Global Information Justice: Rights, Responsibilities, and Caring Connections

Library Trends, Wntr, 2001 by Martha Smith

ABSTRACT

THE GOAL OF GLOBAL INFORMATION JUSTICE (GIJ) IS TO conserve nature and to preserve humanity through the creative uses of the technologies of information, knowledge, and memory using the practices of rights, responsibilities, and caring connections. This article presents the concept of global information justice and describes it in three different but complementary ways--as an ethical ideal, as an organizing principle for a model for analysis, and as a direction for policy making. First, as an ethical ideal, GIJ has as its aim the use of new technologies to preserve humanity and to conserve the natural world. The analytic model relates key issues--access, ownership, privacy, security, and community--to each other and to the goal of GIJ. As an approach to policy making, GIJ is presented as the foundation for policy creation, implementation, and the establishment of normative practices. The concept of global information justice is illustrated with articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), with the works of international scholars and advisors meeting in the late 1990s (UNESCO INFOEthics Congresses) and their continuing efforts through UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization), the International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE), and other groups. This presentation can only serve as an introduction to global information justice and to the research agenda and policy needs that will arise as the future unfolds.

INTRODUCTION

The goal of global information justice (GIJ) is to conserve nature and to preserve humanity through the creative uses of the technologies of information, knowledge, and memory (see Figure 1) using the practices of rights, responsibilities, and caring connections.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This article presents the concept of global information justice and describes it in three different but complementary ways--as an ethical ideal, as an organizing principle for a model for analysis, and as a direction for policy making. First, as an ethical ideal, GIJ has as its aim the use of new technologies to preserve humanity and to conserve the natural world. The analytic model relates key issues--access, ownership, privacy, security, and community--to each other and to the goal of GIJ. As an approach to policy making, GIJ is presented as the foundation for policy creation, implementation, and the establishment of normative practices. The concept of global information justice is illustrated in several articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) with the works of international scholars and advisors meeting in the late 1990s (Unesco INFOEthics Congresses), and their continuing efforts through Unesco, the International Center for Information Ethics, and other groups. This presentation can only serve as an introduction to global information justice and to the research agenda and policy needs that will arise as the future unfolds.

BACKGROUND

Almost ten years ago in Barbara Moran's Library Trends issue on leadership (Smith, 1992), I discussed the concept of information ethics--"Infoethics for Leaders: Models of Moral Agency in the Information Environment." At the end of that article, I described librarians and other information professionals as ethical selves in the global information environments who would "need to negotiate among competing interests and to assert their professional expertise in a constructive and forceful manner"(p. 565). In the last decade, information ethics (IE) has grown substantially as a field in applied ethics. One of the most significant characteristics of the area has been its global orientation. From the very beginning, with the 1988 article by Rafael Capurro, in 1996 with a special issue on global information ethics in Science and Engineering Ethics (Bynum & Rogerson, 1996), and most recently with the founding of the International Center for Information Ethics, IE has been an international discipline devoted to guiding information professionals and global policy makers and to informing and empowering citizens of the world.

During this same decade, the emergence of the consumer Internet, with its enormous potential to connect people as well as to pose a threat to personal privacy and human identity, has heightened public awareness. With globalization now a household word as well as a subject of increasing controversy, any notion of global information justice may seem to be an oxymoron or at least a naive ideal imagined by utopian academics. Yet others would argue that, without consideration of social return as well as financial return, economic growth and continuing prosperity may not be sustainable.

Human rights, another contested issue on the world stage, evokes similar responses of optimism and pessimism. Yet, in 1998, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was celebrated, and its call for international action reaffirmed. The theme of global information justice runs through the UDHR and can be appreciated in the twenty-first century even more than it was fifty years ago. Privacy, information transfer across borders, free exchange of ideas, protection of intellectual property, and the right to know everything--from one's own genetic blueprint to someone else's criminal record--are among the issues that need to be addressed with respect to diverse values and competing interests.