As with metaethics and the normative, academic work in the third category of
media ethics has a worldwide scope. Descriptive ethics is only now turning to the
developing world to account for its media use and social values. Robert Fortner’s
Center for International Media has become a world leader in systematically
researching media technologies in nonindustrial societies. This handbook pays special
attention to ethical issues under the conditions of low-level technology, with
advanced media only available for the elite few. As this research multiplies, primordial
issues will become transparent.
The focus here is on instrumentalism as the major challenge for doing descriptive
ethics in technologically sophisticated countries. The prevailing worldview in
industrial societies is instrumentalism – the view that technology is neutral and
does not condition our thinking and social organization.
The French social philosopher, Jacques Ellul, developed the argument that technology
is decisive in defining contemporary culture (Ellul, 1964). A society is instrumental,
he argues, not because of its machines, but from the pursuit of efficient
techniques in every area of human endeavor. Unlike previous eras where techniques
are constrained within a larger complex of social values, the pervasiveness and sophistication
of modern ICTs reorganize society to conform to the demand for efficiency.
In Ellul’s (1969) framework, the media represent the meaning-edge of the technological
system. Convergence media technologies, for example, incarnate the
properties of technology while serving as agents for interpreting the meaning of
the very phenomenon they embody. Though exhibiting the structural elements of
all technical artifacts, their particular identity comes from their function as bearers
of symbols. Scientific techniques are applied not just to nature, but to social organizations
and our understanding of personhood. Civilizations across history have
engaged in technical activities and produced technological products, but modern
society has sacralized the genius behind machines and uncritically allowed its power
to infect not just industry, engineering, and business, but also politics, education,
the church, labor unions, health, and international relations.
The problem for technological societies is not technologies per se, but the mystique
of efficiency that underlies them. Like heatness in red hot iron, the spirit of
machineness permeates everywhere. The world of means expands in size and speed;
human ends shrivel and become mysterious. Human values are replaced by the
machine-like imperative of efficiency. Human goals are buried under a preoccupation
with means. The new electronic media exacerbate the problem. While ICTs
amplify, store, and distribute information as do books and television, ICTs specialize
in the processing and connecting of information. Bernhard Debatin of Ohio
University describes the contemporary situation this way:
As technology advances from mere use of tools to the employment of machines and
then to the implementation of complex technical systems, technology depends more
and more on its own mediating capacities, since technicization introduces greater
complexity into the human realm of action and perception. In other words, the
technologically created sphere requires increasingly technical mediation for its own
operations. This is the birth of homeostatic machines, cybernetic systems, control
technology, and user interfaces. In the technical-scientific world, the focus of technology
changes from merely controlling the forces of nature to controlling increasingly
intransparent technologies and compensating for their unintended and unforeseen
consequences (2008, p. 258).
The average end-user is reduced to participating in a largely predetermined system
through the computer/browser interface.
In an instrumental age enamored of machines, life becomes amoral, without
moral bearings, devoid of moral categories. Moral vocabulary is not understood.
Moral distinctions have little meaning. In the process of fabricating expert mechanical
systems such as the digital order, the world is sanitized of the moral dimension.
In a technological era, the social fashion is to be emancipated from moral standards
and to disavow moral responsibility.
Several social analysts have noted that basic human values have deteriorated in
today’s technological world. Disrespect for others, lack of civility, crude and offensive
language, selfishness and greed – all of these are increasing dramatically on the
Internet and in popular culture. Politicians show little concern for ethical standards.
Opportunism through the financial system created a massive worldwide
collapse. Children are increasingly defiant at home and school. When efficiency,
speed, and productivity dominate, morality based in human life becomes alien to
us. Moral purpose is sacrificed to technical excellence.
Under these conditions, in order to do research on descriptive ethics credibly, we
need to reconceive technology itself. A fundamentally different approach to technology
is needed instead of the instrumentalist one. The technological enterprise is
a human process, value-laden throughout. Valuing penetrates all technological
activity, from selecting the needs to address and which materials to use, through
the processes of design and fabrication, to the resulting tools and products.
Although valuing is surely involved in the uses to which people put technological
objects, valuing saturates every phase prior to usage as well. There can be no isolated,
neutral understanding of technology as though it exists in a presuppositionless
vacuum. The problems of one group are addressed but not all. Certain resources
are used and not others.
True to the character of machineness, the values of productivity, power, and efficiency
direct the technological process when societies are characterized by instrumentalism.
The principle of self-augmentation begins to rule, pushing the global
media toward greater speed and larger size, marginalizing small-scale activities, and
taking on a life of its own, no longer subject to human control. This instrumentalist
worldview must be reversed. The whole phenomenon ought to be called into question,
not just some of its features. Policy-makers, academics, business executives,
and media professionals face a double challenge – developing a noninstrumental
perspective on convergent media and a deep understanding of the global technological
revolution that is concentrated in the electronic giant nations of the world.
The opposition is not to technological products, but to technicism. We need to
desacralize technology and free our academic and professional language from technological
metaphors. Against an overweening technocratic mystique, a culture
needs to be developed in which questions of meaning, life’s purpose, and moral
values predominate.
Instead of the elementary view that technologies are value-free, the reality is that
they are caught in ever-expanding means that tend to overwhelm all ideals worthyof human allegiance. In the instrumental view, technology is static – products,
machines, laptops, iPods, communication satellites. In a more adequate humancentered
model, technology is not a noun but a verb, the arena in which human
existence is established. We need a new paradigm. The instrumental worldview
must be turned on its head and inside out.
There is no magic answer. The only solution is long term. Through education,
beliefs about media technology can change, and when our values are transformed,
technologies will follow in their wake. Rather than emphasize computers for their
own sake in a mechanized society, the humanities ought to be emphasized instead.
The arts, music, philosophy and literature should prosper, not just engineering and
electronic gadgetry. Beliefs about instrumental progress, consumerism, expertise and
magnitude must be replaced with values rooted in the sacredness of human life.
Post a Comment