Ethics and cybernetics: Levinasian reflections

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? Sherry Turkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate the computer age as the embodiment of "difference." No longer just a theory, one can now live a "virtual" life. Within a differential but ontologically detached field of signifiers, one can construct and reconstruct egos and environments from the bottom up and endlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn the same computer age for increasing the distance between flesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-face relation between real people, allowing and encouraging communication at a distance, information technology would alienate individuals from the social immediacy productive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of these positions, and for similar reasons. Turkle's celebration and Introna's condemnation of information technology both depend, so I will argue, on the same mistaken metainterpretation of it. Like Introna, however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlist Levinas's ethical philosophy to make this case. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.