Ethical issues in the ethnography of cyberspace.
The project of developing an anticipatory anthropology of the future reveals unique ethical opportunities. For example, the increased importance of performance means there is a substantial potential for a substantive "resocialing" of work in organizations, just as the decline of Modernism opens space for collective, situated ethics as opposed to individualized categorical imperatives. An anthropology of the future should address the question of the future of ethics in general. The very possibility of human agency, of informed individual moral action, is brought into question in new ways. The profound flexibility of the computer as a medium carries with it the dangers of hyper-abstraction, while the consolidation of capital reproduction on a global level increases the scope for apparently permanent mystification. Also important are the new ethical challenges raised for those engaged in knowledge "production" or science broadly conceived. These include the necessary effort to acknowledge fully the role of non-human agency, and the potentially profound possibilities in a transformation in the character of knowledge, a correlate, at least in part, of the commodification of knowledge associated with distance learning. These challenges accompany the more overt threats of transgenic entities and ecological degradation. How can one be an ethical intellectual or academic under these circumstances, let alone teach others to be? There are also some specific challenges facing anthropology in particular. Some derive from the increasing "privatization" of ethnography, both in its growing popularity in modes of social reproduction more directly implicated in the reproduction of capital and in the declining academic support for anthropology. In a very specific sense, anthropology has grounded its ethics on an appreciation of and support for the reproduction of "really existing" culture. This ethical compass is not available to the ethnographer who studies the future. How do we participate ethically in the construction of a future in whose character we are inevitably implicated?
Hakken
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Policy Center, SUNY Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 3050, Utica, New York 13504, USA.
D000884:Anthropology, Cultural / Q000592:standards*; D004989:Ethics; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States