Narratives of Digital Ethics

The digital transformation has brought about an unprecedented degree of global interconnectedness, accompanied by increasing efforts to formulate universal ethical guidelines for dealing with emerging digital technologies. The relative ease with which countries around the world seem to agree on universal action-guiding principles of digital ethics along the lines of “fairness”, “transparency”, and “accountability” contrast sharply with the vast differences in technology adoption that we see around the world, and also the vast differences in attitudes towards technology. The project AGIDE, which stands for “Academies for Global Innovation and Digital Ethics”, seeks to explore where differences lie and how these differences might be conceptualized beyond existing stereotypes. To this end, the Austrian Academy of Sciences is cooperating with ten other Academies of Sciences from all over the world. Contrary to initial expectations that the differences we see in the perception and governance of digital opportunities and risks might result from discernible differences in emphasis on particular values, the data did not support such distinctions. AGIDE’s research showed that there is a remarkable consistency in core values (such as justice, dignity or privacy), including in their relative weight, across different regions of the world. Major differences, however, seem to lie elsewhere: in the narratives of digital ethics. Narratives are stories that are told repeatedly, consisting of a series of events that are selected and arranged in a particular order, often including central characters (protagonists, antagonists), a conflict, and a plot. It remains unclear, however, whether the narratives are causes or symptoms of the differences we perceive, or both. Thus we need to better understand the factors that contribute to the development of specific narratives, both at the macro and the micro level, and that are conducive to the transformation of established narratives or cause established narratives to resist even major shifts, potentially hindering important policy changes.