The Digital Moral Ether

I’ve been percolating a specific post about imposed morality in the digital age for a long while now.  My ideas are still weak, but some banter following Mark Pesce’s Vidfest presentation has provoked me to serve them before their time.

Mark was promoting the concept of the mobile phone being the ultimate undiscovered social networking device.  As consumers we’re being encouraged to think of the mobile phone as a communications device or a camera or a game platform, but what we really want according to Mark, and are continuously hacking towards, is a social networking agent.  Mobile phones are increasingly sophisticated portable multimedia computers wandering around with us doing nothing 99% of the time.  What would happen if they applied a few of many spare cycles to quietly recording everything we do, everywhere we go, everyone we meet, and to continuously applying this information to mapping our social networking universe in constructive ways?  The raw thought has some tasty potentials that I’m sure I’ll overcook sometime soon, but not now.

What I will chew into here was an audience question about implications for personal privacy and surveillance.  The gist of the concern was that if we all become snoopers, wouldn’t we all become unwitting agents of larger snoops, such as corporations and government agencies?   Mark’s response was that our agents would be literally in our pockets - under our control, acting only for us, and therefore leakage was at least in our hands.  The personal social benefits would outweigh the societal risks.   In fact, if you’re clever enough, you could program your agent to serve your multiple active social profiles including citizen, felon, bigamist, and whatever.

This is where my percolation had been going.  I fully believe that these new social technologies will allow me to cultivate multiple personae, but I also believe that an emerging ‘digital moral ether’ will oblige all of these personae to be more honest and law-abiding than they might otherwise have been. The tradition has been that our antisocial and illegal behaviours are constrained by barely-evolving social, legal and spiritual inhibitors (“don’t do this or you’ll go to hell”, etc).  However, now that all of our behaviours are digitally engaged it is far more likely that we will be caught sometime much earlier on the red-handed-to-pearly-gates timescale.  The long tails of our digital personae are much harder to hide.

There are dozens of interesting social questions in this domain, such as, “Should my blog ideas prevent me from getting a job today or from holding public office twenty years from now?”  The question that interests me is the “barely-evolving” tradition above.  The norms of socially acceptable behaviour change slowly because they are “carved in stone” by law-makers, legislators and theologians.  Is it possible that a dynamically-evolving digital moral ether emerging from active social networks will generate a more tolerant and civil society?   I believe so.  The key is that the multiple personae we will all currently keep, and will all inevitably foster within digital domains, will almost certainly jostle together within social networks to describe patterns of values and behaviours that are much more authentic and responsive than what is currently published through the political and religious filters of society.  The tension between moral righteousness and let-he-who-has-no-sins-cast-the-first-stone may be mediated more empathetically, compassionately and in real time.

My concept of “ether” derives from the classical notion of an invisible substance that permeates space; the breath of the gods that helps bodies to understand their place and movement.   What does a digital moral ether have to do with mobile media?  There is no point to an ether unless it envelops the real world.  Those ‘social networking agents’ in our pockets will be the bellows for this new breath.