Information Ethics I: Origins and Evolutions

Information Ethics I: Origins and Evolutions Being Part One Of a four part address of the history of Information Ethics Author: Jared Bielby, MA/MLIS Affiliation: University of Alberta © Jared Bielby, 2014 Information Ethics I: Origins and Evolutions “As an MLS candidate, I was surprised by this lack of interest in ethical concerns, and so I devised what is now a rather infamous experiment.” - Robert Hauptman | Abstract | The following paper, the first of four in a series on the history of Information Ethics, will trace the recently established field of Information Ethics through it’s various evolutions, from it’s origins in Librarianship to its role as a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the philosophy of information. The praxis of the field will be outlined for the uninitiated reader, followed by an overview of the founding players and their continued contribution to this ever-evolving field. The current evolutions of Information Ethics will then be explored in the context of their application to the viral global phenomena of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), and finally, the paper will conclude with projections towards future evolutions in Information Ethics and a call for personal accountability to the process. ______________________________________________________________________ Information Ethics I – Origins And Evolutions Overview Information Ethics (IE) was born under the somewhat humble and yet privileged tutelage of librarianship. It can be traced back to key figures expressing ethical concerns in university-taught library courses. It was fostered and raised by individuals passionate and insightful in the exploration of their field, individuals who in many ways were ahead of their time, librarians whose groundbreaking work now bears the mark of a global legacy. Tracing the evolution of the field back to its roots proves a fascinating endeavor, one revealing a tale not so much of a burgeoning discipline, nor of a cross- or post-discipline phenomenon, but rather a human tale of personal encounters with an informational world, a dialectic between thought and conversation spurred into existence by individuals whose intricate journeys of concern for the daily tasks of librarianship beg a grander philosophy, an authentic approach to understanding the age old connection between humanity and information. Chapter one will follow the original scholars of the field, their contributions, and the implications of their work towards a future outlook of IE. It will trace the origins of Information Ethics from its humble beginnings in Library and Information Studies and Cybernetics, through its ever-evolving history, and ultimately explore its current philosophical processes. While traditional librarianship, introducing the field of Information Ethics in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, tended to focus on issues of privacy, censorship, access to information, intellectual freedom and social responsibility, copyright, fair use, and collection development; Computer Ethics, and thus Cyberethics (while including many of the above concerns), placed a focus on ethical issues pertaining to software reliability and honesty, artificial intelligence, computer crime, and e-commerce (Froehlich, 2004). Journalism and Media Ethics, having now also adopted the language of ‘Information Ethics’, concerns itself with issues as diverse as conflicts of interests, fairness, and economic pressure (Smith, 2001). Bioinformation ethics explores issues of information pertaining to technologies in the field of biology and medicine where the traditional concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ donation, euthanasia, and cloning form the basis, where questions are posed regarding rights to biological identity, the use of DNA and fingerprints, and equal rights to insurance and bank loans based on genetics (Hongladarom, 2006). Business Information Ethics is the convergence of two separate fields of applied ethics, those being Information Ethics and Business Ethics, that addresses concerns of the provision of goods and services, how those goods and services are provided, and what impact they have (Floridi, 2009). Thus, traditionally demarcated through the above taxonomy, the field of IE has become a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the philosophy of information. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to define. Praxis A history of the field would be incomplete without first at least a periphery review of the praxis of IE, being the concerns and processes of the field. And while the directions of IE in their various incarnations are for the most part related, critical subtleties do exist. An understanding of the various strains of IE will lay the foundation for understanding its history and evolution. A quick overview of the field reveals a number of foundational pillars along with their applications. While on one hand, Information Ethics can be viewed as spanning and evolving into and through several separate ethical disciplines, it can be noted that many of those supposedly separate disciplines are merely re-envisioned approaches to the evolution of information itself, and are collectively covered under the rubric of Information Ethics. A pertinent example of this is the adoption of IE into the field of Computer Science, a synthesis that forms Computer Ethics. Computer Ethics in turn, synthesizing with the expanding concerns of ethics and the Internet as well as implications towards artificial intelligence, has synthesized into Cyberethics. Thus while Cyberethics would claim to stand as a field of concern in its own right, the claim can be made that Cyberethics has simply replaced Computer Ethics to compensate for evolving technology, means and implications (Sullivan, 1996). While a thorough review of the history of Computer Ethics would at this juncture offer great insight, the reader should here be referred to Bynum’s "Computer and Information Ethics," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), in which Bynum effectively and thoroughly covers the history of Computer Ethics, beginning with Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Drawing a history of the taxonomy of the field concerns itself also with what can be deemed the scions of Information Ethics versus adopted disciplines within Information Ethics. Adopted satellite fields traditionally include the above noted fields of Business, Media and Journalism Ethics, areas of information dissemination dealing with aspects of the ethics of information that don’t necessarily pay homage to Librarianship, the esteemed grandparent of the field, but that have been grafted into the ‘family’, so to speak, through converging ideals. While one can argue that computer ethics arises out of library ethics, since the traditional concerns of library ethics evolved alongside the use of computer technology in libraries, computer ethics also originally arose independently out of computer and IT related disciplines. The implications of such subtleties consist of more than mere semantics, and are addressed below. The above synopsis quickly outlines what might be considered the traditional spectrum of, at least, the applied ethics of the field, and doesn’t include the more theoretical branches of Information Ethics. One quickly becomes aware looking into the breadth of the field, however, that as far as even the applied ethics spectrum goes, the above outlines only, as stated, a kind of traditional overview of the field in its original formation. One could argue, and many do, that numerous other facets form, evolve from, and fall within the parameters of the field. As Elizabeth Buchanan asks: “Where is the discipline of information ethics? It is increasingly diffused. It is, simultaneously more important than ever” (Buchanan, 2011). While Information Ethics now crosses paths with every conceivable discipline, an argument for interdisciplinary and meta-disciplinary foundations that will take shape throughout the below treatment of the field, the concern of the present history of Information Ethics as a discipline will focus on specific developments within its applied and theoretical aspects, those of which can be captured under the umbrella of the specific discipline of Information Ethics itself. However, the reader should note that the below discourse will not exhaustively cover all developments arising from and through Information Ethics. Accordingly, an overview begins by exploring the founders of the field and their contributions to it, starting in the 1940s with Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948). It looks towards the work of Robert Hauptman and his reflections on confidentiality and bias of information in a founding article by Kostrewski and Oppenheim as an origin for the field (Hauptman, 1988). Thus the field is established by Hauptman, who along with Martha Smith and Rafael Capurro, first bring the concerns of Wiener’s cybernetics to light in the 1980’s with the formation of the field’s founding literature. As outlined below, upon such foundations, the field has since evolved rapidly into several disciplines, referred to by Froehlich as a multi-threaded phenomenon, and encompasses, among other disciples, the multi-faceted scope of the Internet, computer science, management information systems, media, journalism, business, and more (Froehlich, 2004). On the side of activism, Information Ethics includes, according to Toni Samek, concerns of intercultural relations, liberty and law (Samek, 2010). Relevant in its own right, as also advocated by Samek, are the concerns of Information Ethics and education, regarding both the education venture itself, but also the specific relevance of IE within the University. The first courses taught in Information Ethics were offered at the University of Pittsburgh, soon to be followed by Kent State University, both Universities eventually offering Master’s level degrees in Information Ethics (Froehlich, 2004). However, as early as 1990, Information Ethics was being taught in South Africa at the University of Pretoria (Buchanan, 2009). Soon after the pursuit of Information Ethics became a legitimized venture, according to Froehlich, Information Ethics was taken on by faculties in Computer Science, the second major contributor to the field following Library and Information Studies, and a number of critical and seminal publications from the side of Comp-Sci soon formed a foundation for Information Ethics literature under the rubric of ‘Computer and Information Science’, including major texts by Richard Severson’s The Principles of Information Ethics (Severson, 1997), Marsha Cook Woodbury’s Computer and Information Ethics, (Woodbury, 2003), and Deborah G. Johnson’s Computer Ethics (Johnson, 1985). The definition of Information Ethics remains in flux, the field itself referred to by Smith as a life-world in process, a “socially constructed reality” (Smith, 2001). The implications for an inclusive definition of Information Ethics are many, venturing into the realms of philosophical dialectics, metaphysics and hermeneutics, a fact recognized early on by Smith, Floridi, and Capurro, key pioneers of the field. As Smith notes even in the field’s infancy, the philosophical implications are as vast as are the implications of a society facing an unchecked technological revolution. Her concern, even then, was that society will not be prepared “to deal with the social, economic, and moral challenges that technological changes present” and that “the human spirit may be exhausted by the information overload and the intrusions of a wired society with technologies uncritically employed” (Smith, 2001). Praxis aside, the nature and phenomenon collectively called Information Ethics must be addressed philosophically and theoretically in order to understand the sudden and widely established recognition of the need for such an endeavor. The necessity for an Information Ethics at a basic level is quite simple, and is a recognized and growing concern across an information society. The fact is this: the nature and use of information through viral technologies and our interaction with it, now commonly referred to in the field as Information and Communication Technologies, or ICT’s, is on the cusp of outgrowing the ability of its users to understand and control it. Such a phenomenon looks to the viral and exponentially intricate nature of information exposed, the breach of ontological walls that previously separated one human being from another, of the quickly disappearing choice of privacy, and perhaps individualism, and the audacious question of whether privacy and individualism should even exist. Information Ethics asks questions that previously had no need to be posed, such as, “Is privacy a human right?” but does not assume an answer, rather instead exploring the socially constructed world created through and by information exposure. Information Ethics questions not only the concerns of ethical interactions with information, personal or otherwise, but also the nature of ‘self’ (Capurro, 2005) and information entity (Floridi, 1999), of self as information entity, responding to, and existing among, other information entities. Critical to the above ontological premise is a far reaching debate that posits philosopher Rafael Capurro’s “self”, envisioned through Heideggerian hermeneutical ontology, against Luciano Floridi’s metaphysical “information entity” within the infosphere (Floridi, 2001). The two are not synonymous ontologies. It is against such a daunting and far-reaching spectrum of ideologies that information scientists and information philosophers struggle to even establish praxis. One place to begin, as with many things, is at a place of origins. Origins Inquiring into the foundation to Information Ethics takes us back several decades to the 1940s to Norbert Wiener’s work in Cybernetics, who in 1948 published his groundbreaking book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. We begin for the purposes of the following history with the work of Robert Hauptman, the most common starting point with regard to a narration of the field of IE. A primary text, Ethical Challenges in Librarianship, written by Robert Hauptman, is often cited as the first written account of the field, introducing ethical concerns for information (Hauptman, 1988). According to Martha Smith, who with Hauptman is a pioneer of the field, Hauptman was the first to use the term ‘information ethics’ in his work (Smith, 2001), though further exploration reveals an earlier use of the term by Capurro, as outlined below. Hauptman’s concern at the time was for ethics as they pertained to librarianship, but according to Froehlich, who has written on the history of Information Ethics, there was no focused attention given to Information Ethics as a field in its own right at the time that Hauptman began including the subject matter in his teaching (Froehlich, 2004). Hauptman, after his original publication on Information Ethics, would once again bring up his concerns a couple years later in Ethical Concerns in Librarianship: An Overview, where he incredulously notes the lack of concern for an information ethics, as ironically immortalized in his overview of the situation, where he states that, “As an MLS candidate, I was surprised by this lack of interest in ethical concerns, and so I devised what is now a rather infamous experiment” (Hauptman, 1990). As is widely exemplified among entry-level students coming into the field of Librarianship, Hauptman’s infamous experiment involved pitting professional ethics against social ethics, and for the first time exposing the dichotomy of intellectual freedom and social responsibility. The experiment saw Hauptman query a number of librarians on requirements for constructing small explosive devices capable of blowing up a suburban home. Not a single librarian refused to help him based on personal objections and ethics, but instead held steadfast to established ethics in librarianship, attempting to provide him the information he needed. It was in reflection of this experiment, as Hauptman notes, that there was an exponential rise in publications concerning ethics in Librarianship (Hauptman, 1990). Much of the controversy among library and information ethicists surrounding Hauptman’s ‘infamous experiment’ concerned not the irresponsible actions of the librarians involved but rather the perceived incredulity of Hauptman that they would do otherwise. While Hauptman, even today, holds closer to the ideal of social responsibility than to an unchecked acceptance of the right to access to information, many information ethicists and librarians hold steadfast to the ideals of intellectual freedom, despite the cost. One of the pillars of Hauptman’s legacy is his creation of the Journal of Information Ethics in 1992, where his above concern takes form in what has become the founding journal for the field. Thus while a basis of literature was established early on, it wasn’t until later when specific courses in Universities were introduced to address Information Ethics as an integral component of librarianship, as outlined above, that the concerns began to spill over into other information disciplines including Information Technology. The first true venture into the then unknown realm of Information Ethics reaches further back than even Hauptman where we find references made to issues of confidentiality and bias of information in an article entitled Ethics In Information Science, written by Barbara J. Kostrewski and Charles Oppenheim. The article outlines concerns over the quality and bias of information provided by vendors to clients and customers. In the article, the authors are aware of the burgeoning requirement for an information ethics, as simply stated, “There is a need for a code of ethics for information scientists, and information scientists need to be far more aware of ethical questions.” (Kostrewski and Oppenheim, 1980). Ahead of their time, the authors are perhaps the first to advocate for an ethics in information. One wonders to what extent these authors could have possibly known that their humble concerns would one day become a leading, globally infused, worldview, one which would shake and then redefine the very foundations of philosophy itself. As noted above, Hauptman was not the first to combine the implications of ethics in information into the single term Information Ethics. A further review of the founding literature in the field reveals the use of the term, hidden away in an early article written by Rafael Capurro. Capurro first uses the term, in German, while referencing the Kostrewski/Oppenheim article noted above. It was Capurro, as far as can be determined, who was the first to introduce the term "Informationsethik" (“Information Ethics”) into the literature in his Zur Frage Der Ethik in Fachinformation Und –Kommunication in 1981, stating, “Man kann die Frage nach einer Informationsethik im Bezug auf Forschung, Lehre und Praxis stellen, wie Kostrewski und Oppenheim es in ihrem Übersichtsartikel ‘Ethics in information science’ gemacht haben.” (One can raise the question of an information ethics in terms of research, teaching and practice, as Kostrewski and Oppenheim have made it in their review article "Ethics in information science") (Capurro, 1981). Martha Smith, a true pioneer of the field, is in many ways the founder of Information Ethics. Of her numerous works, her original Information Ethics stands as the most thorough review of the evolution of Information Ethics from it’s origins up until the article’s publication in the mid 1990’s (Smith, 1997). Smith reviews the realm of Information Ethics and its growth through the 1990’s in another paper written a few years later by the same title where she notes the crux of the concern for an “Information Ethics” as the discrepancy between the rapid increase in technological communications and the uncritical acceptance of such innovations by professionals and laypeople alike. Smith first started exploring Information Ethics in the late 1980s. In trying to develop a model to visualize her theory, she looked to the newly established field of computer ethics for a point of comparison. While computer ethics encapsulated the direction and the idea that she had in mind for Information Ethics, she knew that her vision entailed more. As she states in looking back on her career, “The scope I had in mind was larger and included not only what was then called “information” but also the world of knowledge including the philosophy of knowledge” (Smith, 2011). It was in light of reviewing the philosophy of knowledge that she first discovered the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science. From here she went on to develop her initial model of “five working categories”: Access, Ownership, Privacy, Security, and Community, the first theoretical model for an applied ethics for the field. In her article, The Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and Meaning, Smith reflects back on her career and experience in the context of offering insight from the early years of the field towards those who would take up the torch. While insightful beyond her time, Smith did not have a smooth career. By the very nature of groundbreaking, of pioneering, she encountered resistance at every turn. Her colleagues often reacted with fear, disinterest and resistance to her ideas and she soon learned to balance deliberation with silence when necessary. Through her career, Smith would be passed on for tenure in several appointments. She would be accused of teaching “Sunday School”. Her original vision was so poorly received that her detractors were not even able to objectively and properly qualify her work. Thus she had to fight to even use the term “Information Ethics” when even her supporters insisted she use the term “Library Ethics” instead. Based on her reflections, it is perhaps both disheartening and encouraging to conclude that in order to do what she needed to do she had also to sacrifice much of what she wanted to do (Smith, 2011). Her sacrifice is both exemplary and affirming of the philosophical standards and ideals underlying the very foundations of Information Ethics and of freedom itself. These same ideals, as explored throughout this thesis, will take the reader from the foundation of library ethics in modern librarianship back through thought and time to ancient Greece where Information Ethics finds its earliest origins in the agora of Athenian democracy through parrhesia, an idea of freedom of speech that posits the authenticity of ethics in the vulnerability of the speaker. Perhaps to the new initiate stumbling into the current evolution of Information Ethics, one might assume that the entire phenomenon is constructed and directed entirely by Floridi and Capurro, two key players whose thought seem to dominate the field, and whose works consistently play off of, critique and reference the other. There is no better example of the intricacy and complexity of the field than as demonstrated by the interchange between these two Information Scientists / Philosophers, and the numerous papers written in response to their understanding of Information Ethics through terms of hermeneutics and the metaphysical. Where Capurro introduces angeletics to the field (the study of messengers and messages), and works within the philosophical considerations of a hermeneutical approach, Floridi works within his post-analytic philosophical framework of information ecology and infosphere. In order to accurately assess a history or evolution of Information Ethics, one must first comprehend the foundations of information itself, which was the initial task of Capurro as far back as 1978 with his doctoral dissertation on the Concept of Information. In his formative work, Capurro explores the evolution of our understanding of information, from the early Greco-Roman idea of eidos and morphé to Aquinas’ medieval informatio to the eventual undoing of such objective concepts of information (information as giving form to something) towards a modern communicative theory of information (Capurro, 1978/2009). As such, Capurro’s doctoral and post-doctoral work in the late seventies and early eighties paved the way for an anthropological foundation for Information Ethics through the application of his Hermeneutik of information science. Now a leader in the field, Capurro first revealed his hermeneutical approach en masse in a series of lectures in Sweden in 1985. Following those original lectures, Capurro brought together the ideas from the lectures and from his post-doctoral thesis into his Informationethos und Informationsethik, where he sums up his hermeneutical approach, stating that “The information habits of a group or society ("information ethos") and the critical appraisal of moral norms in this field ("information ethics") are the key concepts of these reflections.” (Capurro, 1988). The conclusions of Capurro’s Hermeneutik define the field in many ways, as reflected under the “Foundations” page of the International Center for Information Ethics, where this hermeneutical epistemological framework for the field is reflected in the differentiation between morals, ethics and law, where morals are customs and traditions, ethics the critical reflection on those morals, with law encapsulating the legal formalization of ethics as norms, a differentiation that has been explored extensively throughout the history of ethics, beginning with the Greek philosophers (ICIE, 2014). Of all Capurro’s contributions to the field, his paramount contribution is in his concept of angeletics, one of the more significant evolutions of the field, being a theory of messages and messengers that while complimentary to his original Hermeneutik, presupposes hermeneutics. Where hermeneutics deals in matters of interpretation, angeletics expands on the communication theory of Shannon and McLuhan, expounding the precedence and import of message before interpretation. As Capurro explains it: “The question, 'what is a message?' opens a new perspective not only with regard to media studies but also to the study of signs and their interpretation. Angeletics is a research field at the crossroad of media studies, semiotics, and hermeneutics. Each interpretation presupposes a process of message transmission. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, not just an interpreter of these messages. The message-bearing nature of communication is what angeletics aims to analyse. But any process of message transmission presupposes indeed a hermeneutic situation in which sender and receiver have some common basis of understanding. In other words, angeletics operates with the sender/receiver difference based on the belief that understanding or, more generally, that a selection process between two systems is possible. Hermeneutics operates with the difference between pre-understanding and interpretation based on the belief that what is object of the process of interpretation has been successfully transmitted, i.e., offered to the receiver as an object of selection. Semiotics is concerned with the whole process by which a sign, what it intends to signify and what the interpreter is supposed to select are viewed as a dynamic, self-organising structure.” Somewhat later to enter the field than Capurro, but just as influential in his efforts at redefining information as a foundation to the field, especially as it pertains to one of its more significant evolutions or reiteration of information itself, the Philosophy of Information, is Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford. Floridi finds his entry into Information Ethics through his search for a new methodology to the problem of the foundation of the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology). In his formative book, Scepticism And the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies, Floridi approaches epistemology from a metatheoretical perspective, asking whether an epistemology is even possible that does not negate itself through logical fallacies. This methodology is Floridi’s answer to what he deems the failure of analytic philosophy. Regarding his venture he muses, “I have wandered from the history of ideas to information technology, from formal logic to the social sciences" (Floridi, 1996). Out of this pursuit, Floridi explored Popper’s objective knowledge, knowledge not dependent on a subject, which Floridi calls semantic information, the beginnings of what would later form the basis to his constructionist philosophy, the philosophy of information (Floridi, 2005). In his Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics, Floridi solidifies his approach by terms of information entity and information entropy. According to Floridi, at a foundational level all things constitute an information entity and all information entities are deserving of and accountable to moral entitlement. In an informational interplay within what Floridi terms the Infosphere, each act either contributes to or detracts from the inclusive “good”, as represented in terms of information entropy. It is from this position that Floridi’s methodology manifests as an environmental ethics, and whereby Floridi’s concept of Infosphere arises. Floridi comprehends the task of ethics as a recognition and regulation of information processes, a recognition in which he regrets as being overlooked and looked down upon by traditional philosophers, an ailment resulting from, as it were, the interdisciplinary nature of computer and information ethics, exemplified by Floridi as “everybody’s business, but nobody’s concern” (Floridi, 1999). Library Ethics While the above history outlines the parameters of Information Ethics as a distinct discipline, the field finds its primordial roots in library ethics whose concerns far predate the inception of Information Ethics, finding their own official origins, at least in the professional sense, in 19th-century librarianship, and their unofficial origins (the crux of the following thesis) in a tradition of library ethics that stretches back to ancient Greece. While the inception of library ethics into an official code was first laid down in 1930, the consideration of ethics by the American Library Association (ALA) dates back to 1892 where a utilitarian motto was adopted to represent the charge of the ALA, characterized as “The best reading for the greatest number at the least cost” (Preer, 2008). That basic utilitarian philosophy remains in place to date, though it has been modified over the years to accommodate changing interpretations of its language. Even so, and criticized by David Woolwine for its absolutist language, the Bill of Right’s mandate still suggests an allegiance to strict utilitarianism, a dangerous scenario that opens the door to the very abuses it so fervently tries to negate. Namely, and especially in our contemporary age of government surveillance and national security, a utilitarian creed of the greatest good for the greatest number becomes a gateway to authorities controlling information, invading privacy and restricting access, all based on “the greatest good” of national security. Woolwine posits that a new philosophy is needed that revamps or replaces the Bill of Rights with a creed more in line with postmodernist idealism (Woolwine, 2007). Tying Information Ethics to its origins in Library Ethics is the shared foundational philosophy of the interplay between intellectual freedom and social responsibility. As Hauptman posits, “Ethical dilemmas arise when two positive necessary dicta conflict with each other. In librarianship this may occur when the demand for information clashes with an iconoclastic advocacy of individual decision making, the human necessity to bear responsibility, to be accountable for one’s actions” (Hauptman, 1990). This interplay could not be better demonstrated than between the polarization of Hauptman’s views and the otherwise prevailing views of most intellectual freedom advocates. While Hauptman places personal ethics (which he equates with societal or ‘common sense’ ethics) before professional ethics, the general trend in Library Ethics, perhaps more so than any other discipline of applied ethics, is to hold steadfast to a professional code of ethics before and if necessary, against, one’s own ethics and personal beliefs. As Preer captures in her Library Ethics, “An ethical mandate to separate personal beliefs from professional responsibilities is inherent in providing the highest level of service and the freest access to information” (Preer, 2008, p. 134). Despite to which bearing one favors in the above gradation of ethics, it is of paramount importance for the information ethicist to observe Hauptman’s original essay, Ethical Concerns in Librarianship, namely for the stage it sets for the foundation to the field of Information Ethics, some of those foundations whose applicability is even now only truly coming to light in a post-WikiLeaks culture of government surveillance. It should be somewhat humbling to see Hauptman predict the dialectical directions of an information-based society and a need for information ethics decades before its current culmination in the WikiLeaks controversies. In the above noted essay Hauptman somewhat uncannily envisages the WikiLeaks phenomenon in his exploration of the dichotomy of the ethical spectrum, concluding that, “one’s personal or social ethic should supersede the ethic that journalists have created for themselves”, whereby “Their ends (discovering information) do not justify the means (acting in an uncivilized or illegal manner)” (Hauptman, 1990). Hauptman remains true to his original take on the matter, judging the activities of WikiLeaks an “abomination” and explicitly asserting that, “offering the world a treasure trove of unvetted proscribed documents embarrasses, harms, and kills” (Hauptman, 2011). It is no coincidence, as will be outlined in further chapters, that the field of Information Ethics has seemingly come full circle in the WikiLeaks phenomenon. It will be argued, however, that the concerns of the field have not come full circle, per se. Nor is it simply a matter of history repeating itself. Despite certain schools of thought that would argue against the uniqueness of the problems now faced by our contemporary information culture, the increased exposure to information is a distinctive experience. Rather than coming full circle, WikiLeaks is symbolic of the culmination of factors leading to an imminent singularity in human / information relations. WikiLeaks, the pivotal factor in the present project, is both a phenomenon and a symbol of fulfillment and dialectical inevitability, encapsulating not only the tradition of library and information ethics in their entirety, but also the contemporary dialectical expression of an information-based culture. While the American Library Association (ALA) and the Canadian Library Association (CLA) mandate strict ethical codes for library and information professionals, unlike law, where one can be disbarred for not adhering to, there is no legal requirement for librarians or information ethicists to follow such codes, nor normally are there prescribed professional consequences for not doing so. To complicate the situation, the applied ethics of information in any given scenario, even when applied according to the same set of professional codes using the same mandates, becomes muddied depending on what side of any particular issue one is standing on. As Hauptman states, “The problem is that correct action is apparently variable depending on one’s allegiance” (Hauptman, 2009). While such an aphorism is likely true for ethics in any field, it not only becomes overtly obvious in library and information ethics, but also in many ways defines library and information ethics at a foundational level. A look towards the early makings of library professionalism points to an intimate meeting that took place in Philadelphia in 1876 when the first members of the American Library Association initially met to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a professional organization for librarians, founding librarianship as an established profession that in time would allow for a formal statement of fundamental and centralized ethics. As noted by Preer, the establishment of the ethical values of Librarianship took shape in real world practice during that time and as influenced within the cultural horizons of the industrial age and mass urbanization, cumulating with the ALA’s first professional code of ethics in 1938 (Preer, 2008). It is thus within the above dynamics that history establishes a common base for both Library Ethics and Information Ethics, addressing the intricate relationship between the spread of common knowledge and the drive towards eradicating exclusivist monopolies on information and access to it. From the early American experience of libraries and increased public access to information, a professional ethical foundation was sought and established under similar parameters as those currently at play within the dynamics of the contemporary digital age. In establishing a history for Information Ethics and ultimately an ethics for a collaborative knowledge based epistemology as demanded by phenomena such as WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks representing a phenomenon, it is thus towards the industrial age and even further that one must look. In many ways, our current digital society with its void of ethics and questions concerning said void as revealed through matters of technology and information control is the culmination of what began in the industrial revolution with the onset of mass production, including the increased distribution of printed information (and this, of course, an evolution of a post-Gutenberg world). However, as will be outlined below, the foundations of library ethics, as we understand them today, far predate even Gutenberg, the industrial revolution and 19th-century professionalism. While addressing what has been established as Library Ethics under the ALA and other institutions, one must, in seeking to unearth the origins needed to navigate the entirety of the evolutions of the field, apply to one’s search an ‘archeology of ideas’ or a historical geology Rafael Capurro, in conversation, October 28, 2013. taking the exposition further back and further inward in order to understand the dynamics involved in the formation of Information Ethics, and thus collaborative knowledge, including the phenomenon of the wiki and finally WikiLeaks itself. While such an exposition looks first to the 19th century, it retreats further to ideas of freedom and access as fortified through the events of the French Revolution, and then further still towards matters of censorship as exemplified by the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the 16th century. Further still, slowly threading its way back through history, the traces of library ethics find their place also in mediaeval Islam in which many ways the modern library most accurately emulates, the Islamic libraries lending out books for loan periods of one day at a time, and finally, at least for the purposes of this overview, library ethics turn to ancient Greece itself, to the very origins of western thought, looking towards ideas of freedom of speech in the Greek concept of parrhesia, and to Plato's criticism of writing and the implications thereof. While the numerous advocates for library ethics and the tales of their struggles paint a fascinating, enlightening and colorful history, the details of such cannot fully be illuminated in the current treatment. The reader is however here directed to Fred Lerner’s the Story of Libraries for a complete education. The critical point to take from the above is an awareness of the cultural dialectics, the rise and fall, the waxing and waning of the interplay between humanity and an informational world that now predicates a digital informational culture as portended in the concerns of Information Ethics. As noted above, the events and concerns of the digital age are not new; they are however cumulative in the fulfillment of the historical conflicts between intellectual freedom and information monopoly, a dichotomy whereby a detailed analysis of the wiki phenomenon and collaborative knowledge ethics encapsulates the historical entirety of the tumultuous relationship outlined above. Evolutions Current directions in Information Ethics are redefining the scope of the field while building bridges between disparate and seemingly separate aspects of its semantic spectrum. Fascinating implications present themselves towards the evolution of that which currently does, and which can be, encapsulated beneath the umbrella term ‘Information Ethics’. It remains to be seen what precise form these evolutions will ultimately take, if indeed there ever is a point where we can put the definition to rest. Where Librarianship has given birth to Information Ethics, Information Ethics has given birth to the Philosophy of Information and angeletics, new foundations to ontology and communication theory, spearheaded by Capurro and Floridi, and in turn, explorations of the Philosophy of Information and angeletics have come full circle to readdress the traditional concerns of librarianship through exploring the philosophical implications of librarianship, namely the relationship between information organization, cataloging, classification, epistemology, and ontology, and all of this precipitated at an intercultural scale (Herold, 2005). It would appear that as the various strains of the numerous and ever growing disciplines within this yet ambiguously defined field slowly coalesce into a recognized and common sphere, the relationships between those disparate pieces will become ever more intimately entwined, greying borders of black and white into a unified kaleidoscope of semantic possibilities. It is however all too easy to become swept away with all of this, and in our excitement, forget the foundations of the field, the foundations that Hauptman fought to establish so many years ago. With all of the grandeur of the construction of this philosophical Parthenon, one such foundational pillar is weakened, often unkempt and neglected, the structures of which it supports threatening to collapse under an ever-increasing thought-load. Thus, least we get carried away with our task, it becomes incumbent on each of the above players to acknowledge that ever critical piece of the puzzle, namely education, as hinted at above, without which, the project fails. It is perhaps somewhat inconceivable that more than twenty years after Hauptman’s call for the teaching of Information Ethics courses in Library and Information Studies, there yet remains a void in the very place where the field found life. Though, as mentioned above, select universities in the US and globally have taken up Hauptman’s call, there remains a seemingly willful ignorance on the part of many Library schools to include in their curriculum a course dedicated solely to Information Ethics. Ironically, and despite the above political landscape, it is education that has arisen as the leading concern in the field of Information Ethics, at least as exemplified in the literature, a fact revealed through the metadata analytics of Dr. Ali Shiri of the University of Alberta in his Exploring Information Ethics: A Metadata Analytics Approach, a study that will be explored further in chapter two of the following thesis. Despite the lack of a home for Information Ethics in education, there are advocates as such, who like Hauptman, work from their positions as professors in Library and Information Studies to push for and make aware the need for the study of Information Ethics especially as it pertains to Librarianship. One such advocate is Toni Samek, a professor teaching out of the University of Alberta, whose legacy as the founding player in the creation and advocacy of Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility equals that of the formative players of Information Ethics as a whole. In recent years, Samek has taken up the torch of Hauptman, and advocated for the further inclusion of Information Ethics in education as a critical element in its own right, but also as critical to Library and Information Studies. Building off of established pillars in her own branch of Information Ethics, Samek applies her experience in the formation and teaching of her course Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility to highlight the necessity of Information Ethics in higher education (Samek, 2010). Her part in the creation of the Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) sets the stage, but most universities and library schools are not yet prepared to heed the call. Professors like Samek bring the idealism of Information Ethics back to the front line, where concerns for Intercultural Information Ethics become a form of activism, often against the very structures of the University institutions themselves, institutions that knowingly or unknowingly repress the very advocacy they ought to be supporting. According to Samek, it is no coincidence that Information Ethics is lacking in the institutional framework. Noting that academic freedom is dependent on tenure and job security, Samek relates the contracting of instruction and the systematic elimination of full time professorships as directly applicable to a hesitancy about free speech, thus defeating the quest of Information Ethics at its very core. The problem here of course translates to matters of education. As Samek put it, “the working conditions of faculty are the learning conditions of students” (Samek, 2010). Concerns for ethics in an information-driven world have saturated all facets of society and culture. One might say that the field of Information Ethics has gone ‘viral’ in recent years, globalizing at a speed unmatched by any singular phenomenon in history. Information Ethics has taken up residence even within the halls of the United Nations itself under UNESCO and “info-ethics”, a term adopted by UNESCO to refer to their own brand of intercultural information ethics, where the main concerns center around topics such as the digital divide, the information rich and the information poor, and cultural alienation (Capurro, 1998). Luciano Floridi reflects back on the transformations in the field over the ten years that he has contributed to it. Now one of leading philosophers in the field, Floridi notes a two-pronged evolution of the field stemming from information and communication technologies (ICTs). On one hand, he notes the various growing dependence in all fields of ethical research for an Information Ethics, as he puts it, “from business ethics to environmental ethics, from medical ethics to the ethics of nanotechnologies, from the ethics of cyberwar to the ethics of e-research.” And on the other hand, he recognizes the conceptual expansion and dialogue within Information Ethics, crossing paths with numerous philosophical traditions spanning, as he lists them, “Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Spinozism, Deontologism, Consequentialism, Contractualism and Buddhism, as well as analyses and discussions of metaphysical, epistemological and logical topics” (Floridi, 2008). The implications of these evolutions are staggering, considering the partnerships formed between philosophy and praxis in Information Ethics, and considering the speed at which they have formed. Under the heading of “Information Ethics” we are now looking at a globally concerned, socially constructed “life-world” (to employ Smith’s terminology), that spans a vision beginning with advocacy for free access to information in librarianship and ending with philosophical studies in information phenomena based in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, both of whom are primary influences in Capurro’s thought and writing (Takenouchi, 2004). With information scientists and philosophers such as Capurro and Floridi pushing the envelope at every turn, ever advancing in thought and application the realm of that which entails Information Ethics, one considers the near futile task of actually defining the field. But perhaps, as many philosophers would point out, a field that can’t be nailed down is the only kind of ‘field’ that is relevant, that defined epistemologies are dead scholasticism, even to the point of irrelevancy. Conclusion Despite the uncertainties and yet unresolved foundations of the field of IE, it is difficult to argue that Information Ethics as a field is not relevant, in all its facets. Studies in the field are growing exponentially in ways that are barely traceable, all towards a holistic understanding of the nature of the world as informational, with loaded implications towards responsibilities that we ourselves have as agents of an informational ontology. But even with this said, the recognition of the relevance of information ethics in all disciplines, in an ironic sort of way, perhaps nullifies Information Ethics as a discipline that stands apart in it’s own field, since the adoption of Information Ethics globally, corporately, scientifically, and philosophically, into all aspects of life, has restructured our understanding of our entire world. Such contemplations are sobering when placed against the digital evolutions of information societies. While one might consider Information Ethics outside of the current applications of the field, the scope of Information Ethics is established around two considerations, those being the proliferation of information, and the digital vehicle in which it resides. Digital ontology states that “the ultimate nature of reality is digital,” a premise that Floridi disagrees with, who favors instead an informational ontology where “the ultimate nature of reality is structural” (Floridi, 2009). Whether or not the ontological debate is ever laid to rest, and whether or not one agrees to such definitive conceptions of reality, it cannot be denied that the quest to define and classify Information Ethics in its own field of study becomes ever more complicated as it coalesces into a state of digital zeitgeist. If everything is Information Ethics, as Vlatko Vedral’s theory of Quantum Information would suggest, then as Elizabeth Buchanan points out, nothing is Information Ethics, a stance that she herself disagrees with (Buchanan, 2011). Perhaps only time will tell if Information Ethics is a field of inquiry, or simply the recognized zeitgeist. 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