more) are compelling and urgent issues. Here, however, we can explore only a few, beginning with privacy (chapter 2). It is also important to notice how these issues are not solely pressing ethical concerns. In addition, some of the stories and accounts of these (including some of the references included above) illustrate a tendency in popular media to call our attention to such issues in the frame of a “moral panic” (Drotner 1999). That is, in order to attract our attention, such stories sometimes simplify and sensationalize (and, whenever possible, highlight the sexual). They thereby appeal to a deep-seated fear in modern Western societies that our new technologies are somehow getting out of control. This fear has been thematic in the modern West since E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann ([1816] 1967) – an early story about a seductive robot – and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ([1818] 1933). These stories and accounts highlight the fear that such new technologies will corrupt our ethical and social sensibilities.
These more popular approaches – in contrast with the far more nuanced and careful reflections of ethicists, philosophers of technology, and our colleagues in the relevant technical fields – appear to influence how “the rest of us” think and feel about these issues as they affect our own lives and existence. So it is important to first examine how “moral panic” reporting both furthers and frustrates careful ethical reflection on digital media. On the one hand, such reporting usually succeeds in getting our attention – and is thereby useful as it catalyzes more careful reflection on important ethical issues. On the other hand, by highlighting the negative effects and potentials of digital media, such reporting fosters a polarized way of thinking – a framework of “technology good” (because it brings us important benefits) vs. “technology bad” (because it threatens the moral foundations of society, most especially the morality of young people). As we will see, such simple either/or frameworks for reflecting on important ethical issues are simply misleading. Rather – and as most of us likely already know full well – whatever truths may be discerned about the ethics of digital media are more complex and often lie somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. But if presented only with the simple choice between “technology good” and “technology bad,” we may not look for further alternatives: hence, we get needlessly stuck in trying to decide between two compelling choices. Getting stuck this way short-circuits, that is, the more careful and extensive reflection required if we are to move beyond such either/or thinking.
So we begin by examining more carefully some of the important characteristics of digital media, along with the specific sorts of ethical issues that these characteristics often raise for us.
(Ethical) life in the (post-)digital age?
In keeping with their increasingly central importance in our lives, “digital media” are the subject of an ever-growing range of analyses in a number of disciplines (e.g., Couldry 2012; Davisson and Booth 2016). At the same time, there has been something of a popular turn in our experiences with and sensibilities toward digital media in recent years. Broadly, a largely optimistic assumption that new technologies would make our lives better in many ways – whether as consumers satisfied with the latest convenience of, say, a voice-activated digital assistant or smart home, and/or as citizens in a world of increasing individual and collective freedom, democracy, and prosperity – is increasingly overshadowed by darker developments, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Solon 2017). At the same time, more and more of us are becoming aware of how “our minds can be hijacked” (Lewis 2017) – in part, as more and more “tech dissenters,” including Justin Rosenstein, the coder who invented Facebook’s “like” button, have become increasingly and publicly critical of the very technologies they themselves have built.
Lastly, since as early as 2000 (Cascone), an increasing number of scholars and researchers argue that we are now living in a post-digital era (e.g., Berry 2014; Lindgren 2017; Ess 2019). Some obvious markers of this era are the increasing popularity of primarily analogue technologies, including analogue film, vinyl records, and rising interest in board games (Birkner 2017); we will explore additional examples, such as “slow technology” and “digital detox” (chapter 4). To be clear: “post-digital” does not mean “anti-digital.” It signals, rather, a broader shift from an exclusive focus on “the digital” – to the exclusion of “the analogue” – to a more nuanced balance and recognition of the roles and importance of each in our lives.
At the same time, digital media represent strong continuities with earlier forms of analogue communication and information media: the latter include printed books, journals, and newspapers, what we now call “hardcopy” letters, and, for example, traditional forms of mass media such as newspapers and “one-to-many” broadcast media such as radio and TV. We will note and explore these continuities more fully in our efforts to evaluate one of the larger ethical questions we will confront – namely, do digital media present us with radically new kinds of ethical problems that thereby require absolutely new ethical approaches? Such questions are often driven by emphasizing instead important differences between earlier media and digital media. Such an emphasis, however, also drives the either/or approach underlying much popular media reporting. In any event, these differences often are part of why new ethical issues come up in conjunction with digital media. Exploring these differences at the outset is hence a good starting point.
Three especially relevant characteristics of digital media are: how digital media foster convergence; digital information as “greased”; and digital media as ubiquitous and global communication media.
1. Digital media, analogue media: convergence and ubiquity
To begin with, digital media work by transforming extant information (e.g., voices over a phone, texts written on a word-processor, pictures of an impressive landscape, videos recorded and broadcast, etc.) into the basic informational elements of electronic computers and networks, using binary code (1s and 0s – bits on and off). By contrast, analogue media, such as increasingly popular vinyl records, capture, store, and make information accessible by producing specific material artifacts that are like (analogous to) the original. Music recording equipment, for example, begins with microphones that translate the vibrations of an original sound into magnetically stored information, corresponding to specific sound pitches and volumes; this is then “written” onto a tape that passes by a recording head at a specific speed. These analogues of an original sound are in turn transformed into further analogues: they are mechanically carved onto the grooves of a vinyl record in the form of bumps and valleys that correspond to the high and low frequencies and volumes of the original sound. These physical variations are then translated by a phonograph needle back into electronic impulses that likewise mimic the original variations of a sound. Finally, these impulses are turned into sound once more by an amplifier and speaker(s) – again, as an analogue or copy of the original that, ideally, is as close to the original as possible.
One of the reasons digital media are so attractive is that analogue media, by contrast, always involve some loss of information across the various processes of collecting, recording, and storing it. This means – and this is particularly critical to the ethical discussions of copying – that each analogue copy of an original is always less true to the original; and the more copies that are made – e.g., a tape copy of a record as a copy of a tape of an original performance – the less faithful (and satisfying) the resulting copy will be. By contrast, once information is transcribed into digital form, each copy of the digital original will be (more or less) a perfect replica of the original. Copy an MP3 version of your favorite song a thousand times and, if your equipment is working properly, there will be no difference between the first copy and the thousandth.
Even more importantly, analogue media are strongly distinct systems: how information is captured and replayed on a vinyl record is not immediately compatible – and hence not easily exchangeable – with how information is
