Herbert Hrachovec , Alois Pichler (Eds.) Philosophy of the Information Society
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Herbert Hrachovec , Alois Pichler (Eds.) Philosophy of the Information Society Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. New Series Volume 7 Herbert Hrachovec • Alois Pichler (Eds.) Philosophy of the Information Society Proceedings of the 30. International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria 2007 Volume 2 Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de Gedruckt mit Förderung des Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung in Wien und der Kulturabteilung der NÖ Landesregierung North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Ire, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected] Livraison pour la France et la Belgique: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin 6, place de la Sorbonne ; F-75005 PARIS Tel. +33 (0)1 43 54 03 47 ; Fax +33 (0)1 43 54 48 18 www.vrin.fr 2008 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-002-6 2008 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag Table of Contents Preface HERBERT HRACHOVEC AND ALOIS PICHLER 5 Section 1: Philosophy of Media – Medienphilosophie Binding Time: Harold Innis and the balance of new media CHRIS CHESHER, SYDNEY 9 A view of the iconic turn from a semiotic perspective AUGUST FENK, KLAGENFURT 27 Medienphilosophie und Bildungsphilosophie – Ein Plädoyer für Schnittstellenerkundungen THEO HUG, INNSBRUCK 43 Medienwissenschaft, Medientheorie oder Medienphilosophie? CLAUS PIAS, WIEN 75 Media Philosophy—A Reasonable Programme? SIEGFRIED J. SCHMIDT, MÜNSTER 89 Section 2: Philosophy of the Internet – Philosophie des Internets Science of Recording MAURIZIO FERRARIS, TURIN 109 Weltkommunikation und World Brain. Zur Archäologie der Informationsgesellschaft FRANK HARTMANN, WIEN 125 Avatars und Lebensform: Kirchberg 2007 MICHAEL HEIM, IRVINE 141 Towards a Philosophy of the Mobile Information Society KRISTÓF NYÍRI, BUDAPEST 149 Section 3: Ethics and political economy of the information society – Ethik und politische Ökonomie der Informationsgesellschaft On our Knowledge of Markets for Knowledge—A Survey GERHARD CLEMENZ, WIEN 167 East-West Perspectives on Privacy, Ethical Pluralism and Global Information Ethics CHARLES ESS, DRURY 185 Information Society: A Second “Great Transformation”? PETER FLEISSNER, WIEN 205 Internet and the flow of knowledge: Which ethical and political challenges will we face? NIELS GOTTSCHALK-MAZOUZ, STUTTGART 215 Will the Open Access Movement be successful? MICHAEL NENTWICH, WIEN 233 Globalisierte Produktion von (akademischem) Wissen – ein Wettbewerbsspiel URSULA SCHNEIDER, GRAZ 243 Section 4: Electronic philosophy resources and Open Source / Open Access – Elektronische Philosophie-Ressourcen und Open Source / Open Access Philosophy in an Evolving Web: Necessary Conditions, Web Technologies, and the Discovery Project THOMAS BARTSCHERER, PAOLO D’IORIO 261 Some thoughts on the importance of Open Source and Open Access for an emerging digital scholarship STEFAN GRADMANN, BERLIN 275 The Necessary Multiplicity CAMERON MCEWEN 287 Abstracts and Biographies 305 Preface This is the second of two volumes of the proceedings from the 30th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, August 2007. It contains selected contributions from sections 4-6 and the workshop of the symposium: • Medienphilosophie – Philosophy of media • Philosophie des Internets – Philosophy of the Internet • Ethik und politische Ökonomie der Informationsgesellschaft – Ethics and political economy of the information society • Elektronische Philosophie-Ressourcen und Open Source/Open Access – Electronic philosophy resources and Open Source/Open Access The editors want to express their gratitude to all contributors and to those who took part in the discussions in Kirchberg and beyond. Special thanks to David Wagner (Vienna) who was in charge of typesetting this volume. In order to set the tone for this volume, and to hint at the interplay between the two distinctively different components which made up the symposium, we here reproduce the introductory remarks given by Herbert Hrachovec at the opening ceremony. Dear colleagues, I want to begin with a hypothetical scenario: If this was the Wittgenstein Heritage Society we would be in serious trouble, because it is well known that Wittgenstein did not take a laptop to Norway and he would have been very critical of those of you who mentioned that Kirchberg may be a nice place, but there is no WiFi available. So we do have a certain amount of tension here, because information society is built upon these sort of gadgets which Wittgenstein did not use at all. 6 To reach back a little bit in the history of this conference I might point out that there is a motto to the “Philosophical Investigations” about which David Stern gave a talk several years ago, a famous motto taken from Nestroy: “Und überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, dass er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.”—Progress looks much bigger than in fact it is. The question then becomes: How do we deal with this Wittgensteinian scepticism about progress vis-à-vis the inescapable optimism that will be found in many of the contributions to this symposium. Now I propose, just as a quick approach to deal with this, that Wittgen- stein in quoting Nestroy actually is making use of an analogy from visual perception, namely “looking bigger than it is”. This is a deception of the senses transferred to the world of concepts and there are at least two types of sense deceptions: One is the fata morgana type where you think you see something and there is nothing there, so it’s just an error. And the second type of deception is the stick-in-the-water type where there is water and there is a stick which looks bent and you know it could not be bent. There is a substratum to the perception, it’s just that appearances are deceptive. If you take these two types of sense deceptions, philosophers may be grouped—very roughly I admit—according to their views about progress: There are those who think that there is just nothing to progress and pride themselves in rejecting this modern notion, including its manifestations like laptops etc., those who reach back to the ancient Greeks while at the same time making use of some of the amenities technological society provides. One could compare them to people wearing a traditional costume with syn- thetic Gore-Tex® fibres hidden inside its linings. These philosophers some- times use Wittgenstein, and in particular his scepticism against progress, to argue their point, but I would submit that this is a misuse. It is much more appropriate to look at the problem from the stick-in-the-water point of view and the interesting thing is that this is a view of the world. Progress is a view of the world even though from this perspective things might seem systemati- cally distorted. A philosophers’ job would be not to reject progress, but to find out about the distortions and their dangers and to put things into place. This seems to me to be a genuine Wittgensteinian move. So I can come back to the points Alois has just made about the development and the prospects of the concepts of information in a Wittgensteinian setting: getting things right, putting them in the right way, even though there is this deceptive surface. Herbert Hrachovec and Alois Pichler Vienna and Bergen, May 2008 Section 1: Philosophy of Media Medienphilosophie Binding time: Harold Innis and the balance of new media Chris Chesher, Sydney Introduction Much has been made of the impacts of digital media on the experience of space: new modes of perception and action at a distance: accelerating glo- balisation; shifting boundaries between work and home life; and so on. It is less common to read about the impacts of digital media on the experience of time. Yet, the digitisation of cultural practices and artefacts has significant implications for structuring our relationships with both the future and the past. In the theoretical traditions concerned with technology and time, the work of Harold Innis, a Canadian economist and communications theorist, offers an approach to understanding the social significance of all kinds of media. He analysed how different media relate to space and time: space-binding media extend influence and meanings over distances, helping to build empires and develop cohesion across space; while time-binding media influence cultural patterns in duration. For Innis, civilisations can be measured by their bal- ance between managing time and controlling space. If this remains the case today, how has the computer changed this balance in our own culture? This paper examines the extent to which Innis’s concepts about media still apply today. Since