information – whether destined for an MP3 player as an audio recording or a word-processor as text – can be stored on and transmitted through a shared medium. Hence the same computer or smartphone can capture, create, process, and distribute digital photos and music, along with a thousand other forms of information held distinct in analogue media, from simple emails to word-processing files to maps to ... “you name it.”
To be sure, these distinctions between analogue and digital media are only one side of the coin. As advocates of the post-digital remind us (Cascone 2000; Berry 2014), however much our media technologies have changed in recent decades, the human eyes, ears, and voices have not: we as embodied beings still generate and receive information in resolutely analogue form. The digital codes, for example, that pass between two computers or smartphones, whether in the form of a Skype call, Facebook update, or phone call, begin and end for their human users as analogue information. The emergence of “the digital,” in short, does not mean the quick and complete end of “the analogue” (cf. Massumi 2002). This is critical to keep in mind especially from an ethical perspective: as digital media build on and enhance – rather than replace – our analogue modes of communication and experiences, they thereby call into play experiences and communication that have been part and parcel of human ethical reflection and frameworks for millennia. This is good news, ethically. That is, it is sometimes argued – and tempting to think – that the ethical experiences and challenges of digital media are so strikingly new that they require entirely new frameworks (e.g., Braidotti 2006). But these continuities with our experiences as analogue and embodied beings argue that the emergence of digital media does not require us to throw out all previous ethical reflections and views and somehow try to start de novo – from the beginning. On the contrary, we will see several examples of how older forms of ethical reflection (perhaps, most notably, virtue ethics) – however transformed through their applications within digital media – are often key in helping us analyze and successfully resolve contemporary ethical dilemmas.
Nonetheless, as once-distinct forms of information are translated into a commonly shared digital form, this establishes one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of digital media – namely, convergence (Jenkins 2006). Such convergence is literally on display in a contemporary webpage containing text, video, and audio sources, as well as possibilities for sending email, remotely posting a comment, etc. These once-distinct forms of information and communication are now conjoined in digital form, so that they can be transmitted entirely in the form of 1s and 0s via the internet. Similarly, a contemporary smartphone exemplifies such convergence: as a highly sophisticated supercomputer, it easily handles digital information used for a built-in camera (still and/or moving video), audio and video players, a web browser, GPS navigation, and many other sorts of information. (Oh yes, it will also make phone calls.)
Digital media thus conjoin both traditional and sometimes new sorts of information sources. In particular, what were once distinct kinds of information in the analogue world (e.g., photographs, texts, music) now share the same basic form of information. What does this mean, finally, for ethics? Here’s the key point: what were once distinct sets of ethical issues now likewise converge – sometimes creating new combinations of ethical challenges that we haven’t had to face before.
For example, societies have developed relatively stable codes and laws for the issue of consent as to whether or not someone can be photographed in public. (In the US, generally, one can photograph people in public without asking for their consent, while, in Norway, consent is required.) Transmitting that photo to a larger public – e.g., through a newspaper or a book – would then require a different information system, and one whose ethical and legal dimensions are addressed (however well or poorly) in copyright law. But, as many people have experienced to their regret, a contemporary smartphone can not only record their status and actions, but further (more or less immediately) transmit the photographic record to a distribution medium such as Snapchat or an even more public website (e.g., as in revenge porn). The ethics of both consent in photography and copyright in publication are now conjoined in relatively novel ways. (In fact, technological convergences toward the end of the nineteenth century – specifically, the ability of newspapers to print photographs – occasioned some of the foundational arguments for privacy in the contemporary world. This innovation led to the demand for celebrity photos – and thereby intrusions into the lives of the famous that violated “the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency” (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 195, cited in Glancy 1979, 8).
2. Digital media and “greased information”
A second characteristic of digital media is that digital information is “greased.” That is, as James Moor (1997) has observed, “When information is computerized, it is greased to slide easily and quickly to many ports of call” (27). As anyone who has hit the “post” button on a status update too quickly knows all too well, information in digital form can spread more or less instantaneously and globally, whether we always want it to or not.
As the example of uploading embarrassing photos or videos from a smartphone suggests, the near-instantaneous and potentially global distribution of digital information raises especially serious ethical issues surrounding privacy. Where it was once comparatively difficult to capture and then transmit information about a person that she or he might consider private, digital media, beginning with computer databases that store and make easily accessible a vast range of information about people, have resulted in an extensive spectrum of new threats to personal and private information. Moreover, digital information as “greased” likewise makes it easy to copy and distribute, say, one’s favorite songs, movies, or texts. To be sure, it has always been possible to copy and distribute copies of a given text, song, or film. But the ease of doing so with digital media is a primary factor in the central problems of copying, copyright, and so on.
3. Digital media as communication media: fluidity, ubiquity, global scope, and selfhood/identity
The emergence of digital media – along with the internet and the Web as ways of quickly transporting digitized information – thus gives rise to strikingly new ways of communicating with one another at every level. Emails, SNSs (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.), photo and video distribution sites (YouTube, etc.), and personal blogs provide ways for people – especially in the developed world, but also increasingly in developing countries – to enhance existing relationships and develop new ones with persons often far removed from their own geographical/cultural/linguistic communities. Especially as the internet and the Web now connect over half of the world’s population (Internet World Stats 2018), they thereby make possible cross-cultural encounters online at a scope, speed, and scale unimaginable even just a few decades ago.
Along these lines, two additional features of digital media become crucial. To begin with, digital media enjoy what Phil Mullins (1996) has characterized as a kind of fluidity: specifically, a biblical text in digital form – either on one’s smartphone or as stored on a website – becomes, in his phrase, “the fluid Word.” In contrast to a biblical text as fixed in a strong way when inscribed on parchment (the Torah) and/or printed on paper, a biblical text encoded on a flash memory or server hard drive in the form of 1s and 0s can be changed quickly and easily. This fluidity is highlighted by a second characteristic of digital communication media – namely, interactivity. Both a printed Bible and the daily newspaper are produced and distributed along the lines of a “top-down” and “one-to-many” broadcast model. While readers may have their own responses and ideas, they can (largely) do nothing to change the printed texts they encounter. By contrast, I can change the biblical text on my smartphone if I care to (e.g., if I think a different translation of a specific word or phrase might be more precise or illuminating) – and, by the same token, a community of readers can easily amend and modify an online text; they might also be able to post comments and respond to a given text in other ways that are in turn “broadcast” back out to others. (Such matters, along with many others evoked by digital media, are the foci of Digital Religion, a now mature field of internet studies: Campbell 2017.) In other words, digital
