Robert Arnautu - Prolegomena to Digital Communication Ethics

Abstract: The Internet speaks about our historical way of understanding the world. The nowadays technology is co-constitutive to society. Consequently, all communication takes the form of a technological-mediated-communication, as in the ending years of modernity all `reality' was taking the form of a written text. For this reason, the ethics of communication has to consider its roots in order to be capable to deal with the ethical problems of computer-mediated-communication. I tried to show that digital communication is rooted in the affectedness (Befindlichkeit) of the human being, in his mores. That ground does not require a stable subject, but the character, the embodiment, and the historicity of the user. The ethics is thus an ethics an embodied experience, of user way of being, and of a historical involvement. I try in this paper to disclose the principles that should underlie an ethics of digital communication.

The technology is nowadays constitutive for our being-in-the-world. The world is enframed by numerous networks: water-supply network, transport network, supermarket network, telephone network etc., and, first of all, the Internet, the network that tends to gather and to reveal all beings and all other networks as standing-reserve. The Internet digitally controls all other networks. The Internet is the Heideggerian Gestell.

One of the main problems that nowadays technology poses is that of communication. The humans have always communicated. The first main switch in this process was the humanistic communication, the communication by means of books. Now, we arrived at a new point of discontinuity. The process of communication became mainly a process of digital communication. What I mean by digital communication are those forms of interpersonal and interactive relatedness by technical means, like telephone- and computer-mediated-communication (CMC). The ethics of digital communication, seems to me, is at the very core of ethical discussions concerning the ethics of information technology. The importance of the Internet is not, first of all, the availability of information, but the tremendous possibilities of communication. Fidler (2004) shows that the users of the first computer-net

Despite the large impact of digital communication, little progress has been done concerning its ethics. The main reason is the lack of an appropriate ontology of the virtual. Therefore, many of the contemporary discussions about computer ethics are very anachronistic, in two ways: either they demand the intervention of a superpower to regularize the technological realm, to control the Net (but not too much!), or they reject the new "disorder" in the name of the bygone peaceful ages. However, these are not the proper options for the ethics of the Internet. How Jodi Dean puts it: "tech-anxieties are part of a politics that uses current uncertainties about computer-mediated interaction to reassert the need for fundamental truths at a time of widespread cultural uncertainty." (Dean, 1999, p. 1073). To speak about the ethos of the Internet presupposes, first, to know what kind of entities, what kind of beings are there, and what kind of disclosures the Internet world exhibits. One way in considering the ethics of communication on the Internet is to account for what the basics of human interaction are. The Internet is more than an instantiation of the technology. As Heidegger puts it, the essence of technology is nothing technological. Analogous, the underlying nature of the Internet must be found not in the different ways of relating people but in what these relationships disclose in the domain of possibility. The computer-mediated-communication is, first, a form of community that discloses a new way of being-together, new fundamental possibilities. These possibilities are not specific only to the Internet, but they reveal, disclose, in the sense of aletheia, the essential of all human communication. The present paper begins with this premise: the digital era praxis discloses new potentialities for interaction, which are consequences of contemporary way of human existence and not of technological devices. The technology is just a way in which the historical man reveals himself, in which the present man apperceives himself.

One point to be stressed is that the digital ethics, and consequently the ethics of digital communication, is not just a domain of applied ethics, or at least it should not be one. The fact that we live in a digital world, that our being is framed and constituted by means of digital relatedness, shows that the computer ethics, the ethics of information and communication technology (ICT) is itself the original ethics. The ethics of ICT reveals the ethos of man in the digital way of being. The ICT arrives at the point of transcending all other human practices and its ethics, therefore, "ponders the abode of man". (Heidegger, 1993, p. 258). Gorniak (1996, p. 179, 187) thinks that the computer ethics, as a particular domain, will become global: "The very nature of the Computer Revolution indicates that the ethic of the future will have a global character. It will be global in a spatial sense, since it will encompass the entire Globe. It will also be global in the sense that it will address the totality of human actions and relations. ... In other words, computer ethics will become universal; it will be a global ethic." However, this is not how the ethics of ITC have to think about the essence of man, as a particular point of view becoming global. This misses the fact that ITC has an ontological relation with the way the man lives in the world, that all praxis is digitally committed. The digital is the mood of contemporary man. Therefore, the digital ethics, the ICT ethics is the ethics itself: "I offer you a picture of computer ethics in which computer ethics as such disappears.... We will be able to say both that computer ethics has become ordinary ethics and that ordinary ethics has become computer ethics." (Johnson, 1999, pp. 17-18).

What seems to be most important in questioning communication is the domain of affectedness and affects. By affectedness, I do not mean feelings or sentiment, but the Heideggerian Befindlichkeit, the essence of the positional fact of being in the world. The communication is not based on the theoretical grounds, on transmitting some information, but its most important characteristic is the phatic, being-together, be

Therefore, we must begin with affectedness (Befindlichkeit), which is the constant mode by which the man lives his world, and consequently the way the man communicates in a digital environment, the way the man experiences a digital relation. The man lives always as an affective being; he always is in some mood (Stimmung). The mood is the state in which the man lives and from which he encounters the other men and the things in the world. Moods are like an atmosphere, a disposition, i.e. the particular affective position of a man from which he disposes the world, views the things and people in a certain way. The mood is socially and culturally dependent: "Shame over losing face, for example, is something one can feel only in Japan, while the exhilaration of romantic love was for a long time the exclusive property of the West." (Dreyfus, 1990, p. 172). Everyone, anytime, is in some mood. What interests us is the particular way in which a person is in that mood. Everybody can be in a joyful mood, but everyone has his particular way of being so. "So, what is the affect or the mood? In a general and scholar mode, we can define affect as an interior perception which is independent of will and which manifests itself in the same time as an agitation of soul and a certain agitation of body. That means, if we can usually determine the object or the situation that is the occasion for the affect (like in the case of fear, joy, anger, shame, etc.), we cannot determine the proper faculty of affectedness. And certainly, it is not hazardously that the language uses normally the metaphor of "heart" (in German: Gemut) for describe what is impossible to assign exclusively either to soul or to body." (Baas, 1992, p. 90). The affect annihilates in a certain way the difference between soul and body, questioning the very basis of this distinction. In fact, that distinction between body and soul, as well as the distinction between subject and object, is not at all pertinent for an analysis of affectedness, as the specific way of being-in-the-world. In addition, the affects annihilate the conscious praxis and reveal the very way of being-in-the-world in its simplicity. In order to understand the affectedness of the digital, the next step will be to consider the basis of human affects in general and, after that, to relate these facts to a phenomenological analysis of the experience of digital communication.

What are the simplest elements on which we rely on in our praxis? What is the name of these elements? In modern languages, two terms denote the elements on which the ethics is constituted: mores and morals. They both came from the same Latin word: mos, moris. It means "customs" or "ways", and refers to the will of somebody. It is an unwritten law, a law that does not need any outside enforcement. It refers to tradition but in the sense that that tradition is internalized. The mores describe the natural way of being, even if it is not a natural law. Like for incest, mores break the distinction between nature and culture. It applies to strong folkways, i.e. the way one lives is pre-determined by his social environment, by the Other. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary defines mores as "a mode of thinking, feeling, or acting common to a given group of people". Mores is not just about the praxis but also about the fundamentals of praxis. In addition, it is about the fundamentals of human being, including theoretical and affective life. In order to understand the role of mores on how the ethical experience is constituted, we must distinguish the mores of what they are not. The mores are to be distinguished of law. The law is the code of licit and illicit. The law concerns only the behavior in the society. The mores are the evaluations that envelope the laws. The law is external, is imposed by others, while mores are something internalized. For example, the relations between wife and husband are different from the point of view of law and from the point of view of mores. In addition, the mores are to be distinguished of moral. Even they have the same etymological origin, the

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moral is the domain of consciousness while the mores are pre-conscious. The moral is the moral of a conscious and active subject that have initiatives in an organized world. For the mores, the consciousness is not a condition because the mores reveal themselves despite consciousness; they question the difference active/passive; they are more closed to instinct. If someone break a moral rule, he may be considered rude. But, the transgression of mores cause disgust, it breaks off the familiarity of world. The mores exhibit the properness of the person.

The affect that reveals mores is the shame (German: Scham, French: pudeur). The shame renders manifest the mores. The shame is quite similar to anxiety because it reveals the unfamiliarity of the world. Contrary to anxiety, that dissolute completely the world, the shame renders the world as strange. In addition, the shame is more present in everyday life. It accompanies every act of the human being: thoughts, actions, etc. The shame is the paradigm of mores. It preserves all determinations of mores: is not enunciable, is variable in respect to the content, and is socially determined but beyond all conceptual determinations. The shame is not a conventional state because it touches the very properness of man. The ultimate destruction of human dignity is not the slavery but "l'attentat a la pudeur" because the man identifies himself with his mores. In the way Kierkegaard puts it, the shame is the most profound of all pains. For Merleau-Ponty, the shame has a metaphysical significance because it reveals the ontological status of the man that find himself in the weak limit between shame and indecency. The shame, like anxiety, is an affect of nothingness, because it is in fact nothing (i.e., not a thing) that ashamed, but only the unusualness of the relation to the world. The shame is not a sentiment of guilt or embarrassment. "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person." (Fossum, 1989). One can feel shame while he is alone; it is not the presence of the other that ashamed. One can feel shame in a computer-mediated-communication, while nobody sees his actions because his mores are touched. Shame, in this respect, differs from embarrassment because it does not involve public humiliation.

The etymology of shame also tells about its closeness to the basis of human way of being. The shame comes probably from Proto-Indo-European *skem-, from *kem- "to cover", that denote the desire for property, for selfness. The shame is thus a painful sensation excited by the consciousness of improperty. It also denotes the parts of human body that have to be covered. It refers to the sexual shame, especially if one considers the Roman word pudor. It comes from pudere, which is also the origin of pudenda that means external genitalia. However, it does not restrict only to the sexual. It encompasses the private life tout court. The shame is expressed by blushing, an incontrollable reaction of human body that cannot be caused by physical means: "We can cause laughing by tickling the skin, weeping or frowning by a blow, trembling from the fear of pain, and so forth; but we cannot cause a blush" (Darwin, chap. XIII). It is worth mentioning that animals do not blush. Even if the blush is not a reaction to physical conditions, it is also not socially acquired: "The blind do not escape. Laura Bridgman, born in this condition, as well as completely deaf, blushes." (Darwin, chap. XIII). That shows that the shame breaks down the difference between culture and nature, between individual and social. The shame reveals the property of man, the selfness, the ownness. The shame is not about the metaphysical subject, which is a mode of consciousness.

The shame comes before consciousness. It reveals the character of man, his proper way of being in the world. This brings us back to ethics because ethos, as it is used in Aristotelian Rhetoric, means the character of the speaker. The ethos, in the history of thinking, becomes the equivalent of man himself, because Cicero translated sometimes ethos as persona, the Latin lacking an exact synonym. Even so, in fact, ethos refers, here, to the position of the speaker in the given situation and the given audience. The ethos implies the positional way of disclosing the world. By positional, I mean,

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when it comes to ethos as understood from the rhetorical point of view, that one is always indebted to his interests, to the language he speaks, to his social position, to his historicity, and to his audience. That means that persona is constructed in the situation. That implies also that the conscious modern subject is just a chimera. The subject is just a positional, temporary instantiation. This is the reason that one has to return to the basis of affectedness, to the mores, to the underlying structure of disclosing the world, in order to rethink the ethics, because an unhistorical ethics of the subject is impossible. The ethics, because is about the proper of man, about his affectedness, is not about the norms or laws. The ethics cannot be expressed because it questions the very ontological status of the world. As Wittgenstein puts it in his Tractatus, "there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher. … It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. … But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. … Of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak." (Wittgenstein, prop. 6.42).

"If I say: truth is relative to Dasein, this is not ontic assertion of the sort in which I say: the true is always only what the individual human beings think. Rather this statement is a metaphysical one: in general truth can only be as truth, and as truth has a sense in general if Dasein exists." (Heidegger, 1990, p. 176). The truth means disclosing a world. Truth or aletheia is always both concealing and revealing. It is oft stated that in the digital communication the identities are constructed identities. Therefore, they did not tell the truth. However, all communication is interest-centered. All identity is so constructed that to reveal best the truth that the user search. The worst conceptions state that the truth on the Internet is the underlying, real life identity of the user. Internet is perceived as a copy of real world, as an extension. Its ontology is derivative from `real' world ontology. I think that precisely the reverse is true. In fact, the user dissimulates in order to reveal what is most important. If someone wants to discus a shameful situation or want to involve in an activity that did not match with his real life status, by constructing an alternative identity he reveals, by that, his way of understanding life, his way of being in the world. Maybe at the ontic level, this represents a falsification, but at the ontological level, it is all about his way of being. Even if somebody lies, there is a sense of involvement, a way of being there for which the identities beyond the screen are irrelevant. To question these identities is like questioning the Kantian thing in itself. The discourse of the other reveals something regardless the truth. Or, better, disclosing is the truth.

Here again the mood and the affectedness play a great role. The mood determines what actions one pursues on the Internet. The mood determine what kind of trajectories I choose: communicating on a fun forum or just chatting with a closer friend. However, the affectedness is always revealed. The user has always his ethos, his way of communicating, and his character. Like the alcohol or drugs, the possibilities of digital communication annihilate the usual moral laws. One can tell things of which he is embarrassed in the face-to-face interactions. Nevertheless, he cannot say things of which he is ashamed, which disgust and contradict his sense of living. He will not involve in an interaction that contradict his being and that is not relevant for his existence.

Different user's identities can contradict each other but the way the user involves in the communication through these identities is the same. The character of the user is like his handwriting: he can write plenty of contradictory things, in the limits of what the language he uses permits, but his style is always recognizable. The user is, as Nietzsche puts it, a multiplicity of I's. "The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of "cells" in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command?" (Nietzsche, §

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490). Each of these I's is floating on the surface of affectedness. They are all products of the same way of experiencing the world. Internet can function in an old-fashioned subject/object mode to facilitate self-knowledge and personal growth. Nevertheless, it mainly functions as a medium of disclosing, of fluid selves that breaks the dichotomies subject/object, agent/patient, etc. Speaking of communication, it is worth mentioning that the user does not enter in the interaction with a stable self that is preserved, and maybe enriched. Beginning with the mood of involving in a certain process of communication, the user's identity is constructed and shaped in the community he partakes. If the identity is literally constructed, others construct it as well, as a text, which is never finished. The process of communication, experiencing the community, precedes the constitution of self. But why not considering these multiple identities as multiple faces of the same subject, as different text of the same book? Because that misses the individuality of each of these selves, of each of these texts. For example, in each community the user is involved, he uses a different set of moral laws that can contradict the moral he uses in a different community. The discourse of the user is always relative to the pathos of the community. Moreover, if we imagine that we can construct a super-subject from different selves we must accept that the different communities are in fact a super-community. Thus, we reduce the Internet to a thing, an object, which it precisely is not. Internet is not a community of communities. The point with the Internet is that the disclosing of the identity of user is underlied always by his mores, by a concernfull involvement. However, the unity of the subject cannot be inferred from the diversity of involvements. This never-lacking concern for his being, i.e. for his world, is the basis of truth. The concernfull involvement of each forms the community, the interaction. By performing a textual common sphere of interest with the other, the user change his self, he is involved in different interactions but with the same type of concern. The concern, the care (Sorge), with which one is involved in each of his interactions reveals the truth and is the basis for different selves. "As one works as an engineer or a banker, one identifies his or her interests to a large extent with those of the group, and through habituation acquires the group ethos. Consubstantiality comes into play when the engineer, while remaining an engineer, becomes "substantially one" with a banker in creating a common sphere of interest through a business proposal." (Campbell). A community in cyberspace is about a common interest, sharing the same ethos.

Another important problem of the Internet communications is that of historicity. Despite the general position that tells us that the user leaves behind, on the Internet, all his determinations, in fact each instantiation is a result of an assumed position toward the world. Usually the user is seen just as present. His projects and his backgrounds are forgotten. Nevertheless, the user brings in the communication his histories, his embodied histories. (I use `histories' and `backgrounds' in plural because involvements in different communities create different fluxes of consciousness.) He brings in the communication his way of mastering language and his way of dealing with questions. As the phenomenology tells us, any action is enveloped by a horizon. The perception, the experience cannot be understood without considering its horizon. Does the computer erase our horizon? Does the screen become the only horizon in the process of digital communication? The computer is just the frame that makes more difficult to see the background, the historicity, the body of the user. We are unhistorical and disembodied beings only if we consider one process that take place at only one moment. In fact, an act of communication is always submersed in a flux of experience, is embodied in a history. There is no view from nowhere. Always the communication is a historical, situational instantiation.

The horizon is indeterminate, is not an object, the other object that must be consider when one thematize a certain object. Thus the horizon is not the context, is not another text

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that must be add in order to understand the first text. The horizon is not thematizable. Taking into account the horizon already reduces it to a thing in the world, to a thing in the horizon of things. This conception about the horizon as context makes possible the idea that the situation of the user online is completely separable of his (everyday) life. Or else, it makes us considering the life online as an uninteresting prolongation of the "real" life. However, none is the case. On one hand, the involvement in the process of communication is always part of some history, some flux of experience which thematize certain backgrounds and certain projects of the user. On the other hand, the digital communication and the digital communities shape the way in which the "real" life is pre-understood and, thus, the way it is lived. The digital disclose, i.e. reveal and, in the same time, create, the contemporary way of being. If the modernity, as Husserl says in Crisis, disclose the world in a specific way, i.e. as measurable, the digital disclose another understanding of the world, another way of experiencing the world. That brings us to the importance that the phenomenological approach puts on the experience regardless its "reality". The online communities are not communities of subjects but communities of users, of partially constructed identities. The online communities are communities of testimonies. Each user testifies his own way of living. In this respect would be very important to develop a phenomenology of testimony.

The communication, the disclosing of world by mean of communication is thus more important that the autonomy of users. The process, the flux of experience is more important that the nomoi of users or of the community. The communication became thus a co-experience. Furthermore, the ethics of digital communication is an ethics of co-experiencing. Such an ethics is not about the norms someone must follow. It is all about the ethos of being-together, about what this co-experience permits to be said and to be done. But, like in the relation between the lovers, such permissions cannot be established a priori. These limits touch the limits of users' affectedness. These limits are the limits of the users' common world, of the particular, the positional co-understanding of being. Any online community has a code of ethics more or less explicit that is just a point of departure for communication. These are the norms that make possible the beginning of the process of communication; they are the digital components of the horizon. Yet, these norms, as being parts of a horizon, are subject to change. They are not laws, as a constitution for example, but rules of the game. Furthermore, as Wittgenstein puts it, the rules are reshaped in the process of playing.

Considering the digital communication from the point of view of co-experiencing the world, we must give an account of the way of constituting this experience of an embodied experience. The question of disembodiment is at the very core of the technological discourse. The Internet was viewed from its early ages as the fulfillment of the Cartesian dualism, the ultimate renouncement at the body. The realm of the Internet is thought to be the realm of disembodied identities. Therefore, the subsequent ethics is an ethics of a disembodied consciousness. All modern philosophy is about stating the importance of the mind in the detriment of the body, which is considered merely as an instrument. "This very attitude of inflation towards the mind and deflation towards the body has long set the stage for the `transcendental' ideals in an attempt to articulate the order of `empirical' world beyond its particularities and peculiarities, or to use phenomenological terms, beyond its `immanence', driving the Western culture to its quest of disembodiment." (Btihaj, 2005). In this respect, Bukatman (1996, p. 208-210) emphasize the importance of disembodiment as a supreme value of digital realm: "Cyberspace is a celebration of spirit, as the disembodied consciousness leaps and dances with unparalleled freedom. It is a realm in which the mind is freed from bodily limitations, a place for the return of the omnipotence of thoughts ... the return of the animistic view of the universe within the scientific paradigm." This is, unfortunately, another way of disconsidering the historicity, the horizon, the particular instantiation of the user. In fact, any experience is part of a phenomenological corporeality. Each experience is an instantiation of a specific domain of perception. Moreover, as Kant put it once, there is no categorical intuition; there is no

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phenomenon without organs of perception. Therefore, each perception, each experience is referred to a form of embodiment. I use the phrase `form of embodiment' because the perception does not refer only to the anatomical body, to the skin. The forms of embodiment are very different: from the perception of a pain in my neck to the perception of a body in a different room by means of a surveillance camera. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the field of perception is infinitely extensible in respect to the intentions of the perceiver. "A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which may break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is. If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can't `get through' without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body. The hat and the car have ceased to be objects ... The blind man's stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight." (1962, p. 143). The user is, thus, at the limits of his field of experience.

This idea of the extended "body" as the locus of perception rejects the Cartesian subject. The embodiment reveals a historicity and a constitution that cannot be surpassed. The user is, thus, an entire field of experience. He is not a special object in the world, the immaterial point of thought, but the horizon of his actions. The instantiation in cyberspace is not purely mental but is a domain of proximity of feeling, hearing, seeing, and talking at a distance. In a way, the digital actions are actions at a distance, but, in fact, these are actions in proximity. The other on Internet is not defined by physical distance but by an interest-related distance. There is an infinite distance between the person who sits next to me in an Internet café and me; but I am infinitely close to my friend I am chatting with. The proximity is the measure of community we are involved in. As Levinas puts it, proximity is the face of the Other. In the Internet case, the `face' is the self-presentation of the user. The users' commitments create community and proximity. Online communities are a matter of local, situated, embodied concern. If one of the users involved in a certain process of communication change the mood, he became distant again. The community is an ad-hoc one, not necessarily because it least only for a moment and after that it breaks off, but because a digital community is not a community of continuous involvement. The user come and goes and probably he will come again in respect with the particular mood, interest, and concern. The dialectic of proximity of the distant other makes possible a new understanding of community. Contrary to modern communities, these ad-hoc communities are never more than their instantiation. They are not beyond the exchanges between their users. They are not unified by some rituals or laws but by the ethos of users because they are communities of interest and concern. These are communities not of surviving together, because belonging is not a matter of necessity, but of being together, the character of the user being responsible for the particular affiliation.

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