Beth asked me to provide some more material on 'ethics and disobedience' for the book that will accompany the Thinking Ethics seminar and I'll admit I've been struggling. So I'm going to come at it sideways (sorry it's taken so long, Beth!). Here are some books and resources that I've enjoyed. They've all got something to say about the emerging Internet ethic – in fact I'm thinking of coining a new abbreviation: the EIE, for Emerging Internet Ethic, since there's definitely something distinctive about the ethical framework of networked types and, as far as I know, it doesn't have a name yet! If you click through and buy any of these books you'll earn me a sales commission from amazon.com (and I'll leave you to worry about the ethical implications of that sort of opportunism!).
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy. Castells is the Daddy of Internet social scientists. He's a sociologist and he wasn't the first to look at the net as a legitimate object of study but he's definitely the discipline's first superstar. His magnum opus is a three-volume blockbuster called Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture which, I'm ashamed to admit, has been gathering dust on my bookshelves for a while. It's big, it's authoritative and it's pretty dry. That's why I recommend The Internet Galaxy – one volume, 304 pages, still dry but a very good way into the sociologist's worldview. It took me a while to figure out what I found strange about reading Castells' writing on the Internet generation but it's obvious when you think about it: it's about me! Nothing stranger than reading an outsider's interpretation of your little world...
Steve
I don't know if you've ever read 'Open Policy' by Paul Miller (he wrote it before going to Demos). Initially we were going to call it Hacktivism till someone got there first.
The pamphlet develops some of these ideas about where the hacker ethic and the activist start to merge and what this means.
At only 29pp and free to download from http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/publications/OpenPolicy_page715.aspx - worth a read.
Posted by: Tim | March 12, 2005 at 12:17 PM