Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations

11 Cyber-ethics: regulation and privatisation

Paul Walton

 

 

 

 

It is important to remember as we examine the history and nature of the digital dilemmas that exist as stop signs and short cuts on the information superhighway, that there are complex ethical issues involved in the so-called information revolution. As David Brown, in his philosophically informed Cybertrends, observes, the so-called information superhighway is often mistakenly equated with the Internet. The highway is a metaphor for the expanding digital information society and the paths across it, whilst the Net is in fact a factual description of a decentralised constellation of computers linked together that can draw upon vast stores of digital information and is now at least ...