Under the label of ‘Net recommendation’, the present study aims to offer a more balanced and constructive normative analysis of  digital media, focusing on the relations between digital media and the good life. The project of Net recommendation aims to (re)assert the importance of actual discourses in our normative analysis of the relations between digital media and the good life. In the present study, I pursue the project of Net recommendation with a Walzerian approach to digital media and the good life that takes seriously (and, ideally, also interacts with) actual discourses. This approach, as I shall argue, allows us to have a better understanding of our normative judgements on the impacts of digital media has (or will have) on the good life and, at the same time, allows us to answer the question of ‘how should we live with digital media?’ more adequately. At the most general level, therefore, I hope the present study will contribute to the field of Information and Computer Ethics and critical studies of digital/new media by (re)turning to the good life through an analysis of the relations between digital media and the good life.

Yet, the Walzerian approach is not only useful to normative analysis of digital media and the good life in an intra-cultural context, i.e. the critical study of the impacts of digital media on the good life within a culture, it is also useful in an inter­cultural context. Using China’s Internet as a case study, I show that the relations between digital media and the good life in each culture have to be examined in its own right. In short, the Walzerian approach is useful not only at a local level, but also at a global level. In this way, I hope the present study will also add to the growing body of research in intercultural (and cross-cultural) studies of digital media.

In Chapter One, I introduce my approach to normative analysis of digital media and the good life, which is based on Michael Walzer’s idea of social criticism. This approach is characterised by five features, i.e. (i) hermeneutical, (ii) immanent, (iii) participatory, (iv) empirical and (v) pluralistic. It takes seriously the actual discourses (e.g. popular discourse) on digital media and urges researchers to integrate them into their normative analysis. Since the focus of my study is on the relations between digital media and the good life, I identify a specific type of actual discourses on digital media that is relevant to the present study, i.e. prudential appraisals of digital media. Here, I argue that prudential appraisals of digital media are normative, and that their normativity is grounded in our practical identity (or our self-interpretation and self-understanding). I discuss how, and in what sense, practical identity is the source of normativity, and point out what this means to normative analysis of digital media and the good life. Finally, I end the chapter by offering an additional argument for the indispensability of prudential appraisals of digital media in normative analysis of digital media and the good life.

As I argue in Chapter One, prudential appraisals of digital media are normative and their normativity comes from people’s self-interpretation and self-understanding. In order to properly understand our normative judgements on the impacts of digital media on the good life, it is necessary first to explicate the normative ground(s) behind the judgements, i.e. our mode(s) of self-interpretation and self-understanding. In Chapter Two, through a discussion of the works of Charles Taylor, Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, I identify three different notions of the self in modern and late modern societies that serve this purpose, i.e. the disengaged self, the expressive self and the reflexive self; and, at the same time, I also identify the ideals (or the views of the good life) these notions of the self embody. Finally, I support my characterisation of the views of the good life in modern and late modern societies by looking at the empirical research conducted by Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues. The main objective of this chapter, in short, is to lay the ground for my analysis of prudential appraisals of digital media in the next chapter by recollecting the evaluative and normative resources for (re)interpreting and understanding them.

In Chapter Three, I apply the Walzerian approach with the notions of the self I discuss in Chapter Two to prudential appraisals of digital media. I examine two sets of prudential appraisals of digital media: the first set focuses on the impacts of digital media on society and culture, which influence people’s lives by transforming the exteriors of their lives; and, the second set focuses on the impacts of digital media on our brain, mind and/or the self, and how it influences people’s lives by transforming their interior lives. More specifically, I attempt to show that prudential appraisals of digital media—and, for that matter, any normative judgements on the impacts of digital media on the good life—are best understood with the notion(s) of the self. This, I also attempt to show, has an important implication to normative analysis of digital media and the good life, namely we should (re)direct our attention to the question of ‘who we should be in a digitally-mediated world?’

Chapter Four is devoted to explore a different notion of the self, i.e. the Confucian self in (contemporary) China. I argue that the modern self and the late modern self I discuss in Chapter Two are inadequate for a comprehensive normative analysis of digital media and the good life, because they are not readily applicable to societies that have a different cultural root, and thus a different trajectory of modernisation. I propose that we should move beyond the idea of singular modernity and replace it with the idea of plural modernities, which allows us to properly acknowledge the importance of various cultural roots. With the idea of plural modernities in place, I explore the Confucian self and the view of the good life it embodies. Similar to what I have done in Chapter Two, the aim of this chapter is to lay the ground for my analysis of prudential appraisals of digital media in (contemporary) China by exploring the evaluative and normative resources available in the Confucian tradition.

I have applied the Walzerian approach in an intra-cultural context in Chapter Three, but the approach is also useful in an intercultural context. In Chapter Five, I illustrate how the Walzerian approach can be applied at a global level. I analyse the Chinese Communist Party’s position on the Internet with the Confucian self, and illustrate the fundamental role of Confucian values (and the Confucian view of the good life) in grounding China’s Internet policy and normative judgements in the opinion pieces. I argue that if it is indeed true that China’s Internet is informed by a different normative and axiological foundation, i.e. the Confucian self, then the question of ‘whether the Internet is good or bad?’, or the question of ‘how we should live with digital media?’, should also be answered differently—in a socially and culturally sensitive manner. To illustrate this, I offer a discussion of social media from the Confucian perspective. I show that there is a prima facie incompatibility between the Confucian way of life and social media, but I also point out that the incompatibility between them may be resolved. In short, the lesson of this chapter is that different societies require their own normative analysis of digital media with their own evaluative and normative resources.

Implicit in the project of Net recommendation and the Walzerian approach to digital media and the good life is philosophers’ responsibility to proactively offer practical recommendations to the public, i.e. users of digital media. However, the practice of recommendation is often faulted as paternalistic, and thus is considered to be morally undesirable. This criticism must be answered if the project of Net recommendation or the Walzerian approach is to be considered as a (morally) feasible option. In Chapter Six, I look at this criticism more closely. I argue that offering recommendations is indeed paternalistic, but we should not see it as morally problematic, because paternalism is inevitable in our technologically-mediated lives. Hence, philosophers should not be shied away from the practice of recommendation—especially only if it is for the worry over paternalism. Although there are philosophers who already take seriously the inevitability of paternalism in our technologically-mediated lives via the idea of design ethics, I point out that it must too be supplemented by the practice of recommendation. Finally, I illustrate how the Walzerian approach may supplement design ethics, and how it can actually minimise the worry over paternalism from the practice of recommendation.

Finally, in the Epilogue, I offer a brief summary of the present study and briefly discuss several policy implications of the project of Net recommendation and the Walzerian approach.

Together, I hope, these Chapters have provided an adequate illustration and defence—in the guise of the Walzerian approach—of the project of Net recommendation, i.e. a positive and constructive way to examine the relations between digital media and people, particularly the relations between digital media and the good life, that does not start with the assumption of digital media being a source of moral problem and strives to recommending specific ways to reform and/or transform digital media and digitally-mediated practices that allow us to have better relations with digital media, and thus help us to live better lives with them.

Extended Abstract for

The 4th ICTs and Society Conference, Uppsala University, Sweden

There is never a shortage of celebratory and condemnatory popular discourse on the Internet and the Web even in its early days. Although the hopes and dreams of the Internet and the Web have faded with the burst of dot-com bubble in 1990s and the rise of control and surveillance over and through information technology after September 11, 2003, the advent of Web 2.0, with its newly proclaimed potential and promise, has rejuvenated the hopes and dreams of the enthusiasts and renewed the popular discourse on the Internet and the Web. I shall argue that researchers should not take lightly the popular discourse on the Internet and Web 2.0, as it can deepen our understanding of the axiological foundation(s) of our judgements towards them.

Looking at some of the most representative examples available (e.g. Andrew Keen’s Cult of Amateur, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallow, Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget and Nick Bilton’s I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works), I examine this (new) wave of popular discourse, focusing on the (new) worries and doubts voiced by the alarmists and the (new) hopes and dreams portrayed by the enthusiasts. More specifically, I will examine the problem representation (i.e. what problems are being represented and how they are represented) and axiologisation (i.e. what benefits and harms are being foregrounded and how they are foregrounded) of the Internet and Web 2.0 in popular discourse. I shall illustrate that the popular discourse on the Internet and Web 2.0 are ultimately rested on different notions of the self, i.e. the disengaged self of the Enlightenment, the expressive self of Romanticism and the reflexive self of the late modernity. This conclusion has a significant implication to practising the critique of the Internet and Web 2.0, namely it entails that our critique of the Internet and Web 2.0 cannot be done without referring to a notion of the self. Hence, a critical enquiry of the Internet and Web 2.0 should not only be about the moral and/or prudential goodness or badness of the Internet and Web 2.0 per se, instead it should be about whom we should be online, or which notion(s) of the self we should strive for.

I shall end my paper with a tentative answer to the question of “Who Should We be Online?” by drawing from Ess’s analysis of the human condition of the information society, and propose an account the art-of-digital-life, i.e. the art of living in information society.

(Excl. Reference)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce an interpretive approach to examining the relation between ICTs and the good life, based on Michael Walzer’s view of (connected) social criticism.

Design/methodology/approach – Through a discussion of Michael Walzer’s view of social criticism, an interpretive approach to normative analysis of ICTs and the good life is introduced. The paper also offers an additional argument for the indispensability of prudential appraisals of ICTs in normative analysis of ICTs and the good life, which in turn strengthens the basis for the Walzerian approach proposed in the paper.

Findings – It is argued that an interpretive approach to normative analysis of ICTs and the good life, i.e. the Walzerian approach, is as viable as – if not superior to – a theory-driven approach. It is also argued that actual appraisals of ICTs and the good life must be taken into account in the normative analysis.

Originality/value – It is only recently that “the good life” has become more visible in normative analysis of ICTs. This paper continues this relatively new line of research and proposes an alternative approach – as opposed to a theory-driven approach – to this research programme.

Full Text Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/fwd.htm?id=aob&ini=aob&doi=10.1108/14779961211210630

Location:             University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Date:                  July 26-27, 2012

Program Chair:
Philip Brey (University of Twente)

Organising committee:
Johnny Hartz Søraker (University of Twente)
Pak-Hang Wong (University of Twente)
Jan-Willem van der Rijt (University of Amsterdam)
Jelle de Boer (University of Amsterdam)

About the Conference
In recent years, well-being has enjoyed a renaissance in philosophical discussions, as well as in fields like psychology, economics, development studies and sociology. Although these approaches share a common goal – to better understand what well-being is and how it can be enhanced – these developments have led to a great diversity in philosophical and scientific approaches to the analysis of well-being. Despite the increasing amount of research, most of the work on well-being is also performed at a highly abstract level. This is especially true in philosophy, but relatively little work has been devoted to the application of theories of well-being also in other fields, in particular when it comes to an understanding of life in contemporary society. Developments such as globalization, consumerism, and the rapid innovation and use of new and emerging technologies, all exert significant impact on the well-being of people living today, and we need a better understanding of their consequences for well-being.

Contemporary society requires that well-being researchers examine these problems – and, if possible, propose solutions to address them. This international conference aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines, including, but not limited to, psychology, economics, sociology, philosophy and development studies, in order to examine the practical role of well-being in contemporary society.

Potential Topics
We are looking for contributions that examine the notion of well-being in the context of contemporary society. The conference particularly welcomes papers that employ a notion of well-being to address social, political and ethical issues in present-day society. Suggested topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical developments and approaches in the philosophy and science of well-being in relation to contemporary society, culture and life.
• Well-being in social and political philosophy and/or in policy studies
• Positive psychology (and related research fields) and its practical applicability
• New and emerging technologies and well-being
• Intercultural and interpersonal comparisons of well-being
• Reliability, validity and applicability of well-being measures
• Other specific practical issues pertaining to well-being in contemporary society

The workshop will include both invited papers and an open call for papers. For the open call, we invite extended abstracts (1500-2000 words).  Please anonymise the abstract, and include title, name and address in the accompanying email. The abstract, and any questions you may have about the conference, should be sent to wics2012@utwente.nl. Your abstract should be submitted before February 15^th 2012, and will be subject to blind peer review.

Publication
Following the conference we aim to publish the papers, subject to a blind review process, in either an edited volume or a special issue of a relevant journal. We did so successfully with our previous conference, Good Life In a Technological Age, from which select papers were published as book in the prestigious Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society series, and will be available in February 2012.

Important Dates
Abstract Submission Deadline:   February 15. 2012
Notification of Acceptance:         March 1, 2012
Conference Dates:                     July 26-27, 2012

As an on-going project (see also, Dao, Harmony and Personhood: Towards a Confucian Ethics of Technology), I have attempted to analyse new media (or, information technology) from a Confucian perspective. But, it is only until recently that I really started to examine the relation between (or, in fact, the compatibility of) social media and the Confucian way of life. And, I started with the hope that Confucian ethics/Confucian philosophy will have something positive to contribute to the existing philosophical discussion on the benefits and harms. Unfortunately, when I proceed with my analysis, it becomes apparent that the Confucian way of life seems to be rather incompatible with the design (and, depends on how one theorises the relations between design and use, use) of social media. So, the obvious question is: Is the Confucian way of life impractical and/or inadequate, if social media is here to stay?

Intuitively, my answer is no; but, at the moment, I have difficulties to articulate it. Anyhow, it might well due to my defected exposition of the Confucian way of life that leads to this negative conclusion.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome!

Work in progress – Please do not cite, quote or summarise or circulate without permission.

Social Media: Affordances and Dynamics

My analysis will be building on danah boyd’s theoretical and ethnographic studies of social media. boyd sought to understand social media through the notion of networked publics, which are publics “transformed by networked media [e.g. ICTs], its properties and its potentials”. (‘Social Network Sites as Networked Publics’, in: A Networked Self, p. 42) Networked publics, accordingly, distinguish themselves by their structural foundation, i.e. bits, and the affordances available to the architecture of bits, namely “persistence”, “replicablity”, “scalability”, “searchability” and “shareability”. (‘Social Networking Sites…’, pp. 40-42 & pp. 45-48; Papacharissi & Gibson’s ‘15 Mins of Privacy‘, p. 76) boyd argued these properties of networked publics have supported three dynamics, which have come to dominate the network publics, namely

Invisible audiences: Not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present.

Collapsed contexts: The lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.

The blurring of public and private: Without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficult to maintain as distinct.

(boyd ‘Social Networking Sites’, p.49)

These dynamics seem to me sit uncomfortably with Confucian values. Now, I will attempt to illustrate how and why social media, with the dynamics identified by boyd, is a poor match for the Confucian way of life.

Social Media and Confucian Way of Life: A Losing Battle?

The existence of invisible audiences on social media is problematic to the Confucian way of life. Since users’ audiences can be neither visible nor co-present at the time when the users ‘say’ (or ‘do’) something on social media, e.g. social networking sites, microblogs, etc, they are in effect interacting with someone who they do not know with certainty. This is not to claim that invisible audiences do not exist prior to social media. Of course, invisible audiences―who are unknown and/or absent―exist in the offline world too. In the offline world, people can interact with someone who is not co-present through writing. There, however, the person in absent is not unknown. Similarly, people can interact with someone who they do not know through writing and/or (public) speech, but, they can still draw a sensible boundary of intended and unintended audiences through the writing’s and speech’s style, genre and context, and thereby assume and perform their roles accordingly. In this respect, (invisible) audiences in the offline world are to a large degree still identifiable to people. Social media, on the other hand, admits a much lesser degree of identifiability. This lack of identifiability is best illustrated by social networking sites: when users disclose themselves through social networking sites such as Facebook, in which other people―as long as they have been granted the permission (i.e., in Facebook’s default setting, when they are ‘friend’)―can view them; these people are all audiences, and they are indifferent to the users. The users, in this case, cannot specify their audiences and differentiate them. This uncertainty about their audiences makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the users to assume and perform the right roles with respect to their (online) audiences because in order to do so, the users need to know who they are interacting with.

It becomes especially troubling to Confucians if we consider the online world to be a continuum of the offline world, as all users’ offline relationships, e.g. family, friends, colleagues, etc., are at the same time potential invisible audiences so long as they are online too; being (potential) invisible audiences, however, they have barred the users from assuming and performing the right roles with regard to them even if the users have no problem to do so in the offline world. So understood, social media at its worst engenders a world in which people constantly fail to assume their roles. Since (social) roles are, according to Confucianism, constitutive of one’s personhood, and one can only become a person if his or her roles are properly performed (with the responsibilities properly fulfilled), Confucians should evaluate social media negatively because of the (online) world it engenders.

Invisible audiences, of course, are not a problem only for the Confucian way of life; it is a problem for any users of social media, as they too need to know if what they say or do are appropriate or not. To counter the problem arises from invisible audiences, one strategy for the users is to imagine who they are interacting with when they are using social media. This strategy helps to reduce uncertainty on the users’ side because the users can then delimit their behaviours and practices in accordance to the type of audiences imagined. Yet, I think, imagined audiences are too thin for the users to determine their roles correctly. Since imagining audiences is essentially a strategy for limiting behaviours and practices, unless the users have imagined a concrete relationship, it cannot tell what roles people ought to assume and perform. At the same time, because of the existence of invisible audiences, even if the users have assumed and performed some roles correctly through some types of imagined audiences, they remain constantly open to other relationships they are unaware of, and, thereby, cannot account for. In short, the existence of invisible audiences on social media has created an environment which renders the Confucian way of life hard to live by.

The same is also true of following rites, i.e. another important component for living the Confucian way of life. To reiterate, rites is a set of proper conducts and attitudes for a specific situation. The multiplicity and simultaneity of relationships that social media affords make it difficult―again, if not impossible―to follow rites, as which rites to follow are determined by who the person is interacting with and related to. This issue is further aggravated by another dynamics on social media, namely the collapsed contexts. On social media, contexts are mixed and merged by default; however, people need to know what contexts they are in if they are to know what are the proper conducts and attitudes to have. Contexts are ethically constitutive of the Confucian way of life, as it requires people to have proper a set of conducts and attitudes, which is context-dependent, e.g. a familial context and a professional context clearly demand a different set of proper conducts and attitudes. In other words, the Confucian way of life needs to maintain, at least, an epistemic separation of various types of contexts. Collapsed contexts on social media, therefore, entail an enormous difficulty for people to know what are the proper conducts and attitudes to have in the (online) world.

Finally, the blurring of public and private should worry Confucians too. However, unlike the current debate on this issue, which is often framed as a privacy issues, Confucians’ worry on the blurring of public and private is of a different nature. Firstly, Confucians do not distinguish sharply between the public and private with respect to self-cultivation and self-transform because they believe people’s self-cultivation and self-transformation in the private sphere will essentially carry onto their public sphere (and vice versa). Hence, both the public and private are of equal moral significance as they are, and should be, subjected to the same level of (moral) scrutiny. Secondly, in accordance to Confucian non-individualistic view of person, the term ‘private’ is not to be understood at an individual level; instead, it is to be understood at a familial level. Hence, the private sphere refers to the familial sphere from a Confucian point of view. So construed, the Confucians’ worry over the blurring of public and private is not about individual privacy but about changes at the familial level.

Confucians’ insistence on the priority of familial relationships and the importance of filiality and fraternity, however, has already hinted that a separation between the public and private ought to be maintained. In Confucianism, the familial relationships are a model for other non-familial relationships. Family (or, the familial sphere) is believed to be distinct from other spheres in that the roles and role responsibilities in familial relationships are driven by natural affections and trust, i.e. parent-children and sibling; therefore, it provides qualitatively different feedbacks to people in their learning to become a person. And, it is also where people learn to socialise through assuming and performing the roles and fulfilling the responsibilities, and, thereby, to eventually achieve proper conducts and attitudes towards the non-familial members in the society. Hence, family is essential in people’s (moral) development from the Confucian point of view.

The blurring of public and private leads to the disappearance not only of the private sphere but also the familial sphere; in doing so, it also takes away the space where people learn to become a person and to achieve proper conducts and attitudes towards non-familial members. Indeed, by breaking down the barriers between the public, private and familial sphere, it seems to neutralise familial and non-familial relationships, and depreciate the importance of the former, too. Most importantly, perhaps, is that without the familial sphere, every (wrong)doings are subjected to risks of publicshaming, which is detrimental to people’s development. In short, the blurring of public and private has eliminated a domain crucial to the Confucian way of life.

To summarise, the three dynamics supported by social media, i.e. (i) invisible audiences, (ii) collapsed contexts and (iii) the blurring of public and private, have engendered an online world that is rather inhospitable to the Confucian way of life. Alternatively, since the Confucian way of life is hard to live by with social media, I believe Confucians will inevitably see it as undesirable.