Almost against information ethics, with lessons from Caputo’s obligation and Foucault’s ethics of freedom

lições a partir do conceito de obrigação em Caputo e da noção de liberdade em Foucault

Abstract

It is time to rethink information ethics. John Caputo is against ethics. His deconstruction of ethics replaces it with obligation. This paper is guided by his work because Caputo locates obligation in the midst of the disasters of our time. In so doing, his work challenges the comfortable field of information ethics to face obligation by confronting disasters, dilemmas, and catastrophes. It is time to disturb information ethics, to discover a new strain of information ethics. This paper is intended to provoke such a pursuit. It questions the force of Caputo’s obligation in a contemporary mediascape that generates technologically mediated distraction, numbness, inattention, fragmented concentration, anhedonia, and disturbed affect. It argues that Foucault’s ethics of freedom can point to the work of discovering possibilities of escape from the numbing effects of our technologically mediated situation. It also encourages a “small-e information ethics” that draws from pre-modern concepts of information that convey the ongoing processes of becoming in-formed, that is, trying out and taking on a new form. It is an information ethics hospitable to Caputo’s lessons about obligation and Foucault’s lessons on explorations of ways of becoming other than what we are.