Sometimes, To Be Ethical Is To Be A Fool.

If free information distribution is considered to be an ethical practice today, at what point does information retention become unethical?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Google Labs"][/caption]

A very good example to illustrate this dilemma would be the products of Google, more specifically the services offered under their Labs feature. The first step in increasing worldwide public access to information was the Google Books project. The unevenness of opportunities presented by lack of space or time was nullified by the access to a range of books written in many languages and of many genres (especially of the classics corpora). On that primary level, any competence that involved information as a principal player saw the latter’s transformation into a tradable commodity. It began to be subjected to the same abuse that money faced: hoarding, thriftiness and deficiency. Therefore, he who hoarded, he who was thrifty and he who caused deficiency was inculpated for unethical practices.

Now, with too much information swimming around the cybersphere, data visualization has been resurrected with greater responsibility and, as a matter of an axiom, greater power. In between the two eras, that of data acquisition and perception, there was a period dominated quietly by a backstage hero called data mining: with more information on more things coming out every second, the proverbial gap between the winner and the loser began to narrow down because the two factions were only separated by the knowledge of what information was worthy and what was not. However, when we bit off more than we could chew, it was soon not a matter of what but of how. When we began to find out more than we ought to have known about the past, the future becomes less of a certainty and more of a possibility.

In line with that thought, Google brought in its Ngram Viewer (NV). A simple extension of the Google Books venture, NV brought together simple data mining, graphical data visualization and hundreds of thousands of books written in the last 200 years in 7 languages to leave the user with a new kind of data, ripe for interpretation. Visit the viewer here and see for yourself how the usage of the words “gay” and “homosexual” has varied in frequency over the years, and how it can be understood to show our perception of the words themselves: the more often they were used, the more they featured in discussion, the more they impacted us.

In this secondary level of information distribution – with the world as such tending to greater access limited by vaguer boundaries – could there be such a thing as information hoarding? Definitely. Compare this scenario you’re in to a ladder: you’re on the bottom rung, raw data is on the top-most rung. Before the raw data can reach you, the number of other filters it goes through on the way is increasing. Even though the greater challenge has been to engender new perspectives, there is also the challenge of leaving some information to be interpreted. On the primary level, the access to the information is increased. On the secondary level, it is classified more logically. On the third level, when it reaches you, you retain a responsibility still to decide:

1. How you use it


2. Why you use it, and


3. Whom do you use it with

Therefore, the ethics of this day and age have not been blurred by the repeated refinements but have only been rendered into a finer and finer line, bent this way and that by corporate greed, capitalist agendas and an overriding anarchism performed as an act of rebellion in most cases. The withholding of information does not spell misdemeanour but, more often than not, caution. This is the very nature of capitalism: to address greed by fostering the need to compete in its players. To be completely ethical in such a day and age is to be a fool.

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