UNESCO and INFOethics: Seeking global ethical values in the Information Society
Introduction
“Only the mindless confuse value and price.”
Antonio Machado, poet.
Cited by Federico Mayor,
Director-General of UNESCO, in his opening
speech to the INFOethics conference in 1997
In November 2013, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) adopted during its General Conference a resolution on “Internet-related issues within the mandate of UNESCO, including access to information and knowledge, freedom of expression, privacy, and ethical dimensions of the Information Society”. A significant number of UNESCO’s member states were concerned about its possible effects on national security, innovation and economic growth. Hence, the resolution’s adoption had been preceded by an extensive debate about the need for and content of such an international standard-setting instrument, which resulted in an important revision of the text (UNESCO, 2013: 2f). This debate was only the last episode in a long series of exchanges on the ethical dimensions of the Information Society that UNESCO witnessed during the last decades. It was moreover the most recent example of the difficulties UNESCO consistently has to face in its search for a global consensus on ethical values in the digital age – a search that already begun in the early 1990s, when the organisation started to wonder about the repercussions a world increasingly dominated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) would have on the individual well-being, and that has not found its conclusion until today.
This article retraces the evolution of this search and specifically focuses on a series of conferences called INFOethics, which took place between 1997 and 2000. Its purpose was to foster an open and critical exchange about information ethics “as the branch of the philosophy of information that investigates, in a broad sense, the ethical impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on human life and society” (Floridi, 2013, p. xii). During these meetings, hence years before Facebook was founded and more than a decade before the NSA-PRISM scandal would raise global awareness of the dangers new technologies might bear on individual civil rights, an international group of experts discussed issues whose sensitivity we only realize now, like the importance of privacy in cyberspace and the risk of commercial or governmental exploitation of user-generated data. UNESCO’s efforts to find a global consensus concerning these new ethical challenges culminated in the preparation of a ‘Recommendation on the promotion and use of multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace’. But due to fierce opposition by some member states, it took UNESCO six years and many efforts until the recommendation was eventually adopted in 2003.
The article aims to fill a gap in research about UNESCO’s role in the global governance of information and the Internet. While the organisation’s engagement for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and its involvement in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) have been extensively treated by various scholars (Carlsson, 2003, Mansell and Nordenstreng, 2006, Mastrini and de Charras, 2005, Pickard, 2007), the period between these two events has until now found little academic attention (Frau-Meigs et al. 2012).1 Yet, it was during this intermediary period that UNESCO, as any other institution involved in global communication policy, had to react to the emergence of digital technology and develop coherent policy discourses regarding the changing role of information for society and individual well-being. Thus, the objective of this article is to show how, in the late 1990s, UNESCO slowly extended its conception of moral values related to information, and established information ethics as a subject of intergovernmental policy debates. Through this historical analysis, the presented research contributes to the understanding of origins and divergent positions regarding ethical questions and the value of information in an increasingly interconnected world.
The study is based on archive research, document analysis and interviews with UNESCO actors. It moreover uses an argumentative approach for the analysis of policy discourse.2 Instead of solely looking at final policy documents to understand the position of a particular actor or a public institution, this approach has the particularity to analyse discourse as it is created during debates and other exchanges between policy actors (Fischer and Forester, 1990, Fischer and Gottweis, 2012, Hajer, 1993, Hajer, 2006). It thereby considers how the process of meaning-making is influenced by the exchange of arguments amongst participants of policy debates as well as their political, diplomatic and socio-economic context.
The first part of the article gives a quick historical overview of UNESCO’s engagement in global communication debates until the 1990s, and the difficulties it had to face in its struggle against global imbalances in the distribution and production of information. It then retraces the history of the INFOethics conferences and the issues discussed there, based on the analytical and chronological structuration of information ethics proposed by the information philosopher Luciano Floridi (Floridi, 2013). The article further describes UNESCO’s search for a global consensus on these ethical questions and analyses the different conflictual positions within the organisation with regard to universal access to information in a digital environment. In the last part, the article draws on Robin Mansell’s reflections on Information Society imaginaries (Mansell 2012) in order to explain the divergent perspectives as results of the paradoxical nature of the informational environment itself.
Section snippets
The origins of UNESCO’s struggle for access to information
UNESCO’s concern for ethical questions relating to information and its usage, as well as the difficulties it encountered during its search for a global consensus on information ethics can only be understood when looking at the historical background of the organisation’s activities in the field of information and communication. The origin of UNESCO’s interest in this field can be traced back as far as 1945, when the United States proposed to add the field of media and mass communication to the
From informational resources to informational products
This shift from the structural to the individual level was only one aspect that aroused UNESCO’s interest in the ethical aspects of ICTs. It was furthermore caused by the rapid expansion of the Internet and the request of several member states that the organisation should position itself in regard to this new technological development. In July 1995, UNESCO held a first, still rather small ‘Expert meeting on Legal and Ethical Issues of Access to Electronic Information’. Taking place under the
Information as a global public good
With these debates, the old question of monopolization versus socialization of information, which had already dominated the NWICO period and the political confrontations around it, started to emerge again within UNESCO. And this not only during the INFOethics conferences, which had only a limited influence beyond the narrow field of information experts, but also within UNESCO’s own policy discourse on the Information Society. Its development was mainly driven by a newly recruited director for
The paradoxes of ethics in the Information Society
In 2003, the same year UNESCO eventually adopted its recommendation on multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace, the ethical questions and challenges of the Information Society were debated at length during the WSIS in Geneva. The outcome document of this first phase of the World Summit, the so-called Geneva Plan of Action (ITU, 2003), placed on UNESCO the responsibility for the implementation of Action Line C10 “Ethical dimensions of the Information Society”. In the years following
Conclusive remarks
In times of globalization, that results for some parts of the world in an increasingly hyperconnected Information Society in which the traditional meaning of time and space shifts (Castells, 1996), the informational environment surrounding us becomes more and more synchronized and delocalized (Floridi, 2013, p. 293ff). Yet, a large part of the world’s population remains excluded from this new environment, while, at the same time, cultural and linguistic diversity are put at risk. UNESCO, with
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). I would like to thank all interviewees, the team of the UNESCO Archives and of UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector for their continuous support, Prof. Dr. Rainer Kuhlen for pointing me in the right direction, and Maximilian Girod-Laine for his insightful comments and corrections.
Julia Pohle is a doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and a researcher at iMinds-SMIT, Centre for Media, Information and Telecommunication, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on information policy, international policy-making processes, Internet Governance and global communication debates. She recently co-published a book about the last 30 years in communication geopolitics (From NWICO to WSIS, Intellect, 2012). Prior to this, Julia has worked as a
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Julia Pohle is a doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and a researcher at iMinds-SMIT, Centre for Media, Information and Telecommunication, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on information policy, international policy-making processes, Internet Governance and global communication debates. She recently co-published a book about the last 30 years in communication geopolitics (From NWICO to WSIS, Intellect, 2012). Prior to this, Julia has worked as a consultant for UNESCO.