Does technological innovation improve or corrupt morality?

“A medium is a technology in which a culture grows.”

- Neil Postman

New and technologically innovative mediums are not just the space in which we or our art exists, it also contains flows, eddies and bubbles. It constrains and directs our processes and outcomes; and requires different inputs and controls to achieve the desired work. Such constraints are not directly deterministic — more placing “soft” constraints on our work which we can choose to confront, flow within, redirect or disrupt the existing ecosystems or change processes. But are these constraints corrupting or enhancing our work and world?

Does technological innovation improve or corrupt morality?

Morally judging technology by many standards of modern morality often seeks to position humans at the centre of our techno-ecological universe. There are, however, multiple ethical frames by which we can evaluate technologies’ improvements from its own frames of reference.

Part of the reason that we should aim to avoid a anthropocentric evaluation (in favour of a more inclusive one) is the ethical issue that Thomas (2018) raises — that of:

“Who gets to define these ethics? Or, who are the right people?”

Thomas argues that we shouldn’t just let “experts and organizations that could feel like the right choice: scientists; investors and entrepreneurs; lawmakers and governments; the public and external companies” define these frames for us, but instead “tech affects everyone equally, so…everyone needs to be aware of how tech affects people”. Similarly, everyone effects the medium in which technology exists, and so needs to be aware of their effect on it.

Part of the difficulty of this moral positioning is due to the complexity calculating the ethical impacts of various technologies within various media ecologies:

Bateson introduced the concept of the three ecologies — mind, society, and environment — a triadic schemata of entangled assemblages designed to reconnect ethical and political issues pertaining to mental, social, and environmental issues.

— Taffel, 2013

These ecologies can also be mapped to technological and media ecologies in the following ways:

“content, software, and hardware [are] three entangled scales akin to the conceptual approach of the three ecologies of mind, society, and environment”

- Taffel, 2013

This then means that scale of moral and ethical challenges that could occur because of technological or medium changes is very difficult to directly measure, but we can at least start to understand the scope of what is being asked.

Can a technology be “evil”?

Technologies and mediums do, however, lend themselves towards something — a Bowing 747 wants to fly, not be turned into a greenhouse (though it might become one). A gun is designed to be fired, though it may be used as a club. Neil Postman is often described as being very deterministic in this analysis of mediums and technology, but there have been various interpretations as to whether he was being a “hard” or “soft” determinist in his analysis — saying “X causes Y” or “X tends to imply Y”.

We don’t really know what [Technology] will do. The people who ran the factory for payphones, they probably didn’t look at a pager as something that could put them out of business. But because pagers changed the geography of a drug dealing so completely, cellphone companies started removing payphones. And nobody predicted that. It makes total sense after the fact. And a lot of technology-driven social change works at that level.

Anderson, 2015 interviewing Gibson

So we have a moral obligation to protect humans from technology?

[We] are already immersed in the digital world and are influencing what that world will look like tomorrow. It is up to us to ensure that [we] are equipped with the skills and support to make it a place where [we] can thrive.

- Park, 2016

Park was discussing the role in which we have in raising our children to be equiped to handle an increasingly digital world, and broke down the skills and challenges into the following areas:

- Digital citizenship — The Moral Right to Civil Participation — The ability to use digital technology and media in safe, responsible and effective ways

- Digital creativity — The Moral Right to Cultural Participation — The ability to become a part of the digital ecosystem by co-creating new content and turning ideas into reality by using digital tools

- Digital entrepreneurship — The Moral Right to Economic Participation — The ability to use digital media and technologies to solve global challenges or to create new opportunities

“Of the three, digital creativity is the least neglected, as more and more schools attempt to provide children with some exposure to media literacy, coding and even robotics, all of which are seen as directly related to future employability and job creation.”

So, if we take this framework as a method of mapping the potential sources of our own moral corruption, creativity has the most chance of either becoming, or avoiding becoming “tools of our tools” (Eusebio, 2014). However, as Adorno notes, uncritical creativity would have the ability to perpetuate human suffering, which would mean our creative contributions to the media ecosystems could be immoral if they did not take into account other moral rights, and the moral rights of others as well.

This, however, is a very anthropocentric view of media ecologies, prioritising our own well being over that of the medium.

Do we have a moral obligation to protect the media ecology from ourselves?

Ecophilosphy theories deliberately seek to de-emphasise humans as central to Media Ecologies, seeking to find non-humanist ethical frames in which to understand philosophical, moral and ethical dimensions of media that extend beyond human-centric frames of reference. These were initially applied by Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari:

Within ecophilosophy, both Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari use this model which they describe as the three ecologies; of body/mind, culture/society and the environment as a useful way of conceptualising a series of scalar ecosystems in which humans are embedded, and which need to be considered concurrently if we are to take collective ethical actions with regards to pressing ethical concerns.

— Taffel, 2011

This seems like an enormously complex way of imagining potential sources artistic of corruption the media ecosystem, but with enormous technological giants such as Facebook and Google changing the way in which various mediums present themselves on a worldwide scale every day, it is worth considering whether such firms should be being held morally accountable for the changes to digital ecologies that they introduce.

Impacts

As noted noted above above, there are tangible links where affecting or being affected by certain technology and media means that another piece of media may be affected in either adverse (or potentially beneficial) ways.

We should therefore within our own work consider the moral, ethical and ecological impact of our content on the medium, the impact of the medium on our content, and the social context in which our content exists, and all of these on both audience and on us as an artist, in order to morally improve ourselves and our work.

References

Anderson, E. M. (2015, October 14). William Gibson Talks To EMA About Getting the Future Right. PAPER. https://www.papermag.com/william-gibson-talks-to-ema-about-getting-the-future-right-1427658486.html

Eusebio, A. (2014, October 16). Media Ecology: A Brief Overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=ilHHAAcSJz4&feature=emb_logo

Park, Y. (2016). 8 digital life skills all children need — and a plan for teaching them. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/8-digital-life-skills-all-children-need-and-a-plan-for-teaching-them/

Taffel, S. (2011, June 15). Media Ecology — An Introduction. Media Ecologies and Digital Activism. https://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/media-ecology-an-introduction/

Taffel, S. (2013). Scalar entanglement in digital media ecologies. European Journal Of Media Studies, 2(1), 233–254. https://doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2013.1.TAFF

Thomas, M. (2018, December 26). Ethical Technology: How machines are reminding humans that they should care. Medium. https://medium.com/hackamena/ethical-technology-5fb9f8b7e656

Wateridge, J. (2007). Jungle Scene With Plane Wreck [Oil on Canvas]. https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/jonathan_wateridge_jungle.htm