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Cybernauts Awake!
It's easy to write an encyclical about morality and cyberspace -- just read Usenet and you'll see what I mean. The hard part is writing about spiritual and ethical questions so as to invite a broad readership to think about it for themselves. The people of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility are not the first to consider these questions. In fact, their thoughtful discussion of the issues has almost certainly benefited from observing where other such efforts have gone wrong. While some references are made to a generic Christian perspective, for example, the authors avoid preaching. Rather than condemning piracy, for example, they simply note that "the fact that the copy does not appear to cost the original owner anything, nor to deprive the owner of anything, shifts many people's moral balance."
"This time for sure!"Perhaps more than in other treatments, geeks and our responsibilities are addressed specifically. Coders are asked to 'love your user as yourself', to consider good design a moral issue, and to reflect on the general implications of the work being done. Similar encouragement is given to IT directors: listen to the geeks and try to understand them! General suggestions for users are also offered: "remember systems are dust", as one heading puts it. Some may be dustier than others, of course, but I found it a refreshing way of saying 'garbage in, garbage out'.
When not framing the broader picture, Cybernauts Awake! also touches on specific issues of interest to Slashdot readers. Shrinkwrap licenses, for example, prompt a discussion of the balance of power between the manufacturer and the consumer. Although many inexpert users are likely to blame themselves for the effects of bugs, the authors note, the market generally rewards new features but not added stability. Similar attention is given to the human-computer boundary (with an explanation of the Turing test), communities (defined by geography or common interests), globalization and cryptography.
"Whoops -- don't know my own strength!"I appreciate that the authors have kept the perspective broad enough that very few toes are stepped on. Having said that, I must note a subtle but cheap shot. "There is a huge free-speech culture" online, the authors write, "and in the US provided you are not an anti-abortionist, it seems that you can post anything you like." The site they allude to certainly bears mentioning, but without knowing the details (people's names were put on a list and were then crossed off after they had been killed by opponents of abortion), many readers may simply conclude that US laws do not permit speech on one side of the issue. Fortunately, this is a rare exception to a well-balanced discussion.
Recommended AudienceCybernauts Awake! will be enjoyed by most readers interested in the subject of cyberethics (e-thics?), and can serve as a thoughtful tour of technological issues for readers with more knowledge of Christianity than of the Internet.
AvailabilityUnfortunately, the major booksellers have yet to add this title to their catalogs. I had to order directly from Church House Publishing (the official Anglican publishing house). Happily, my copy arrived in Florida within a few days of my order; the £8.67 total was translated without a hitch by my bank as a $14.14 charge.
Table of Contents- Dream Machines
So what's new?
Good dreams, bad dreams
Choosing our dreams
What this book is for - What Is Cyberspace?
Digital communications
Virtual worlds
On being digital
Beyond physical limits
Cyberspace: what lies ahead? - Into Cyberspace
What is true?
What are real relationships?
Who has the power?
What is a person?
Concluding remarks - Space Probing
Introduction
The Christian story
Christian response
The continuing story
Concluding remarks - Relationships in Cyberspace
Friendship
Neighbourliness
Community
Church fellowship
Physicality as reality
Summary - Living with Cyberspace
Business and people in cyberspace
Property
Justice and accountability
Exclusion
Privacy
Secrets and lies
Implants: bringing cyberspace inside
Deciding what we want - Cybernauts Awake!
Implications for information technologists
Implications for directors
Implications for users
Implications for parents and guardians
Implications for Christians - Appendix: Annotated Bibliography
The PR says that the entire book can be found online at www.cybernautsawake.net For me that site redirects until I get to here.
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Lots of familiar themes here. Lots of high tech topics in the "Into Cyberspace" chapter. On the subject of relationships, it talks about tribes. Tribes used to be formed by geographic location. Today, we have a choice of neighbors in a virtual tribe -- such as Slashdot. Elsewhere in the book it talks about the "death of distance".
A few interesting quotes:
"Technology has the power to change relationships between people. It is not neutral."
"If a standard is 'owned' by one company... then the company ends up with something very like a monopoly."
"People 'in' cyberspace and deeply experienced with it tend to overrate it."
"Money has always been somewhat virtual..."
Most useless chapter: Cyberspace: what lies ahead?
I wouldn't take this book as an authorative reference on cyberspace, but it does point out a lot of interesting things.
This isn't intended as flamebait but I was curious to know why don't have any other types of books reviewed? I mean I'd particularly like to see reviews of science books for non-sciencetists.
For example, Alice in Quantum Land or a A brief history of time should be required reading IMHO.
"Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and my monkey" - The Beatles "If you're not part of the solution, you'
you know who needs a commandment plastered on his office wall that says, "Thou shalt not embrace, extend and propriatize" (is that a word? it is now!) in order to enslave your customers with 'vendor lock in' and then call it 'progress' or 'standards plus'.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
While I don't doubt the fact that this book raises a number of good/valid points, the source (Church of England) makes it (in my eyes) highly suspect. I don't want to get into another Church vs. Religion debate, but generally it seems the organized religion is generally more interested in controlling (some might even say censoring) information rather than promoting the freedom of ideas.
I'm sure that from their relative point of view their points are valid and important, but chances are that once you get past the obvious (technology makes distances 'shrink', etc.), their fundamental premises will be very different from my own; something I frequently encounter when reading arguments from many groups who adhere to a less libertarian point of view than I do.
This is not to say that this book is automatically bad because it stems from the CoE, but even if I would read it, I would read it with the following thoughts in the back of my mind: "What do they want? How do they want to use the medium (internet) to their advantage? What do they see as a threat and how does all of this influence their views?" Whatever you do, consider the source of your information and the biases (sp?) this (source) introduces. This of course doesn't only apply to religion and politics but to just about anything else as well.
However, this seems to be a genuine attempt to say something useful and constructive. It's only my opinion, but I hope EVERY Slashdot reader, regardless of personal belief system (including agnostic or athiest) recognises the positive side of trying to be constructive, regardless of the source.
There is the question of whether the Church should "interfere" with the State/Internet/Corporations. However, both the Jewish and Christian faiths have done nothing BUT interfere, since their respective foundations. (So have many others.) Sometimes that interference has been one of trying to seperate two warring sides, othertimes it's giving someone an often well-deserved piece of their mind.
I honestly can't see the Biblical character of Jesus ignoring the Internet, and saying "I can't go there. It's full of... GEEKS!" IMHO, he's more likely to preach tolerence on BOTH sides, and encourage co-operation, rather than antagonism.
In short, faith can be a friend of "Open Source", "geeks" and net denziens. There is nothing inherently contradictory about that. It doesn't have to be, either. Plenty of coders have no faith in anything. It's just not mutually exclusive.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Another review at ship-of-fools.com.
This book has been rightfully lambasted as being long on cyberjargon and short on content. A response to this book was prepared by Dr. Brian Reid, one of the designers of Altavista and long a presence behind the scenes of the Internet. He is one of the founders of The Society of Archbishop Justus a non-profit organization which maintains the anglican.org domain in trust for the world's Anglicans. Their excellent site, Anglicans Online is a weekly must read for Anglicans.
His response to Cybernauts Awake!, The Church and the Internet, while written for a non-technical audience, is definately worth a read.
After having personally participated in a large, worldwide Anglican mailing list for several years and running my own list for Clergy Spouses, I know that the Anglican Church is alive and well on the Internet.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I always have hated debates like this.
We are all people who do not "live on the net".
I cannot pull up a bunch of data and sit on it.
I sit in my chair in my house and type on my keyboard. The ideas I type go to some computer system somewhere else in the world, so everyone who connects to the same system I do can see it.
My ideas, thoughts and ethics go with me. They are evident in my actions.
If you think being on the 'Net is letting you "be someone else" you are wrong, you are still the same person. Think about that.
As someone raised in York, I have to correct you - it's York Minster.
Personally I don't particularly view it as "interfering" (I know that's not the gist of what you're saying, but you do mention it as interfering). The Church has as much right to free speech on this and all other matters as anyone else. Sometimes they do interfere, and cross what I consider boundaries. I don't consider this one of those boundaries.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Regards, Ralph
I believe that the kind of 'neutrality' being referred to in this sense doesn't directly relate to goodness or evil (and yes, I caught the AD&D reference...). What's meant rather is that because our communications technologies alter the shape of the 'space' (in the mathematical sense) in which we engage in relationships with others, they are not 'neutral' to the forms of relations we have.
Take, for instance, the telephone. When the telephone was new, phone calls were rare and momentous, and the fact that someone is calling you was a very important thing to know. For this reason, phones were equipped with loud bells which could interrupt 'real-world' conversations to draw attention to the phone appliance itself.
Phone conversations became more commonplace, and people began to use the telephone to hold conversations of lesser importance. However, the interrupting nature of the ringing phone did not go away -- and so we now live in a world where many people will postpone or cut off a real-world conversation when the phone rings, even if the phone conversation is of less importance than the real-world one. Thus, the phone technology has biased the 'conversational space' away from the less-interrupting mode of average, polite, real-world conversations and towards the more-interrupting mode of telephone conversations. Rather than deciding which of two conversations to engage in on the basis of their importance or on the basis of 'first come, first serve', people tend to favor with their time the phone conversation over the real-world one. The telephone also increased the level of interruption through which people must work.
(Another way of saying the same thing is that regardless of the content of the conversations, people give telephone conversations disproportionately more attention because they come in at a higher level of interruption.)
This is by far not the only example. Different communications media all have different 'biases'. Consider, for instance, the difference between typed and spoken conversations. In writing -- be it in a letter, email, Slashdot post, or IRC -- you cannot hear people's tone of voice or see their facial expressions, and thus emotional content is more difficult to convey accurately. (One can say "I am angry!", for instance, in many ways, but it lacks the immediacy and the subconscious mammalian signaling present in a stern look and a harsh voice. Worse yet, your reader may read emotions into your text which are not there, based on their own emotions; flamers tend to see perfectly reasonable posts as being flames themselves.) Thus written media are biased towards emotionally detached content, while spoken ones are in a sense biased against it (because the 'distractions' of emotional signaling cannot be eliminated).
That is the non-neutrality of communications technologies.
Just some random musings....
I recommend anyone who hasn't go to the online site and browse the book. It's really raising a lot of interesting issues, and treating them from the standpoint you never hear. That is to say, it's not asking what's fair, but what's right.
But is it the right thing to do? Like I said, many people may not have Internet access any other way, and the activities offered on the Internet are so diverse that in much of it, it is not unreasonable to want a little privacy. Should the employers knowingly limit their employee's only access to this world?
Perhaps. Maybe some of the things the employee is looking at (like pornography) give them legitimate liability concerns, and may offend other employees. But what about my imaginary daughter's email from college? Or my credit card number, when ordering clothes online? And is it okay to monitor traffic so we can tell the difference between what's "okay" and what isn't?
Corporations are very often embroiled in the discussion of "fairness" (usually to make sure they are being treated fairly), but morality transcends this. In fact, it has largely been moral and ethical concerns that gave rise to Free Software -- just because I have the right to make my code non-free doesn't mean I should.
Corporations are not necessarily moral or ethical bodies. In fact, the overarching goal of publicly-traded companies -- to please the shareholders with maximum profits -- seems to conflict with morality and ethics on several levels.
However, as companies come online, they seem to be erecting barriers to entry -- barriers surmountable, generally, only by other companies. If they are allowed to succeed in this, the future of the Internet (IMO) will not be determined with moral considerations in mind, and those of us with moral concerns will have to do things the dirty old way we do now -- forcing corporations to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
These are just my thoughts, of course. But reading a document like the book being reviewed really points out to me what a golden opportunity we have to inject ethical considerations into the very way the Internet works. It would be a shame to waste it with inaction.
phil
Coders are asked to 'love your user as yourself', to consider good design a moral issue....
Those certainly sound like decent suggestions on the surface, but are they? And are the two suggestions contradictory?
Good design can be rather subjective. One user's favorite navigation tool is painful for another to use. Just as in art - people never seem to agree on what good art is. But even art lovers can find more to agree on than users. They may disagree about whether a painting is good art, but both would probably prefer to put the painting on the wall (good design) rather than on the floor, where people would have to step carefully to avoid tripping over it (bad design). But users can't even seem to agree on what constitutes good design, other than maybe "the program should not crash."
And "love thy user as thyself" might make for some really user-hostile programs. Should programmers follow the golden rule, and treat users as they (the programmers) would like to be treated? Just because lots of programmers like command lines does not mean that ordinary users will. Programmers (and many experienced users) don't usually like to be spoon-fed their instructions. Figuring them out for oneself is fun! But not for everyone. Some people will want - and need - a lot of hand-holding.
I would certainly agree that it's immoral to deliberately code a program poorly, but beyond that it's hard to pin down the morality of bad code. Is there room for honest mistakes? Even if one is sincerely trying? What if there's a deadline, and quick-n-dirty is the order of the day?
Regardless of the forum it provides the Church and its followers, as it stands it looks more like a private club than an organization for providing a charitable service.
It is my understanding that progress on 501(C)3 status has been made in recent months. The Society operates entirely with volunteers and given the effort that goes into updating the Anglicans Online site weekly, quite a lot does gt accomplished. I myself have a small role in the maintenance of a web site hosted by the Society. They are certainly providing a service to the Church with their expenses being provided entirely by the founders. The additional expences of the legal help necessary to secure tax-exempt status only take away from the services they are providing.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
"What do they want? How do they want to use the medium (internet) to their advantage? What do they see as a threat and how does all of this influence their views?"
;-)
As a Christian, when I read things written by libertarians arguing for no gun control or whatever, I apply exactly the same criteria.
This of course doesn't only apply to religion and politics but to just about anything else as well.
So why bother making the point at all?
Gerv