Ethics from Within Google Glass, the Collingridge Dilemma, and the Mediated Value of Privacy

Following the “control dilemma” of Collingridge, influencing technological developments is easy when their implications are not yet manifest, yet once we know these implications, they are difficult to change. This article revisits the Collingridge dilemma in the context of contemporary ethics of tec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScience, technology, & human values Vol. 44; no. 2; pp. 291 - 314
Main Authors Kudina, Olya, Verbeek, Peter-Paul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA Sage Publications, Inc 01.03.2019
SAGE Publications
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Display devices
Ethics
Expectations
Glass
Human behavior
Meaning
Morality
Privacy
Technology
Wearable technology
technomoral change
technological mediation
ethics of technology
Collingridge dilemma
sociotechnical experiments
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Summary:Following the “control dilemma” of Collingridge, influencing technological developments is easy when their implications are not yet manifest, yet once we know these implications, they are difficult to change. This article revisits the Collingridge dilemma in the context of contemporary ethics of technology, when technologies affect both society and the value frameworks we use to evaluate them. Early in its development, we do not know how a technology will affect the value frameworks from which it will be evaluated, while later, when the implications for society and morality are clearer, it is more difficult to guide the development in a desirable direction. Present-day approaches to this dilemma focus on methods to anticipate ethical impacts of a technology (“technomoral scenarios”), being too speculative to be reliable, or on ethically regulating technological developments (“sociotechnical experiments”), discarding anticipation of the future implications. We present the approach of technological mediation as an alternative that focuses on the dynamics of the interaction between technologies and human values. By investigating online discussions about Google Glass, we examine how people articulate new meanings of the value of privacy. This study of “morality in the making” allows developing a modest and empirically informed form of anticipation.
ISSN:0162-2439
1552-8251
DOI:10.1177/0162243918793711