The choices designers and developers make when they create an app or website can significantly impact your life.
In the information strategy lecture, we learned that the turning on or off, of the anonymity function in a dating app can significantly impact the number of matches you get (Bapna et al., 2016).
We also learned that the (not) showing of the buyer ID at the Dutch Flower auction, impacted buyer behaviour significantly (Lu & Heck, 2016).
What these examples illustrate is that information technology has a profound impact on human behaviour.
Some authors argue we should attribute moral value to IT because of this impac.t
To me, this is fascinating and therefore I decided to write my philosophy thesis about the question: can IT’s have moral values?
To answer this question, we must go back to the start of the morality in technology debate:
The idea that technology could incorporate values wasn’t generally accepted and seldom or never applied to particular technologies, until the 1980’s. This was noticed and contested by Langdon Winner in his famous essay Do artifacts have politics (1980). He argued that “[i]n controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative that the notion that technical things have political qualities” (Winner, 1980, pp 121).
Winner argued that artifacts do have political qualities and influence human life in profound ways impossible to account for referring merely to human actions. His view took root and inspired a new area of philosophical thinking about how material things can have values incorporated, embedded or built in them.
This view is stronger than to say that artifacts can be used for specific purposes, or that artifacts favor a certain use. Winner wants to inquire if artifacts “have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses” (Winner, 1980, pp 125). The word prior must in this context be understood logically, not temporally. It is to say that artifacts can have observable or traceable values in them aimed at certain effects but without actually being used. This idea is what was most controversial about the essay.
The consequences of the embedded values in artifacts are that the material world has a strong impact on human behavior. In Winner’s view, built structures influence almost all aspects of human behavior, freedom and feelings, whether consciously experienced or not.
Winner’s ideas are applied to ICT’s by Lawrence Lessig, a legal scientist at Stanford University. He acknowledges many of the ideas articulated by Winner and extrapolated them to the digital world. He argues that there is a modality that shapes the virtual world in the same way as architecture shapes the built environment. By making this comparison Lessig incorporates Winner’s concern about the importance of the way we build our artifacts. He calls attention to the “architecture of cyberspace”, his way of describing “the software and hardware that make cyberspace the way it is”, designated by the simple word code (Lessig, 1999, pp 503). In other words; code is the architecture of the virtual world.
Lessig’s most important insight is that code regulates and constraints behavior effectively.
“In cyberspace technology constitutes the environment of the space and it will give us a much wider range of control over how interactions work in that space than in real space” (Lessig, 2009, Pp 15).
It is interesting to think about Lessig’s claims in the light of information strategies.
Do you believe IT and the information strategies chosen by firms have significant impact on your life?
Should we argue that IT’s have moral values in them?
Sources
Bapna, R., Ramaprasad, J., Shmueli, G., and Umyarov, A. 2016. One-way mirrors in online dating: A randomized field experiment. Management Science, 62(11), 3100-3122. Links to an external site.
Lessig, L. (1999). The law of the horse: What cyberlaw might teach. Harvard law review, 113(2), 501-549.
Lessig, L. (2009). Code: And other laws of cyberspace. ReadHowYouWant. com.
Lu, Ketter, Heck – 2016 – E XPLORING B IDDER H ETEROGENEITY IN M ULTICHANNEL S EQUENTIAL B2B A UCTIONS 1-annotated.pdf
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics?. Daedalus, 121-136.
