Tuesday, December 16, 2014

My Review

The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality by Luciano Floridi is a philosophical book on the impacts of looks at how our digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are affecting our sense of self, how we relate to each other, how we shape and interact with our world, and how our activity online shapes our lives offline. Floridi believes we are in the midst of a fourth revolution where our high self-conception of ourselves is transformed into something more modest. Copernicus taught the world that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin taught us that we are not God’s special creatures, Freud taught us that we are not masters of our own mind, and Floridi claims that we are not masters of information. He states “what is real is informational and what is informational is real.” Everything in reality is information and we are inforgs, a term he coins meaning information organisms, and shows us that we are not masters of it through many of his overarching themes.
Floridi starts his book identifying the three ages of human development that are directly related to ICTs in society. In prehistory, there are no ICTs. He states that the invention and development of ICTs made all the difference between who we were, who we are, and who we could be and become. It is only when systems to record, accumulate and transmit information for future consumption became available that lessons learnt by past generations began to evolve exponentially, and so humanity entered into history. In history, there are ICTs to record and transmit information, but societies depend mainly on technologies concerning primary resources and energy. In hyperhistorical societies, ICTs and their data-processing capabilities are not just important but essential conditions for the maintenance and any further development of societal welfare, personal well-being, and overall flourishing. This idea relates closely to the concept of time-space distantiation, discussed in a chapter of a book by Jan Van Dijk on Social Structure. Time-Space distantiation is the idea “that human and social time and space dimensions tend to widen in the course of history” (Van Dijk, 157). This process looks at how societies stretch information and communication under constraints of time and space. Traditional societies were based on direct interaction between people living close together so their information was constrained to only those it could reach by word of mouth and could be preserved for as long as that information would be passed along to the next person. Modern society stretches much further across time and space. The increasing reach of communication and transportation of our societies information globally break barriers of space, while information stored in these new technologies to be passed on to future generations break barriers of time. Van Dijk’s ideas directly support Floridi’s claim that society enters a new era of development once ICTs are available to record and preserve data for future generations.
      Floridi spends some time discussing the shift into being ICT-dependent requiring unprecedented levels of processing power and huge quantities of data and its affects on memory and connectivity. The book includes a graph of Moore’s Law, which is the number of transitors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, that shows the speed at which ICTs are growing in order to store and process the exponentially increasing ocean of data being created. This increased computational power is also available at a decreased cost. Floridi includes a graph that shows the cost of an ICT with the same power as the IPad 2 would be in that decade. In 2010, the IPad 2 costs $100, while in the fifties, that power would cost $100 trillion.  He also talks about Metcalfe’s Law and includes a figure that shows us that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected nodes of the system. The more nodes there are, the more useful it is to be connected and expensive to be unconnected. These ideas are supported by a chapter in Michael Spence’s book on Information Technology and the Integration of the Global Economy. Floridi’s claims of increased computational power being available at a decreased cost is supported by Spence where he discusses Moore’s Law and how ICTs are becoming smaller and more portable as they become faster and more powerful. Metcalfe’s Law is supported by Spence as well where he discusses a tipping point that at a certain number of users, the value of the network exceeds the cost for potential users and continues to multiply rapidly.
      A portion of Floridi’s book is dedicated to understanding informational privacy after the fourth revolution. He states that as we begin to reinterpret our self-understanding in this fourth revolution, privacy required an equally radical interpretation. Each person should be constituted by his or her information such that a breach of one’s informational privacy is a form of advancing towards understanding one’s personal identity. Floridi also explains that your information expresses a sense of constitutive belonging, not of external ownership, a sense in which your body, your feelings, and your information are part of you and not your legal possessions.  Floridi’s claims over privacy are undermined by in a chapter of a book by David Lyon on Surveillance, Power, and Everyday life. Lyon believes that privacy gives individuals, groups, or institutions the right to control, edit, manage and delete information about themselves and to decide when, how and to what extent that information is communicated to others. Under Lyon’s claims, information is the personal property of the individual and not a sense of constitutive belonging.
      Overall, I sincerely enjoyed reading Floridi’s The Fourth Revolution. Floridi did a great job expressing his ideas and concepts in a way that could be understood by a more general audience.  I agreed with many of his ideas and was enlightened by even more. His perception of privacy in our ICT-dependent society is something I haven’t considered, but makes sense moving forward as our devices continue to grow in speed and connectivity. I also liked how he started his book illustrating the magnitude of ICT-dependence we’re currently at and at the rate it is going, and then spends the rest of the book explaining it’s implications on society. His evidence contains many endnotes and references that clearly shows the amount of research and thought he put into all of his ideas, causing me to be more convinced of his arguments. I would recommend this book as a fun and interesting read to anyone interested in the direction our hyperhistorical society is moving in and it’s effects.

Michael Spence, “Information technology and the integration of the global economy,” in The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (2011).

David Lyon, “Surveillance, power, and everyday life,” in R. Mansell et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies (2007).


Jan A.G.M. van Dijk,"Social structure" in The Network Society (2006)

Monday, December 15, 2014

Luciano Floridi



Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is the Director of Research and Senior Research Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute, Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science. Floridi is currently a member of Google Advisory Council on “the right to be forgotten” and of the Advisory Board of the Internet and Society Institute recently launched by Tencent. His research concerns primarily the Philosophy of Information, Information and Computer Ethics, and the Philosophy of Technology. Other research interests are Epistemology, Philosophy of Logic, and the History and Philosophy of Scepticism.  He has published over 150 papers in many anthologies and peer-reviewed journals and eight books. His most recent book is the book I read, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Floridi's lifetime project that he has been working on since the late nineties is a four volume project called The Foundations of the Philosophy of Information. It investigates the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its ethical consequences. This is a map of how Floridi's books are related to one another in his efforts to complete his tetralogy and developing the philosophy of information as a new and independent area of research.


Book Reviews

The New York Review of Books: John R. Searle

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/what-your-computer-cant-know/?page=1

"Floridi tells us that “reality” suitably interpreted consists entirely of information. But the problem with that claim is that information only exists relative to consciousness. It is either intrinsic, observer-independent information or information in a system treated by consciousness as having information." 

BBC News: Peter Day

"It is noteworthy because of the way he widens the high-tech horizon.He applies big and perhaps timeless thoughts to something that is often merely talked about as baffling change."

Ginger IS the Professor (Independent Blog): L. M. Bernhardt

https://lmbernhardt.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/gingers-narcissistic-one-body-book-club-presents-what-information-wants/

"Floridi’s little book is also engaging, but it is not a practical piece. It is a philosophical book (albeit one aimed also at non-philosophers) in which Floridi rather neatly lays out a set of concepts and questions relevant to figuring out exactly how one ought to deal with the ways in which information technology shapes and is shaped by us, as human beings who are living with and through and around and in it."

Nature: Barbara Kiser


"We look with new eyes at our transformation into generic online consumers, and our creation of an environment that is dumbed-down enough for smart technologies to excel. Non-alarmist and very, very smart."

New Scientist: Douglas Heaven


"Fascinating stuff. But, ultimately, both books suffer from being five years too late and five years too early: we already know the internet is changing us, but we lack the perspective to say what shifts are the most important."