaborative Knowledge Ethics must be traced back through concerns in Librarianship

and Information Ethics, establishing WikiLeaks Studies and collaborative information and

knowledge Studies properly at home within Information Ethics.

It is no coincidence that librarians and librarianship so quickly embraced WikiLeaks

and its drive towards information access and transparency. No stranger to conflict with

government censorship themselves, Librarianship at large immediately felt a kinship with the

prerogatives of WikiLeaks. The one exception to the apparent natural affinity between the two,

and very telling to the nature of relationship between them, was the reaction of the Library of

Congress in systematically condemning WikiLeaks, proceeding to block all access to the

WikiLeaks site through library computers. There was an immediate drive of the ALA to

petition and advocate for WikiLeaks against the Library of Congress in support of Julian

Assange. As Bill Sleeman, the Assistant Director for Technical Services at the Thurgood

Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland School of Law pointed out in his article, A

Librarian reacts to WikiLeaks, “all librarians, myself included, envision ourselves as zealous

advocates of open access so we are generally supportive of any effort to distribute officially

declassified government information no matter how suspect or unfamiliar the organization”

103

(Sleeman, 2011). The article fostered a somewhat legendary debate among Librarians

surrounding the complex nature of the matter. The “WikiLeaks” phenomenon was in fact not a

new concern in Librarianship, especially at home in the ALA, where the same debate

surrounding transparency of government information and library access to government

information had been raging since the 1970s. In many ways, the only thing new about

WikiLeaks from the perspective of Librarianship was the sudden attention and widespread

coverage of what was an ongoing, complex, and frustrating warfront between government and

librarianship.

However, Sleeman’s article struck a chord across the board and catapulted the debate

into the spotlight by pinpointing the complexity of what WikiLeaks entailed, pitting long held

values of access to information against the yet abstract concept of information ownership,

especially as it pertained to stolen property. Of concern also was the aspect of motivation on

the part of Assange and WikiLeaks. Against the hype to support the WikiLeaks initiative,

Sleeman triggered a metaphorical silence with his thought provoking reflection. As per his

inquiry:

“Should we even care about any possible bias on WikiLeaks? As librarians we should care, not so much about WikiLeaks per se but more importantly we should be concerned with what it says about our community to so willingly embrace the WikiLeaks initiative when we know so little about it. In library information literacy programs we try to teach our students that when using Internet sources the need to continually question; to look beyond the surface and identify any bias in a web site. Yet there seems to be little willingness on the part of some in the library community to do so here” (Sleeman, 2011).

It is through the history and praxis of Information Ethics that a theoretical foundation

for an ethics for WikiLeaks must be introduced. WikiLeaks is not simply another cog in the

104

wheel of the history of Information Ethics, nor simply a manifestation of media culture and

media ethics, but rather it is the inevitable manifestation and fulfillment of the same cultural

dialectics behind library ethics, as chronicled throughout history from the philosophy of

ancient Greece, to the history and ethics of mediaeval Islamic Libraries, to ideas of access to

private libraries arising from the French Revolution, and finally to the encapsulation of

Library Ethics in the professionalism as established by the ALA in the 19th century, where

ontological accountability prefaces the life cycles of information control and colors the

dialectical outcomes of information flow. Thus Library Ethics, Information Ethics, and an

ethics for WikiLeaks ultimately find their origins in the agora of Athenian democracy through

ideas established around parrhesia and existential accountability.

Information Literacy

Tadashi Takenouchi speaks to the previously explored question of the predisposition of

the western drive towards an Intercultural Information Ethics18 and envisions similar biases in

terms of the push for “information literacy”, a very western born idea founded in democratic

and humanist principles whose tenets have again been presumed and globally layered as one

size that fits all (cultures). As he states in his Consideration on the Concept of Information

Literacy:

“The phrase ‘information literacy’ has been used as a focal concept to encourage information education in recent years. It is often said that information literacy is an ability which is ‘necessary for all’ living in the information society. But the concept of

18 One must keep in mind that even the word “ethic” is a Greek term, originating in a

western philosophical context!

105

information literacy is quite ambiguous, and its meaning is different according to different situations. Is information literacy really ‘necessary for all’? In reviewing various descriptions of information literacy, they do not seem to be” (Takenouchi, 2004).

Paramount to the objectives of Takenouchi is the need for a critical assessment of the

engrained beliefs of modern library culture, namely the assumed and inferred requisite towards

Information Literacy. Does modern library culture assume an uncritical Information Ethics?

When Takenouchi asks if information literacy is “necessary for all”, he is not making a value

statement on information literacy, but rather questioning the category, field, and level of the

concept of information literacy in any particular situation. He is acknowledging that the

understanding of information and of literacy must not be assumed, since literacies are

understood in anecdotal terms, with already predetermined foundations. To not address the

meta-ethical variations in terms of ethnic and cultural experiences, in some cases the scarcities

of such meta-ethical presumptions, dialogue becomes again a one-way street leading to “faulty

conclusions” (Takenouchi, 2004).

Public libraries ideally (at their best and most authentic actualization) are manifestations

of and symbolic of both the present and past worldviews of cultures and societies at localized

and globalized levels. Public libraries, so long as they have existed, have always been on the

forefront of Intercultural Information Ethics in terms of the dialectics and evolution of

education and ‘literacies’, and where modern redefinitions of the purpose and meaning of

public libraries expand into social realms that include cultural settlement and outreach

‘missions’, thereby assisting new, displaced, or otherwise culturally disadvantaged individuals

with information needs, the above question of literacies ought to be especially addressed.

106

Above all, a certain humility should pervade the task of the activist called ‘Librarian’,

since it becomes incumbent upon said activist to know that they are witness, not missionary,

to the ebb and flow of not only information, but also culture itself. The Librarian is, and has

always been, situated in a privileged position to represent the entirety, so far as universality

exists, of all culture, thought, belief, and knowledge, and while the Librarian represents the

entirety of such, they need to understand the gravity of what it entails to act not as guardians

of information, determining in their own ways and time what knowledge shall be, the value of

said knowledge, as well as the means of its dissemination, but rather they should stand

humbly aware that the library is the living formation of things past, present and yet to come,

and that their job as witness is just that, witness. Were the conditions right, the shift from

information guardian to witness and teacher could be enacted through the vehicle of

information literacy, but a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies of literacies is

lacking. James Elmborg, writing on information literacy and the role of the librarian states,

“This shift, driven by demand, implies an evolution in what librarians do, and moving from

service provider to active educator challenges librarians and library educators to develop new

guiding philosophies” (Elmborg, 2006).

Within their emerging roles as teacher, where to teach is to witness to that which is,

rather than to determine what is, and while keeping in check as far as possible both bias

against and monopolies on knowledge, the new librarian seeks to encourage others to engage

with sometimes the most volatile issues facing society, while not enforcing their own

preconceived moralities on the issues, and not forcing their hand, but instead advocating for

and allowing the representation of knowledge a fertile ground on which accountability on the

107

part of all citizenry in able to find root. It is by this means that critical librarianship becomes

real and by which the librarian becomes an activist as witness rather than missionary.

Louise Limberg demonstrates the role of the emerging librarian as witness and teacher

below:

“The view of information seeking as something that is learnt is well in accordance with the view that the appropriation of information literacy may be a goal for learning. However, information literacy can be approached as an object of teaching as well as an object of learning. In librarianship information literacy appears particularly often as an object of teaching. It follows therefore that we can assume that literacy is the outcome of learning. We may also claim, however, that all learning is embedded in cultural practices and imbued with norms and values, since learning implies developing one’s ability to understand and act in gradually more sophisticated ways within a specific practice.” (Limberg, 2012).

Christine Pawley, in Information Literacy: A contradictory Coupling, advocates a

critical librarianship around terms of information literacies, pointing out the weakness in both

assumptions of the values of information literacies and their supposed democratic culmination.

It is noteworthy to consider once again, as Heidegger states, that democracy may not be the

best answer to technicity. As Pawley states:

“Information literacy has established itself as an important subfield of librarianship. Yet although librarians justify information literacy as increasing democratic participation by all citizens, their efforts to improve 'quality control' of information also threaten to restrict choice in systematic ways. This contradiction results in part from the genealogy of the terms 'information' and 'literacy,' terms that share a relationship traceable to an Enlightenment ideology, namely, that reading could transform society by informing its people.” (Pawley, 2003).

The implications of such are more than mere semantics, especially when it comes to

understanding critical librarianship, which advocates for, among other points, an advocacy and

108

assessment of the dialectic of intellectual freedom and social responsibility, and the layers of

complexity are many. Samek, pioneer and leading scholar in areas of critical librarianship,

imagines an authentic librarianship where transparency plays a part at all levels, including

internal ones. As she states in her Days of Action speech to the Madison graduating class of

2013, “Advocating outward for our publics requires some inward work within our own

institutional culture” (Samek, 2013). Samek explores at length the lesser known forms of

censorship at play within library institutions themselves, those forms of censorship that restrict

advocacy and intellectual freedom on the part of the librarian and the library school professor,

whether through corporate backed loyalty oaths or media relations policies. She points out that

while the American Library Association (ALA) has adopted, in 2005, a Resolution on

Workplace Speech to guard against internal censorship, the Canadian Library Association

(CLA) falls short of ensuring the same protections (Samek, 2013), a difference that could in

turn hinder her own work as well as the task of the new librarian as teacher and advocate,

creating an environment of fear, self-censorship and ultimately of silence and ignorance,

impeding public literacies, information, digital or otherwise, at a foundational level.

The dangers undermining cultural transparencies, and thus education, knowledge and

personal and social accountability arrive not so much in the form of outside external forces

pushing back against libraries, but rather from a treacherous cancer festering within the very

heart of the body of culture, the library itself. Where the power structures of the institution

increasingly fall prey to corporatization and where, as such, the administrators of libraries in

turn encourage an uncritical environment by shamelessly assuring self-censorship, where

intellectual freedom becomes mere lip service to the public face, critical thought on the part of

librarians is blatantly discouraged and librarians fall silent, defeated in their place.

109

However, the hypocrisy and deviousness of the above scenario is increasingly exposed

as the international library community slowly begins to develop an awareness of libraries as

inter-culture, as the heart of all education and communication. As per The International

Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Code of Ethics for Librarians and

other Information Workers: Section 3: Privacy, secrecy and transparency, “Librarians and other

information workers support and participate in transparency so that the workings of

government, administration and business are opened to the scrutiny of the general public. They

also recognize that it is in the public interest that misconduct, corruption and crime be exposed

by what constitute breaches of confidentiality by so-called ‘whistleblowers’”. WikiLeaks is the

representation of what Libraries would be, freed from power structures, while Libraries provide

the historic-ethical framework needed by WikiLeaks in developing an ethics. The clash of

cultures exemplified by ICTs is due to a digital appropriation of the world, and traditional

information literacies quickly demand digital literacies of its citizenry but do not necessarily

provide or encourage it, widening digital divides. Where local and global borders are

increasingly both simultaneously erased and emphasized, libraries potentially stand in a unique

position as the only remaining public social institution existing to represent the entirety of

publicness, not just carefully selected elements, and they exist not only as the face to ever

changing cultural and intercultural facets under a digital appropriation, but also to acculturation

itself.

Capurro in his summation of IIE, quotes a Korean curator by the name of Won-il Rhee,

whose Conflicts between and Becomings of different Time-spaces captures well the field of IIE,

but incidentally (and not coincidently) also acutely describes the place of the modern Library at

the frontline of collaborative knowledge ethics. Rhee references acculturation as the “collision

110

between globalism and localism, the discord and conflict between tradition and modernity, the

collision and coexistence between high and low culture” (Rhee 2007), very aptly summing up

the phenomenon that defines the frontline of the modern public library, where more than at any

other time in history, the allowance for, and sanction of, publicness truly exists. The potential

for a true open allowance of information flow becomes possible, but issues of information

guardianship still preside, blocking the healthy movement of information as a body, often

within the veins of culture itself, the library.

Accountability

Samek reminds us that we must “recognize our being in our doing” (Samek, 2013).

Floridi speaks of the dialectic of reflection, that the human mind must constantly give meaning

to its surrounding environment to escape meaninglessness, nothingness, chaos, because these

‘threaten to tear the Self asunder, to drown it in an alienating otherness...this primordial dread

of annihilation urges the Self to go on filling any semantically empty space with whatever

meaning the self can muster’ (Floridi, 2002). Slavoj Žižek would posit that, through

WikiLeaks, the denial of knowing has been shattered, that we must now fess up to not only

knowing that our suspicions regarding, for instance, government surveillance, are grounded in

fact, but more disturbingly, that we must now take accountability for knowing. We have been

forced out of our denial. We are put face-to-face before the glaring inconsistencies of our own

renunciation of responsibility to self and other, and we know, if even for only a brief moment

in time, that it is we ourselves who are solely responsible for the state of information. As

portended by Floridi, we will fill the semantic chasm with one meaning or another. What we

choose to fill that space with will either reflect an accountability of knowing, or a denial of it.

111

Žižek , venturing into the debate, warns that the danger of the WikiLeaks phenomenon

resides in its “liberal appropriation”, whereby through the act of voicing our outrage, we

misplace immediate responsibility to action, and WikiLeaks becomes a convenient scapegoat to

the acceptance of responsibility. As S. M. Reid-Henry points out in his article On Zizek on

WikiLeaks, the perceived recompenses of WikiLeaks has failed us, namely in that the shame of

our own apathy has only been all the more exposed in the silence following our initial uproar.

As Zizek says, the shame is that we “we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone

knows we know”. Picking up from Floridi, “the right to ignore” no longer exists.

An authentic ethics for information demands a return to accountability, a task that

becomes perhaps somewhat easy to neglect in our ideological grandstanding. Two concerns not

raised often in the field (or any field for that matter) are the vices of abstraction and ego,

whereby the negation of one’s accountability to their claims occurs through the very pillars that

would support them, those pillars being on one hand, as outlined by Nathaniel Enright and

Slavoj Žižek, the capitalist influences and/or foundations to Library and Information Studies

and the commodification of information, and on the other hand, our own ego.

Through an in-depth study of the field, the critical observer might note that this

grandstanding of the field itself as a field becomes a wall against accountability to self and to

other. Ultimately it is ego as both vice and virtue that both enables and prohibits the

actualization of Information Ethics, in the same way that Information Literacies have the

potential to inhibit knowledge flow, as highlighted above. Without attending to any detailed

study of the nature of egoism vs. altruism, let it simply be noted here that ultimately, one’s

concern for any matter, including one’s drive to do Information Ethics, resides largely, for

better and worse, in a self gratifying desire to do so, for whatever reason, whether that reason is

112

openly and admittedly for personal interest or for the betterment of society and others. While

building our ventures and writing our papers, while attending conferences and staking our

claims, it becomes all too easy through doing so to abdicate on the very responsibilities we so

fervently advocate, if only because in doing so, we believe we have addressed our task, and

thus lay it to rest. It can be argued that true advocacy requires true sacrifice, sometimes even to

the point of personal loss, as exemplified by the pioneers of the field of IE. Unfortunately one

all too often becomes too comfortable in one’s complacency and luxury to easily step into the

foray of the actual cause.

By establishing a claim and paying lip service to it, it becomes easy to ‘appease one’s

guilt’, so to speak, to feel as though we have made the prescribed difference simply by making

a noise. The above phenomenon can be demonstrated by comparing it to the all too familiar

debate over the value of online social forums such as Facebook. For all their value, and apart

from the conversation surrounding digital identities, such forums too easily encourage a not so

new tendency (history is full of examples) of one to renounce accountability simply by

announcing it, whereby one starts to believe that simply by “sharing” a cause, or clicking

“like”, one fulfills their self-accountable ‘quotient’ and thus through means of slacktivism, feels

as though they have done their part, but in fact it is in the very doing so that eliminates our

conviction to personal accountability.

Similarly, Information Ethics risks becoming a means to the wrong end, and merely

becomes just one more scapegoat to not actually having to address ethics, to not having to

choose to do so. Žižek speaks of our unbearable freedom. He reminds us that the trauma of

being informed is not in the discovery of some abstract puppeteer secretly and deceitfully

pulling the strings of our destiny, but rather in our confrontation “with the fundamental

113

unconscious choice by means of which every one of us has to choose her or his existential

project” (Žižek, 2011). It is not the puppeteer we fear, but rather the freedom that comes with

the choice we must make free from the puppeteer’s strings. The players of WikiLeaks and

especially Assange, even though representing the pathologies of information control, stand

paradigm to the ancient Greek idea of parrhesia, to self-sacrifice, and it is in light of their

sacrifice that the citizen is convicted in their apathy.

Nathaniel Enright, in his speculation into the origins of Information Ethics, tolls the bell

on abstraction and the commodification of information when he posits that even the very

foundation of the field itself, Library and Information Studies, is culpable to the abdication of

ethics, being itself a product of a capitalist drive to commodify information, where

“information becomes an everyday mechanism for the reconstitution of exploitation and control

immediately foreclosing on the possibility of an ethics of information” (Enright, 2011). Enright

highlights that Information Ethics is similarly imperative and impossible and cautions that “in

Library and Information Science (LIS), information ethics is understood in a very general sense

to be a self-verifying good and as such something that must be unquestionably defended,

supported and promoted” (Enright, 2011). As stated above, Samek raises the same concerns

over the commodification of information and information literacy in her struggle to maintain

academic freedom in the University, remarking that “in many instances information literacy has

been co-opted by the state”. Samek implores the information ethicist to “try to save information

ethics from the same fate – a fate that ultimately closes down rather than opens up new

possibilities for effectively understanding human trajectories in the economy of ideas,

commodification, monopolization, and war” (Samek, 2010).

114

WikiLeaks and the implied recompenses of WikiLeaks were quickly adopted by the

library communities without a lot of critical judgment or knowledge on what it entailed. Even

if, as the argument is made, libraries were in a privileged position to recognize the essence of

WikiLeaks and all it occasioned, they did so based on western philosophical biases as

established in the Agora of ancient Greece, the same biases that have unquestionably founded

western cultural dialectics since, namely, the unquestioned rights to privacy, information and

value of self. If one could even simply come to terms with that, a dialogue could ensue. The

situation is, however, even more insidious than just a matter of western bias, involving the

totality of human vices, including everything from scapegoating to greed to fear and denial and

ultimately to matters of accountability and lack thereof. The question must be asked of libraries

and society in general - is the willing acceptance or rejection of WikiLeaks not just an

appropriation of the same vice that Enright speaks of, namely the commodification of

information? After all, what do western capitalist founded cultural ethics really value - equity,

or equity? One is reminded here of the biases of Intercultural Information Ethics, previously

addressed, whereby the unquestioned and engrained assumptions of the most foundational

cultural elements of any given society form unconscious biases against irreducible pluralism.

Enright’s work on the commodification of information seems to emphasize more than just the

appropriation of information and information ethics for self-serving, political, or capitalist

reasons, but is also reflective of the ontological debates between Capurro, Floridi and their

eastern Buddhist counterparts, posing questions of self and entity. What is self and what is

entity? And what is their worth? Such concerns are rife with yet unsolved ethical

considerations.

115

Capurro says that it is the worldview of the digital that embraces all the dimensions of

our being-in-the world. He talks about cultural alienation within societies and in society as a

whole because of the consequences of information technology on individuals and society

(Capurro, 1992). The implications of cultural alienation within an information-saturated society

must be addressed alongside notions of accountability to self and other, explicating the

dimensions of being-in-the-world, as per Capurro’s Heideggerian ontology. This is where

‘ethics’ comes into play, in terms of our post-WikiLeaks society and otherwise. How do we

responsibly navigate mass-information while maintaining accountability to knowing? Capurro

says “information technology gives us means for reality construction through awareness of and

respect for people and other living beings,” (Capurro, 1992) and yet the aftermath of

WikiLeaks would suggest despite such means, and although it ought to be the case, we have

actively opted out of responsibility. And yet accountability to information becomes difficult

when even the foundations of contemporary culture become ungrounded. What happens when

established encyclopedic definitions change at a moment’s notice, as per the previously noted

example regarding Smith’s original work on the Wikipedia entry for ‘Information Ethics’?

Indeed, “How do sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and others promote

scholarly connections and knowledge?” (Smith, 2011).

An existential accountability to information must be demanded for a foundation to an

ethics for WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks phenomenon signifies the choices of each individual in

the ‘information society’, not just those of a handful of dissidents. Žižek says, “The only

surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we

learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances:

we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox

116

of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes

everything” (Žižek, 2011). But it should be contended that only in actively knowing can

accountability to information take place, where knowing should inform one’s daily choices.

Žižek psychologizes our reaction to information saturation to stages of grief, where we

first react in ideological denial, and then anger, followed by bargaining, and ending in

withdrawal. Žižek, Capurro and Floridi set the stage. Upon each revelation of WikiLeaks, the

obligatory outcry by citizens-to-whom-it-concerns is sounded. The expected noise is declared

and broadcasted by the media, but the citizen, upon manufacturing the obligatory clatter, then

returns to the comfort zone of complacency and abstraction, as though to make a noise is good

enough to appease their sense of accountability to the state of government, to the state of

privacy, to the state of secrecy, to the state of their own self. After all, ‘what can one really do’?

It is here that information pathologies begin, and where cultural alienation takes hold. Žižek

concludes by noting that, “Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our

shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicized” (Žižek,

2011). Ultimately, the abuses of power are a reflection of what the citizen chooses, at least in a

democratic society, and existentially speaking, it might be posited that the active choice, that of

ignoring, and the consequences thereof, is ultimately what the citizen wants.19 Are the short-

lived reactions of citizens and their noise merely a straw man set up to redirect one’s guilt from

the vices of complacency? If the citizen were truly engaged with what they know, they would

not lay down their “ballot” after casting it, but would take it up daily. They would make good

on themselves (their selves) as democratic citizens. It is only through a full participation on the

part of every citizen that information pathologies can even begin to be addressed.

19 Christine Belley, in personal communication, January 14, 2014.

117

As Reid-Henry puts it, what is really in question with regard to WikiLeaks, and

especially within it, is how one does and should believe and act as an agent of change (Reid-

Henry, 2011). Žižek divides the WikiLeaks phenomenon into two war fronts. On one hand,

WikiLeaks is a war between WikiLeaks and its suppressors, but on the other, it is a war of

philosophical debates over the nature and implications of WikiLeaks itself, a war over what

WikiLeaks is and ultimately over what it should be (Shin, 2011). The second war front is what

concerns the present thesis. As Žižek has challenged the common assumption numerous times,

the public and corporate interpretation of WikiLeaks misses the mark on several occasions. The

greatest mistake that has been made in regards to WikiLeaks is the polarization of its players,

whereby either ‘lionizing’ or ‘demonizing’ Assange and fellow whistleblowers, either putting

them on a pedestal or casting them as dissidents, we have both misrepresented their journey and

abdicated on our own responsibilities in regards to what WikiLeaks is and how it has come into

being as the very representation or manifestation of our collective apathy to the state of

information and information flow.

Even though WikiLeaks, as a symbol for collaborative knowledge in an information

society, may have fallen short of adequately representing the wiki phenomenon, namely in that

WikiLeaks never did reach in its efforts the level of collaborative knowledge required to place

it in the same category as other wiki-based platforms such as Wikipedia, and being as it was

focused on government documents only rather than the entirety of monopolized knowledge, it

all the same becomes a symbol for collaborative knowledge in its conviction of a collectively

apathetic information society, revealing the truth as that of a collaborative denial of

responsibility to the state of information and our place in it. As suggested above by Floridi and

Žižek, a knowing society, when faced with the conviction of their collective denial of a

118

responsible and accountable information ecology, can no longer ignore their part in creating in

the first place the very structures and conditions necessary to allow the need for such

monstrosities as WikiLeaks, the monstrosity of such being not WikiLeaks and its players

themselves, who in speaking loudly the truth despite the consequence, model accountability

and expose the culmination of a heritage of cultural pathologies whose formation can be traced

through history to their origins in the widely unheeded call of parrhesia in ancient Greece, but

rather the monstrosity being that which WikiLeaks has blown the whistle on, the

collaboratively backed vacuum of knowledge denial.

Conclusion

The main platform that WikiLeaks and information dissolution come together on is in

the uncritical release of tens of thousands of classified documents into the public domain by

WikiLeaks, an act that harbors harsh criticism even from other journalists who point out that

such a lack of editorial discretion bypasses the necessary analysis of responsible journalism

(Carr, 2013). A very valid critique, it is a complete lack of analysis, not so much on the part of

WikiLeaks but rather the citizen, that abdicates accountability for the content and influence of

information exposed, including the inevitable lack of influence of said documents on those-to-

whom-it-concerns, namely the free citizen, who having not taken accountability for the state of

information previous to its exposure through the efforts of whistleblowers, continues to deny

that accountability in the face of it. It is not the government that WikiLeaks has blown the

whistle on; but the citizen.

119

This lack of accountability is the very exemplification of the above noted concerns of

Floridi and Žižek, where the concern becomes not one of secrecy and access, but rather of

accountability. As Žižek points out, our outrage over the government surveillance revelations

should not be about the danger of government monitoring our information, but rather the

opposite, that of the government, of WikiLeaks, of any institution not knowing the very

information that it monopolizes for the sheer magnitude of the information. (Žižek, 2011).

Namely, there is no way that a single government or institution, consisting of only a handful of

people in control can be accountable to the content of such vast swaths of information. More

concerning, of course, and the crux of this thesis, is that the above revelation of the true dangers

of information accountability becomes mirrored in Žižek’s critique, turning the notion of

accountability for information back on society and the individual. If the institution, whether

being an institution of government, peer-reviewed journal or collaborative knowledge forum is

not capable, as an elitist faction limited in number, of being accountable to the vast amounts of

information available through information and communication technologies, and yet they hold

exclusive rights to it, monopolizing it to the disadvantage of both themselves and society, then

it becomes incumbent upon an information society to ask why such a scenario is allowed. It is

only as a collective of individuals that we have the capacity to face information dissolution and

to account for it.

As exemplified in the recent Heartbleed scenario, our fears are not unfounded

conspiracies, and the state of information in the world is more vulnerable to theft, attack,

misuse, and dissolution than it has ever been throughout human history. Heartbleed was a

wakeup call. Further worldwide security breaches are inevitable, with each attack being

exponentially more severe. It is unacceptable that as global citizens we allow the state of

120

information, personal or otherwise, to sit unaccounted for and unguided in the hands of

negligent guardians, whether library administrators or governments. Capurro notes that a “free

Internet can foster peace and democracy, but it can also be used for manipulation and control”.

He believes it “a necessity to strive for a future Internet governance regime on the basis of

intercultural deliberation, democratic values and human rights”. Regarding such concerns as

ICT controlled and borderless economies, the ecological crisis of our environment, and an

accountability to a ‘human’ rights that expands beyond humanity to include both non human

and environmental systems, Capurro states succinctly that “we have to change our lives in

order to become not masters, but keepers of our natural environment” (Capurro, 2013).

121

Bibliography: Adams, Andrew A., Kiyoshi Murata, and Yohko Orito. "The Japanese sense of information privacy." AI & Society 24.4 (2009): 327-341. Alfino, Mark. “Twenty Years of Information Ethics and the 'Journal of Information Ethics”. Journal of Information Ethics, 21(2), 13-16. 4 p. FALL 2012. American Library Association. "Intellectual freedom principles for academic libraries: An interpretation of the library bill of rights." 2004. Online, retrieved April 27 2014. Bates, Theunis (28 September 2010). "WikiLeaks' Woes Grow as Spokesman Quits Site". AOL News. Archived from the original on 2012-09-16. Retrieved November 17, 2013. Berry, John N. “ALA Midwinter 2011 - Blatant Berry: Every Issue Is a Library Issue”, Library Journal Archive, Dec 15, 2010. Website accessed January 19, 2013. Britz, Johannes. "Understanding Information Ethics." Information Ethics in Africa: Cross-cutting Themes: 1, 2013. Buchanan, Elizabeth A., and Kathrine A. Henderson. Case Studies in Library and Information Science Ethics. McFarland, 2009. Buchanan, Elizabeth A. (2011). “Looking Back, Looking Forward, and Transformation in Information Ethics”. Journal of Information Ethics 20 (2), 157-160. Bynum, T. "Computer and Information Ethics," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), EN Zalta (ed.), Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information (http://plato.stanford.edu/). Capurro, Rafael. Ein Beitrag zur etymologischen und ideengeschichtlichen Begründung: des Informationsbegriffs München, New York, London, Paris: Saur Verlag 1978, 320 Seiten Capurro, Rafael. "Information Ethics in the African Context." Information Ethics in Africa: Cross-cutting Themes: 7, 2013. Capurro, Rafael. "Intercultural information ethics: foundations and applications." Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 6.2 (2008): 116-126. Capurro, Rafael. "Information technology and technologies of the self." Proceedings of the Asis Annual Meeting. Vol. 29. 143 Information Today Inc, 1992. Capurro, Rafael. "Information ethics for and from Africa." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.7 (2008): 1162-1170. Capurro, Rafael. Informationsethos und Informationsethik. Gedanken zumVerantwortungsvollen Handeln im Bereich der Fachinformation. Nachrichten für Dokumentation, 39, 1- 4, 1988.

122

Capurro, Rafael - John Holgate (eds.). “Messages and Messengers. Angeletics as an Approach to the Phenomenology of Communication. | Von Boten und Botschaften. Die Angeletik als Weg zur Phänomenologie der Kommunikation”. ICIE Vol. 5, München: Fink 2011. Capurro, R., “Moral Issues In Information Science.” First published as: Report TRITA-LIB-6024 (Royal Institute of Technology Library, Stockholm, Sweden), 1985. Capurro, Rafael. “On Floridi’s Metaphysical Foundation of Information Ecology”. Ethics and Information Technology, 10 (2-3), 167-173, 2008. Capurro, R. “Past, present, and future of the concept of information”. TripleC 2009, 7, 125–141. Capurro, R. “Towards an Ontological Foundation for Information Ethics,” Ethics and Information Technology, 8(4): 157-186, 2006. Capurro, Rafael. "What is angeletics." GlossariumBITri: Glossary of Concepts, Metaphors, Theories and Problems Concerning Information (2011). Capurro, Rafael. “Zuerst veröffentlicht”, Nachrichten für Dokumentation (jjetzt: Information. Wissenschaft & Praxis) 32, 1981, Nr.1, S. 9-12, 1981. Carr, David. “War on Leaks Is Pitting Journalist vs. Journalist”. The Media Equation 2013, New York Times. Web accessed December 05, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/business/media/war-on-leaks-is-pitting-journalist-vs-journalist.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Casadevall, Arturo, and Ferric C. Fang. "Is peer review censorship?." Infection and immunity 77.4 (2009): 1273-1274. The Center for International Media Ethics (CIME: How Media Shapes Society). Retrieved August 18, 2013 from http://www.cimethics.org/home/ Chan, J. “Confucian Attitudes Towards Ethical Pluralism”. R. Madsen and T.B. Strong, editors, The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World, pp. 129–153. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003. The Analects of Confucius. Vol. 28. Psychology Press, 2005. Dummett, Michael. Origins of analytical philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1996. Elmborg, James. "Critical information literacy: Implications for instructional practice." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32.2 (2006): 192-199. Enright, Nathaniel F. "You Can't Polish a Pumpkin." Journal of Information Ethics 20.2 (2011): 103-126. Ess, Charles. "Ethical pluralism and global information ethics." Ethics and Information Technology 8.4 (2006): 215-226. Ess, Charles. “Floridi’s Philosophy of Information and Information Ethics: Current Perspetives, Future Directions”. The Information Society 25, 3 (May 2009), 159-168. Feather, John & Paul Sturges, ed. International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, 2nd Revised. Taylor & Francis, 2003. Floridi, Luciano. "Against Digital Ontology." Synthese 168.1 (2009): 151-178.

123

Floridi, L., Sanders, J. W. (2001). “Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer Ethics”. Ethics and Information Technology, 3(1), 55-66. Floridi, Luciano, and J. W. Sanders. "Entropy as evil in information ethics." Etica & Politica, Special Issue on Computer Ethics 1.2 (1999). Floridi, Luciano. "Ethics after the information revolution." The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (2010): 3-19. Floridi, L. “Ethics in the Infosphere” The Philosophers’ Magazine, vol 16, 2001. Floridi, Luciano. "Information ethics: on the philosophical foundation of computer ethics." Ethics and information technology 1.1 (1999): 33-52. Floridi, Luciano. “Is Information Meaningful Data?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70(2): 351–370, 2005. Floridi, L. “Network ethics: Information and business ethics in a networked society”. Journal of Business Ethics, 90, 649-659, 2009. Floridi, Luciano. Scepticism And the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies. Vol. 70. Brill, 1996. Friedman, Batya, and Helen Nissenbaum. "Bias in Computer Systems." ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 14.3 (1996): 330-347. Froehlich, T. (2004). “A Brief History of Information Ethics”. BiD: textos universitaris de biblioteconomia i documentació, 13, DL B-19.675-1998. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1997. Glaser, Anja, and Markus EBERSBACH. "Towards emancipatory use of a medium: the wiki." International Journal of Information Ethics 2 (2004): 1-9. Gotterbarn, Don. “The Life Cycle of Cyber and Computing Ethics.” In R. A. Spinello and H. T. Tavani, eds. Readings in CyberEthics. 2nd ed. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, pp. 651-658, 2004. Gray, Alex. Ed. “Plagiarism: Addressing the Skeleton in the Closet”. CIME Newsletter 1, 2013. Retrieved August 10, 2013 from http://www.cimethics.org/home/newsletter/mar2013/ Hauptman, Robert. Forward. Case studies in library and information science ethics. By Henderson, Kathrine A. McFarland, 2009. Hauptman, Robert. Ethical Challenges in Librarianship. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1988. Hauptman, Robert. “Ethical Concerns in Librarianship: An Overview”. Information Ethics, ed. by Anne Mintz, pp. 14-23. Jefferson: McFarland, 1990. Hauptman, Robert. "Whistling, Protecting, and Causing Harm." Journal of Information Ethics 20 (2) (2011). Herold, Ken R. "Librarianship and the Philosophy of Information". Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal), 27, 2005 Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/27

124

Hongladarom, S. “Ethics of bioinformatics: a convergence between bioethics and computer ethics”. Asian Biotechnol. Dev. Rev. 9, 37–44, 2006. “Ideogram.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Retrieved August 29, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram

Information Ethics Group (IEG), Oxford University Research Group on the Philosophy of Information, Department of Computer Science. University of Oxford. Online, last accessed 2/24/2014. http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/ “Information Ethics.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Retrieved February 14, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_ethics Intellectual Freedom Manual. 7th ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006. International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE), the field. Site last updated February 2, 2013. Retrieved February 21, 2014 from http://icie.zkm.de/research Johnson, Deborah G. Computer Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985. Khatchadourian, Raffi. “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency”. The New Yorker, 2010. Web accessed February 22, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all Kostrewski, Barbara J., & Oppenheim, Charles. “Ethics in Information Science”. Journal of information science, 1, 277-283, 1980. Langefors, B. “Models and Methodologies”. J. Hawgood Ed.: Evolutionary Information Systems. Amsterdam, North-Holland 1982 pp. 48.

Limberg, Louise, Olof Sundin & Sanna Talja. “Three Theoretical Perspectives on Information Literacy.”HUMAN IT 11.2(2012): 93–130, University of Borås. Malcouronne, Peter. First Regional Conference for the Asia and Pacific Region on the Ethical Dimensions of the Information Society, 12-14 March 2008, Hanoi, Vietnam. Mathiesen, Kay. "Wikileaks and Methods in Information Ethics." SIRLS, University of Arizona 10 (2010). Mathiesen, K., “What is Information Ethics?”, Computers and Society Magazine, Volume 32 - Issue 8, June-2004, http://www.computersandsociety.org/sigcas_ofthefuture2/sigcas/subpage/sub_page.cfm?article=909&page_number_nb=1 Mehegan, David. Bias, Sabotage haunt Wikipedia's Free World. Boston Globe | February 12, 2006. Web. Accessed December 17, 2013. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/02/12/bias_sabotage_haunt_wikipedias_free_world/ Moor, James. “What is Computer Ethics?” In Cyberethics, ed. By R Baird, et. Al New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 23-33, 2000. Moot On Media Ethics in Digital Age Starts, in Daily Times, Islamabad, 2013. Retrieved August 25, 2013 from http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2013%5C08%5C25%5Cstory_25-8-2013_pg11_6

Nayar, Pramod K. "Wikileaks, the new information cultures and digital parrhesia." Economic and Political Weekly

125

45.52 (2010): 27-30.

Nishigaki, Toru. "The ethics in Japanese information society: Consideration on Francisco Varela’s The Embodied Mind from the perspective of fundamental informatics." Ethics and Information Technology 8.4 (2006): 237-242.

Ocholla, Dennis N. Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha, Johannes Britz, Can information ethics be conceptualized by using the core/periphery model?, Journal of Informetrics, Volume 4, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 492-502 Pawley, Christine. "Information literacy: a contradictory coupling." The library quarterly (2003): 422-452. Preer, Jean. Library Ethics, Westport, Libraries Unlimited, 2008. Ramberg, Bjørn and Gjesdal, Kristin, "Hermeneutics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/hermeneutics/>. Ranganathan, S. R. Prolegomena to Library Classification: The Five Laws of Library Science. Asia Publishing House (New York), 1967. Rhee, Wonil. The creative time of thermocline. Conflicts between and Becomings of different Time-spaces. In “Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves”, 2007. http://hosting.zkm.de/thermoclines/stories/storyReader$7 (Accessed on April 01, 2014) Reid‐Henry, S. M. "On Žižek on WikiLeaks: Two Figures and a Point of Critique." Antipode 44.1 (2012): 1-4. Samek, Toni. “Days of Action”. Progressive Librarian; Fall 2013, Issue 41, p52 Samek, Toni. Forward to Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis. Ed. Shana Higgins and Lua Gregory. Los Angeles: Library Juice Press, 2012. Samek, Toni. Librarianship and Human Rights: A Twenty-first century guide. Oxford: CHANDOS (Oxford) Publishing, 2007. Samek, Toni. Teaching Information Ethics in Higher Education: A Crash Course in Academic Labour, International Review of Information Ethics, 14, 4-9, 2010. Shin, Sarah. "Shame is a weapon": Slavoj Žižek on the importance of WikiLeaks. VERSO 14 January 2011. Web accessed October 02, 2013. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/341-shame-is-a-weapon-slavoj-zizek-on-the-importance-of-wikileaks Severson, Richard J. The principles of information ethics. NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Shiri, A. 'Exploring Information Ethics: A Metadata Analytics Approach’ presented at the Information Ethics Roundtable 2014: Information Ethics and Global Citizenship Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 24th April to 26th April. 2014. Available at: https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/ier2014/home (Accessed: 26 April 2014). Shirky, Clay. Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags, 2005. Retrieved July 5, 2013 from http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html Schopenhauer, Arthur. Studies in pessimism. Cosimo, Inc., 2007. Sleeman, B. A librarian reacts to WikiLeaks, 2011. Retrieved from https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2011/01/24/a-librarian-reacts-to-wikileaks/

126

Smith, Martha M. The Beginnings of Information Ethics. Journal of Information Ethics 20 (2):15-24, 2011. Smith, Martha. Information Ethics, in Frederick C. Lynden (ed.) Advances in Librarianship, 25, Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2001, 29-66. Smith, Martha Montague. Information ethics. Annual review of information science and technology, 32, 339-366, 1997. Spence, Edward H. "Government Secrecy, the Ethics of Wikileaks, and the Fifth Estate." International Review of Information Ethics 17 (2012): 07. Spence, Edward H.; Quinn, Aaron. Journal of Mass Media Ethics , Oct-Dec2008, Vol. 23 Issue 4, p264-279, 16p; DOI: 10.1080/08900520802490889 Spence, Edward H. "Understanding Luciano Floridi's Metaphysical Theory of Information Ethics: A Critical Appraisal and an Alternative Neo-Gewirthian Information Ethics." APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 8.1 (2008): 19-24. Spiegel International (Hamburg). "WikiLeaks Spokesman Quits". 27 September 2010. Accessed November 25, 2013. Spinello, Richard A. and Herman T. Tavani. 2001. Readings in Cyberethics (1st ed.). Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. Sturges, Paul. Information Ethics in the Twenty First Century, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 40(4), 241-251, 2009. Sullivan, Patrick F. Ethics in the computer age. In: Kizza, Joseph Migga (ed.), Social and ethical effects of the computer revolution. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1996. Takenouchi, Tadashi "Capurro's Hermeneutic Approach to Information Ethics: Ethos in the information society and the development of 'angeletics'" International Journal of Information Ethics, (2004): 1. Takenouchi, Tadashi. "A Consideration on the Concept of Information Literacy: Is it really “necessary for all”." International Journal of Information Ethics 2 (2004): 11. Taylor, Arlene G. and Daniel Joudrey. 2008. The Organization of Information. 3rd ed. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited. Weckert, John and Douglas Adeney. 1997. Computer and Information Ethics. Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., Westport, CT, USA. Wiener, N. Cybernetics; or control and communication in the animal and the machine. New York: Wiley, 1948. "Wiki." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Retrieved January 12, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki Woodbury, Marsha Cook. Computer and Information Ethics. Champaign: Stipes Publishing, 2003. Woolwine, David E. "Libraries and the Balance of Liberty and Security." Library Philosophy and Practice (E-Journal), Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2007).

127

World Summit on the Information Society. Geneva 2003 - Tunis 2005, Document WSIS-03/GENEVA?DOC/4-E, 12 December 2003. Version: English. Accessed 03/05/2014. Zimmer, Michael. "Wikileaks and Information Ethics." SlideShare. 14 April 2011. Online accessed December 13, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. "Good manners in the age of WikiLeaks." Contemporary Art & Investment 2 (2011): 020. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Double Life of Véronique: The Forced Choice of Freedom”, The Criterion Collection, February 01, 2011. Online at: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1733-the-double-life-of-veronique-the-forced-choice-of-freedom Žižek, S. “The Truth Shall Set You Free, But Not This Truth”. ABC Religion & Ethics (Opinion), 2011. Retrieved 27 April, 2011, from http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/02/25/3148881.htm.

Other Works Referenced: Buschman, John. "Information Rights, Human Rights, and Political Rights: A Précis on Intellectual and Contextual Issues for Library and Information Science," Progressive Librarian, Issue 38/39, Springe 2012, pp. 17-24. Lerner, Fred. The story of libraries: from the invention of writing to the computer age. New York: Continuum, 1998. Luscombe M., D. Greenbaum, M. Gerstein. “What is bioinformatics? An Introduction and Overview”. Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2001 (2001). Stewart, D. S. An essay on the Origins of Cybernetics, 2000. Retrieved July 22, 2013 from http://www.hfr.org.uk/cybernetics-pages/origins.htm

Documents

The Heritage of WikiLeaks: A History of Information Ethics