AUTHOR
Anne Gerdes, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

In 2008 militant violent jihad web sites were shot down by international authorities, as part of the “war on terror” strategy. But fighting dedicated jihadist websites and forums is not sufficient in order to dam up for online radicalisation. As a consequence of the international banning strategy towards militant homepages, al-Qaeda and jihadist Internet Brigades have increased their presence on global social networking platforms, like YouTube and Facebook. Contrary to an ordinary Web forum, which grows into a mature community by passing through certain developmental stages in establishing critical mass of users and content; Facebook provides a full blown community of friends, in which new groups can easily launch their ideas and foster engagement among friends and related networks of friends. Apart from offering an easy set up framework for groups, Facebook also facilitates a new type of mass interpersonal persuasion, which might sustain radicalisation (Fogg, 2008). Likewise, YouTube provides an accessible platform, motivating participants to contribute by uploading videos or making comments.

Thus, the spread of jihad-promoting content continues, and more over, it now reaches a broader audience besides sworn followers (CTA: Center for Terror Analysis. The Danish Security Intelligence Service, 2010, p. 3), (Bermingham, Conway, McInerney, O’Hare & Smeaton, 2009). Furthermore, the banning-strategy of violent jihad Websites has advanced the transfer of the jihadist online movement, from static Web 1.0 use of the internet – which relay on one-way, typically top-down, communication, focusing on passive acquisition of information – into Web 2.0 use modes, characterized by participation via bottom-up activities and many-to-many communication, in which participants take part in the construction of vivid communities.

In a forthcoming book, Investigating Cyber Law and Cyber Ethics: Issues, Impacts and Practices, edited by Dudley, Braman and Vincenti, I contribute with a chapter called: “Al-Qaeda on Web 2.0 – Radicalisation and Recruitment Strategies” (Gerdes, 2011). Here, I discuss the al-Qaeda Web and media strategy. A strategy, which makes them stand out from other extremist groups, who in most cases lack an overall approach towards branding and Web communication. Consequently, I illustrate the impact of the al-Qaeda media strategy, which enables al-Qaeda to set the agenda for online global jihadism and cultivate virtual communities of engaged jihobbyists (a term coined by Jarret Brachman: Brachman, 2008, p. 19). Thus, I mainly address issues of radicalisation and recruitment by emphasizing how strategic use of Web 2.0 tools scaffolds jihadist activities. In this paper, I set out to discuss prototypical strategies for fighting online jihadist radicalisation (in the form of top-down controlled strategies versus bottom-up user driven strategies). First, al-Qaeda as a global online social movement is described, stressing their professional media strategy, which enables al-Qaeda to enhance processes of self-radicalisation among young people with extremist attitudes. Within this context, I analyse different strategies for breaking the circle of radicalisation and introduce ethical reflections (Macintyre, 1999, 2000, Løgstrup, 1997, Benkler & Nissenbaum 2006) in order to discuss the potentials of these initiatives.

REFERENCES

Ansar Al-Mujahideen Network (2010). Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://www.ansar1.info/

Anscombe, E. (1958). Modern Moral Philosophy. Philosophy vol. 33, 1-19.

Bermingham, A., Conway, M., McInerney, L., O’Hare, N. & Smeaton, A. F. (2009). Combining Social Network Analysis and Sentiment Analysis to Explore the Potential for Online Radicalisation. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://doras.dcu.ie/4554/

Brachman, J. (2008). Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice. Routledge Press.

Cool, S. & Glasser, S. B. (2005). Terrorists turn to the Web as a base of operation. Washington Post, 7 August, 2005.

Conway, M. & McInerney, L. (2008). Jihadi Video & Auto-Radicalisation: Evidence from an Exploratory YouTube Study. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://doras.dcu.ie/2253/

CTA: Center for Terror Analysis. The Danish Security Intelligence Service, 2010 (2010). Youtube.com og Facebook.com – de nye radikaliseringsværktøjer? PET, Center for Terroranalyse. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://www.pet.dk/upload/youtube_og_facebook_-_de_nye_radikaliseringsvaerktoejer.pdf.

Fogg, B.J. (2003). Persuasive Technology – Using Computers to Change What We Think and do. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Fogg, B.J. (2008). Mass Interpersonal Persuasion: An Early View of a New Phenomenon. In H. O Kukkonen, P. Hasle, M.H.K. Segerståhl, P. Øhrstrøm (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Persuasive Technology. Oulu, Finland. (pp. 23-35). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Foot, P. (1978). Virtues and Vices. In S. Darwall (ed.), Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell 2003.

Gerdes, A. (2011). Forthcoming: Al-Qaeda on Web 2.0 – Radicalisation and Recruitment Strategies. In: (ed.): A. Dudley, J. Braman, G. Vincenti, Investigating Cyber Law and Cyber Ethics: Issues, Impacts and Practices. Hersey: IGI Global.

MI5 Security Service. (2010). Al Qaida’s Structure. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from https://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/al-qaidas-structure.html

O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0 Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://oreilly.com/Web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Seib; P., H. (2008). The Al-Qaeda Media Machine. Military Review, May-June 2008, 74-80.

Shactman, N. (2008). Online Jihadists plan to invade Facebook. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from, http://current.com/1r3i84c

The Danish Counterterrorism Research Lab (2010). Retrieved August 16, 2010 from, http://www.ctrlab.dk/

Weingberg, L., Perliger, A. (2010). How Terrorist Groups End. CTC Sentinel, February 2010, vol. 3(2), 16-18.

AUTHOR
William M. Fleischman

ABSTRACT

This paper is a reflection about my experiences of the past thirteen years teaching the course in computer ethics at Villanova University. If I say that this assignment, which was presented to me unexpectedly in the winter of 1998, has proved to be most challenging and rewarding of a long career, it is simply that the responsibility of teaching computer ethics has forced me to be a student on the same level as the young people who – when they display the beautiful good will and generosity of the young – have been my companions in thinking through and sorting out the questions we have encountered and addressed during this eventful period.

My observations here are neither abstract nor general. There is a particular topic to which they are immediately connected – the quite contemporary questions related to the use of robotic agents in warfare. At this historical moment, the use of such robotic weapons has an understandable attraction, especially for students who are technically inclined. Considering the set of advantages these robotic agents possess, the development of automated and, in some cases, autonomous weapons may seem an unavoidable imperative [Singer 2009, Arkin 2009]. Of course, critical consideration of the circumstances of their intended deployment reveals a complementary set of disadvantages that argue against indiscriminate use. [Singer 2009, Gotterbarn 2011] Certainly this is a subject that deserves analytical discussion in a setting in which aspiring hardware and software engineers consider and wrestle with the value choices they will face in professional assignments they undertake after graduation.

But there is a larger and, to my mind, more significant theme that has bearing on my students’ understanding of these issues. This theme has to do with the convergence between what my students conceive to be the nature and limitations of human intelligence, and what they conceive as possible through the simulation of human behavior by means of the techniques of artificial intelligence. Of course, this convergence does not originate with the views of students, nor is it confined only to those who are in the initial stages of their intellectual and professional development. It is a tendency of thought decried by Joseph Weizenbaum in his 1972 essay, “On the Impact of the Computer on Society,” and again in his book, “Computer Power and Human Reason,” [Weizenbaum 1972, 1976].

The issue at the heart of this convergence is the subject of a debate that has, for many years, occupied the attention of influential thinkers and practitioners in computer science. The fundamental question or assertion may be phrased in one of several variant forms. “Is the brain merely a ‘meat machine’?” “The human brain is just a network of 1011 neurons. We’re going to be able to build that soon.” Of course, this is a dream with deep roots in our culture – in literature as well as film. And it constitutes an attractive topic for uncritical treatment in the popular press. Thus, it has many avenues of entrée into the consciousness of young people who eventually gravitate to the study of science and technology.

The first section of this paper will comprise brief remarks about the general approach I take in teaching the course in computer ethics and a more detailed explanation of the unit in which we discuss questions related to the deployment of robotic agents in warfare. In the section that follows, I will take a step back to consider the larger context of the ambitious projects involving the application of artificial intelligence tin the simulation of human behavior. This is a question we explore in the ethics course through readings that begin with the public debate in which Weizenbaum engaged with the influential ideas of Herbert Simon and his followers [Simon, 1969]. This exploration takes us into the realm of “cyborgian” speculation and experiments [Moravec 1998, Warwick, 2000] inspired by Simon’s ideas. In particular, I wish to point out how these speculations and experiments feed the naïve expectation, “We’re going to be able to build this soon,” that many students bring to the topic. And they are at the root of those recurrent moments mentioned in title of this article, which I will illustrate with several examples provided by my students in the course of discussions concerning robotics, cyborgs, and machine simulation of human behavior.

In a sense, the essay, “On the Impact of the Computer on Society,” is the cornerstone of the course on computer ethics as I conceive it. It is a difficult essay for the students to penetrate, in part because of important elements of historical context that, for students born after the fall of the Berlin Wall (to lay down a convenient chronological marker) lie increasingly in the remote and inaccessible past. But it is also a difficult essay because its short form demands of Weizenbaum, the writer, a severe compression of the broad scope of the argument that Weizenbaum, the thinker, wishes to join with those who have asserted or who have internalized a mechanical conception of human history, culture, and intelligence. And finally it is difficult because there are very few instances in the education of my students in which a scientist speaks to them as loftily yet as bluntly as Weizenbaum does of the danger of losing the accumulated wealth of human culture, of undervaluing the full richness of human intelligence. Thus, I will discuss several strategies for unpacking and illustrating Weizenbaum’s argument in a manner that is meaningful to my students. These strategies underscore the exceptional, joyful, and unmechanical nature of human creativity, something against which the world of this moment mounts altogether too many deadening and discouraging counterexamples.

REFERENCES

Arkin, Ronald C. (2009), “Ethical Robots in Warfare,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, volume 28, no. 1.

Gotterbarn, Don (2010), “Autonomous Weapon’s Ethical Decisions; “I Am Sorry Dave; I Am Afraid I Cannot Do That.” Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2010, pp. 219-229.

Moravec, Hans (1998), “When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain?” in Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 1, available online at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm, last accessed 6 February, 2011.

Simon, Herbert A., The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Singer, P. W. (2009), Wired for War, Penguin Press, New York.

Warwick, Kevin (2000), “Cyborg 1.0,” in Wired Magazine, Issue 8.02, February 2000, available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html, last accessed 6 February, 2011.

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1972), “On the Impact of the Computer on Society: How Does One Insult a Machine?” Science, vol. 176, no. 4035, pp. 609-614.

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976), Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York.

AUTHOR
Catherine Flick, Penny Duquenoy and Matt Jones

ABSTRACT

“Ghosty” is a network-enabled monitoring device aimed at encouraging discussion in families about children’s internet use, and/or enabling children to better self-monitor their own internet use, in order to promote and reinforce positive internet use and resilience against online predators. It allows children or other household members to know what types of websites or networks are being visited or used, rather than specifics of particular websites or conversation details. The device can show internet access according to type delineation (such as “homework”, “social”, “email”), or by risk level by varying the colour shown by LEDs within a lamp. It is aimed at being an ethics-centred device, with the child’s privacy paramount in its design.

Online child protection approaches can be split into two parts: the first being prevention of crimes occurring and the second being the finding, arresting, and prosecuting of offenders. The former has traditionally relied on deterrence (from prosecutions), education of children as to their safety online, and monitoring and/or filtering devices for home and school networks. The latter relies on sophisticated software used by law enforcement for tracking paedophile behaviour, such as Peer Precision or the Isis Project, as well as traditional policing methods to identify potential abusers and distributors of child sexual abuse material online.

Although the latter approach is useful in apprehending paedophiles, an approach that helps children avoid child abuse situations in a proactive way is needed. To achieve this, we need methods and mechanisms for prevention of offences, most of which currently centre on supervision of children on the internet, such as parental education (which suggests that computers should be kept in a public part of the house, or that parents should supervise their children on the internet). Monitoring and filtering tools such as Net Nanny have also appeared, allowing parents to set limits on internet use, email them on keywords used during a child’s internet session, or block certain websites or services.

The problems with traditional monitoring and filtering devices are numerous, particularly from an ethical perspective:

• They can cause distrust in family relationships, when a child rebels against such filtering or monitoring systems;
• They can trigger false positives and block innocent content;
• They can lull parents (and children) into a false sense of security about online safety;
• They can impinge on the privacy of the child, by emailing a parent when a child uses a key word, for example, or simply allowing a parent to view all chat text; and
• They can cause a child to become more secretive about their behaviour online, to name a few.

Social networking has also come into the spotlight in recent times, to the degree that the UK child protection agency CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection) produced a Facebook “emergency button” application for children worried about others’ behaviour online. The “ClickCEOP” application allows children to report suspicious activity toward them on Facebook as well as learn about safe internet practices.

Recent research has come to light showing that many children are not at all vulnerable to online predators: these young people who are approached are, in this way, “resilient”, telling potential offenders to go away. However, there is a smaller group of young people, the “disinhibited”, who are often willing to interact with offenders and engage with them due to various reasons, such as negative self-esteem, parental problems, difficulties at school, loneliness, tendency to self-harm, or familial sexual abuse. They can, in some cases, use sexual names or actively seek sexual encounters with people online. These are ideal targets for paedophiles seeking relationships with children with the possibility for future contact offences(1).

Although parents might be concerned about their child’s safety online, they may consider the current monitoring software available to be too intrusive on their children’s privacy: instead of intense scrutiny provided by current monitoring software they may wish to engender a stronger trust relationship with their child by allowing the child to self-monitor for risk or the family to “keep an eye on” the lamp colours to have a general idea about what the child is doing in a way that is akin to knowing where a child may be playing but not necessarily what he or she is up to specifically.

More generally, we wish to enable more families to foster a sense of resilience in their children, particularly those who have the potential to become more resilient. Our project also aims to reinforce resilience amongst children who are already resilient, allowing for parents to loosely monitor their internet activity without knowing details, but using this knowledge to spur positive conversation and discussion amongst family members, or allowing children to self-monitor to gauge their level of risk. In this way the device aims to be an ethical monitoring tool used in a very specific way to enable resilience amongst children and allow for greater family bonds which could help prevent disinhibition.

REFERENCES

(1) Davidson, J. Understanding online offending behavior: Preliminary findings from the European Online Grooming Project. Online Child Protection: Future Technologies for Policing the Internet. London (2010) http://european-online-grooming-project.com/

AUTHOR
Catherine Flick and Penny Duquenoy

ABSTRACT

Isis is a project with the aim of developing a set of ethical monitoring tools and frameworks to assist law enforcement agencies in policing Internet chat and file-sharing networks in order to protect children from abuse, particularly that of paedophile activity. The tools aim to automatically detect and identify files that depict child abuse, and the communities that distribute and collect these, and to also allow for identification of paedophile “grooming” behaviour in internet chat logs. The latter tool is planned for use on previously captured data by law enforcement (using official channels that are already in place for such data collection) and aimed at simplifying and reducing the workload for tasks currently performed manually by law enforcement agents. It will not be deployed “in the wild”.

With such a sensitive issue as child sexual abuse, it is particularly important for the designers and developers involved to be aware of their responsibilities to society. Thus it is important that the Isis project is developed in a socially accountable and ethical way, with definite boundaries on use, ethical development procedures, stakeholder input, and ethical review. This paper forms part of the ethical assessment of the Isis project.

The Isis project has been presented to several focus group workshops and ethics interest groups for reflection and input on the outcomes and processes of the project from an ethical perspective. It might be assumed that such groups would applaud a project aimed at the protection of children, reducing exposure of law enforcement agents to potentially troubling material, and more efficient processing of data in order for timely interventions. It has instead been met with varying degrees of rejection. In many of these groups, the question of whether the Isis project is needed at all was brought up, citing the severely problematic ethical side effects or dual uses of the technology behind Isis as compelling arguments for such technological developments to not be developed, and asking whether the problem of online child abuse was enough to warrant such a technological response. In this paper, we seek to address this question from an impartial standpoint: is there a significant problem with online child abuse? If so, what sorts of ethical responses are possible?

With the growth of the Internet in recent years has come a shift in the way society operates. Increasing amounts of our time is spent online, and we are now at the point where current generations of children have not known life “without the Internet”. With this growth and increasing ubiquity of the Internet has come a massive increase in the use of social networking and other social interaction tools, such as chat and file-sharing. The Internet has also enabled people with similar interests to connect with each other easily, share information, and chat about their particular interests, where in the physical world it might be difficult to arrange similar sorts of meetings. Although these sorts of groups are, in the majority, innocuous, social networking sites, chat channels, and file sharing networks have also become domains in which child sex offenders can operate in relative anonymity, sharing images of child sexual abuse, or grooming and exploiting children. Historically, child sexual abuse is not a new phenomenon. In more recent times, yet before the Internet was in popular use, child sexual abuse images and movies (often termed “child pornography”) were available, although it required a large effort to obtain and keep such material (finding a distributor, physical storage, etc.) (Taylor & Quayle, 2003). Thus it was mostly left to those who already had a significant sexual interest in children. However, with the increase in computer use, and the ability for people with diverse interests to easily share them online, crimes involving sexual exploitation of children have also increased. Online resources and tools allow for “predatory offenders to electronically creep into the bedrooms of our nation’s youth, where they engage in sexually explicit “chat”, “cybervoyerism”, and “cyberexhibitionism”” (Bourke & Hernandez, 2009).

Given the sensitive nature of this topic, there are large gaps in our knowledge when it comes to the perpetrators and victims of these sorts of crimes (Quayle, 2009). Amidst claims of moral panics, hysteria and media overreaction, there is an all-too-real problem, but this is often lost in the response. It is even, in some ways, somewhat unfashionable to be working for stronger child protection, since “in the present climate, few people would openly acknowledge this”, but “whilst the numbers involved are unknown, sexual interest in children is much more widespread than we might imagine” (Taylor & Quayle, 2003, p. 198).

In this paper, we will establish the background to the questions being asked by looking at the sensitive issues of child pornography and paedophile grooming behaviour, as researched by academics working in the field, to determine whether there is a problem that needs a response. This step allows us to identify the issues from an academic research perspective and to distinguish them from any sort of media reports or “moral panic”. We will then look at the implications of these findings for the Isis project, and discuss its place within such a socially and politically volatile and emotive area.

REFERENCES

Bourke, M. L., & Hernandez, A. E. (2009). The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-on Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders. J Fam Viol , 24, 183-191.

Quayle, E. (2009). Abuse images of children: identifying gaps in our knowledge. G8 Symposium: Examining the relationship between online and offline offenses and preventing the sexual exploitation of children. UNC Chapel Hill.

Taylor, M., & Quayle, E. (2003). Child Pornography: An Internet Crime. New York: Routledge.

AUTHOR
Matthew Edwards

ABSTRACT

1. Introduction

This paper is a follow up from Ethicomp 2010 which proposed that there is a core curriculum in technology education, and that industry could find a place within the public school system. This article will pursue an actual tie between industry interests and a State run university in the US. It is poised to have a positive worldwide effect.

There are arguments in education that address whether or not technology in the classroom is a help or a hindrance. For example, using a calculator for math computation in the classroom speeds up a student’s ability to quickly complete rigorous tasks and calculations, yet some argue this creates an unhealthy dependency on technology that will potentially damage the learning process.

From an industry perspective, technology allows those with basic skill sets the ability to accomplish complex tasks. For example, a person can run a cash register with complex transactions using credit cards, cash, or checks, and the cashier may actually have poor computation skills. They can do these tasks with amazing accuracy…most of the time, and as long as the power is up and going.

Using the basic concept that technology can be used to bring individuals to higher performance levels than would otherwise be possible, I will pursue the idea that the economy of underdeveloped countries can be changed for the better by introducing technologies that give illiterate populations the ability to perform tasks that have been heretofore out of their reach.

2. Background

I work as a professor at a university in the western United States. In the summer of 2010 I had an opportunity to pursue answers to an intriguing problem. The problem is the ever present state of poverty and lack of safe and energy efficient housing in underdeveloped countries. I felt that somewhere between modern technology and hard work lie answers to this perplexing dilemma.

I designed an inexpensive, fireproof, hurricane proof, and earthquake resistant residential structure and building system using modern technology, and discovered that I could simplify complex tasks using computer modeling, 3-D printing, and color-coded building plans, to deliver a visual training system that can be understood by illiterate populations.

By creating new innovations that allow the end user to participate without the extensive knowledge base that was once necessary, much of the world’s populations can now take active roles in stimulating the economy of their country. In many of the sub-Saharan countries of Africa the average daily wage of a laborer is less than 3 US dollars. Presently, an illiterate worker only completes tasks that are simple and of no profound effect; digging ditches, carrying materials, and in essence, doing only those tasks that would otherwise be done by basic machinery accept for the monetary savings had by using what is paramount to slave labor.

3. Project and Method

Using students from our CAD/CAM 3-D design department, and pulling a small team of professors including myself, one professor from CAD/CAM, and one from our CIS department, it became apparent that modern technology not only provided design tools, but also created a visual learning environment for the end user in the building industry.

Using university faculty, students, and a couple of individuals from industry, the formula and idea to utilize this new building process to help underdeveloped countries became more focused.

My methodology will focus on utilizing educational studies about adult illiteracy, economic statistics from underdeveloped regions around the world, but especially related to Native Americans in the United States. This phase of the data collection is based on both primary and secondary data which includes high school dropout rates, suicides rates, and the lack of economic development and societal segregation. I will also include research that pursues questions, concerns, answers, and ethical dilemmas surrounding the potential use of modern technology in underdeveloped countries.

4. Current Results, and future potential

So far my findings indicate that we can take modern technological innovations and move those applications into the building industry, bringing the less qualified end user more fully into the equation. As we have witnessed, the building industry is a major player in the world economy. When this industry is not flourishing, thousands of connected industries suffer, and the economy likewise falters. In Africa, there are millions of educated people who live in squalid and filthy conditions because there is no infrastructure supporting a middle class building industry. There are many factors, such as the lack of financing that contributes to this condition. However, there is not a wide gap in living standards between this “middle class” educated society, and the illiterate poor.

Many of these governments have desires to provide housing for their civil servants, professors, and military personnel, but without an infrastructure that can handle such an extensive task, it is not economically feasible. Part of the infrastructure is human ability, and must come from within to be economically sustainable. The other part is an inexpensive system to build structures that will provide safety from natural disasters, and provide privacy and aesthetics that basic dignity requires.

Our building would provide a method to deliver social networking opportunities to underdeveloped countries by facilitating a “safe cyber café” of sorts. This structure provides a somewhat bullet proof environment that is inexpensive.

This paper will expose current world conditions in underdeveloped nations, and will explore how the appropriate use of modern technology may be the answer to turning the tide of poverty. This is a significant contribution in the ethical use of technology in construction management since few studies of this nature reflect this topic.

AUTHOR
Massimo Durante

ABSTRACT

The theme of “the social impact of social computing” is a central, complex and unavoidable theme of reflection and discussion for our age. The formulation of the theme in terms of “impact” is indeed prudential since it leaves open whether this impact is either governed by the values, interests and decisions of human beings or is deterministically brought about by the technological evolution. However, it seems, in both cases, to rely on the epistemological and political foundation of modernity: the relation between the subject and the object (Serres, 2009). In the modern epistemological and political perspective, the object is always the societal reality, i.e. the national or the international world at large, whereas the subject has been represented either as a free, rational and autonomous or as a determined, irrational and heteronomous “human being”, both of them dealing with the ongoing technological evolution.

The subjects have been always represented as human beings. In the modern epistemological and political tradition of contractualism, these subjects have been represented as human beings enough irrational and heteronomous to be determined by their passions (i.e. by their want to possess everything and by their fear to be killed) and, at the same time, enough free, rational and autonomous, to decide to get out from the natural state and to stipulate a social contract. So represented, these subjects share three fundamental characteristics: 1) they are human beings; 2) they are subject to conflicts; 3) they are citizens, that is to say the only figures entitled with rights.

The hypothesis of the present paper is that the social impact of social computing is much deeper than expected and it concerns all these characteristics but in a very different manner, since it puts into discussion, according to us, the first and the third characteristic but it still maintains that the actors on the global scene of the networked Society of Information are essentially subject to conflicts.

Our main point is that the current technological evolution not only generates new conflicts but, first and foremost, it alters the distribution of powers that have been governing, up to now, the national and international conflicts and obliges people to rethink the assumptions on which the epistemological and political modernity has been based on. To take just one example, no longer holds the adage that all political sciences schools first teach: “l’Etat fait la guerre et la guerre fait l’Etat” (The State makes war and war makes the State). In our Society of Information, however counterintuitive it may appear, there is a crisis of the (military) puissance (Serres, 2009). The conflict is no longer or not only an armed conflict. Or, to put it differently, the armed conflict is no longer capable to govern by itself the networked space of the Society of Information. This goes along with a more general crisis of the whole vocabulary of the political modernity based on sovereignty, force, representation, citizenship and so forth.

The other side of the coin is that the most controversial and debated aspect of the networked Society of Information consists in the fact that its space is therefore perceived as an anomic space, i.e. a non-democratic space devoid of norms, a space requiring a new social contract. Is it still possible to speak of a social contract? And if so, who are the parties of this agreement and what should be its content? In the present paper, we try to defend three main points: 1) the relations between the actors of the global and networked Society of Information are still likely to be subject to conflicts (i.e. to be understood in terms of social conflicts); 2) however, the subjects of those conflicts (and of the interests and the rights thereof) are not only human beings; 3) a different political and legal sensibility should arise, in order to culturally account for the decentralization of human beings from the role of the exclusive beneficiaries of the social contract.

The paper will be divided in three parts. In the first part of the paper, we will expound an idea we have already presented elsewhere (Durante, 2007). The idea is that the social impact of social compu-ting does not obey to nor it can be explained in terms of any technological determinism. The global and networked Society of Information is made out of a plurality of different agents (be human or artificial), whose complex relations are not subjected to deterministic laws (Taylor, 2001). Rather, a key to understand the social impact of the ongoing technological evolution is in interpreting this impact throughout the social conflicts that this evolution is capable of generating or renewing. Needless to say that, in our opinion, those conflicts or competitions are inherent to the social character of agents but are not necessarily negative. On the contrary, they can spread out new energies and produce innovations (Benasayag M. – del Rey A. 2007).

Technology creates new possibilities. Not all of those possibilities are turned into real and imbedded in the society. When this occurs, those possibilities are likely to be turned into real powers which agents are provided with. In this perspective, the primary and general social impact of the technological evolution consists in modifying the distribution of powers that exists in the society (in our opinion, it is thus more a question of redistribution than of expansion of powers). From that redistribution of powers a number of conflicts is likely to arise. However, the role of conflict cannot be confined at the bottom of the technological process. The reason way some possibilities are turned into real powers and some other possibilities are not depends often on preexisting conflicts or competitions between interests, values or ideas already circulating across the society.

Conflicts or competitions play thus a crucial role in creating technological innovations and in selecting among the possibilities displayed by such technologies. They play hence a crucial role also in order to understand the social impact of the technological evolution and to understand the society as such. In this perspective, it is important to move from the analysis of the conflict that characterizes the Society of Information. The second part of the paper is devoted to this analysis: to this aim a special attention will be paid to the recent reflections that Michel Serres has consecrated to the stratified crisis that marks our own times (Serres 2009). The philosopher correctly remarks that, in the modern political tradition, the conflict is always a game between two players: “[…] the Master and the Servant, the Left against the Right, the Republicans against the Democrats, an ideology against another one, the green against the blue” (Serres 2009). This game is always played by human beings and in favor of human beings. There is not a real “third” in this fixed two-players game (“jeux à deux”), even though it is exactly the modern political tradition (of contractualism) that has given rise to the notion of the third (Hobbes [1651] 2008; in the social perspective: Simmel 1964).

However, in the tradition of contractualism, this third is always a projection of human interests (i.e. the legitimization of the Sovereign or of the civil society, etc.). The thirdness of the third should be thus rethought of in relation to a new concrete third, i.e. the world at large, which can be interpreted either in ecological terms (as in the case of Michel Serres who adds an epistemological and political dimension to the ecological stance) or in informational terms (as in the case of Luciano Floridi’s notion of infosphere [2003]). This requires people to establish a new and different social contract that challenges the “human narcissism” (Serres 2009) and defeats the political vocabulary of modernity centered upon the idea of citizenship. How this social contract should be structured is a work that has been initiated by different authors as those above mentioned (Serres 1995, 2009; Floridi 2007). What is of our interest is to understand what conceptual move we should accomplish, in order to account for the transformation of our conventional and enduring beliefs, practices and institutions, which are no longer expected to govern the cyberspace in the same way they have governed the (analogical) political space of modernity.

In the third and last part of the paper, we should try to sketch out what is this required conceptual move. Our hypothesis is that we should develop a political and legal sensibility capable to challenge the durable and accepted philosophical premises of the modern idea of the legal subject. This idea seems to us to be founded on three main assumptions: 1) the legal subjectivity is an exclusive property of human beings; 2) human beings are the only sources producing the politically and legally relevant information for the recognition and granting of rights and duties; 3) the legal subjectivity is, mostly, strictly based on the symmetry between rights and duties. All these assumptions need to be discussed and revised. And the grounds for this discussion and revision should be found, according to our understanding of the issue, in a theory of information, for the very simple reason that human beings are subjects that conti-nuously and relentlessly transmit, exchange and share information with non-human beings.

This also means that, continuously and relentlessly, human beings deal with information they receive from non-human beings. This simply overturns the epistemological division between subject and ob-ject since what is commonly meant to be “an object” is susceptible to produce, store and transmit information. This point is well stressed by Michel Serres: “[…] the things of Land and of Life, codified like us, are capable of receiving, producing, storing and treating information. […] This quadruple attitude does not design us as subjects nor designs them [i.e. the things of world] as objects. In the same way that we communicate, we understand and speak, we write and read, both non-living and living things produce and receive information, store and treat it. Asymmetric and parasitic, the old division subject-object no longer holds; every subject becomes object; every object becomes subject” (Serres 2009).

This philosophical consideration can provide us with the basis for a new understanding of the rela-tion between law and information, since human beings are no longer conceived, in this perspective, as the exclusive sources of the relevant political and legal information. There is no longer a pure and per-fect epistemological and political correlation between the subject and the object but only a relation of mutual implication (Durante 2011), according to which we depend from what depends from us since we are both codifying and codified things (Serres 2009) or, to put it in Floridi’s terms, since we are, qua informational objects, structuring structures (Floridi 2010).

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