The Freelance Netizen™

Original Post: Ryerson University / Centre for Free Expression / Blog. Reposted with permission.

Every interaction by or about a person on the Internet, whether intended as public, semi-private, or private, is vulnerable to instant digital tattooing. For this reason, the right to be forgotten is emerging as a compelling companion to privacy. Privacy, like Article 19, features in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 12 st...

How can companies most effectively and ethically engage consumers across a connected brand and product ecosystem, balancing the drive to innovate and personalize, with privacy safeguards and responsibilities? How can they do so in ways that deliver actual value, protection, education, respect, and assurance and not creep people out in the meantime?

These questions are central to ongoing research conducted by myself, Jessica Groopman, Resea...

One of the potential outcomes of a well considered philosophy is surely the development of a personal code by which one may live one’s life honourably and thus contentedly. A code which enables one to face any situation, no matter how challenging or onerous, with dignity and courage of conviction even in the face of grievous personal danger. A code which is sustainable for richer or for poorer and irrespective of personal loss. To live by such...

A TFN exclusive ~ by Rafael Capurro 

There is an interesting ethical and intercultural discussion in the German newspapers (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan 13, 2015, No. 10, p. 8: "Angst vor Blasphemie. Die britische und amerikanische Pressse und die Moral" by Jochen Buchsteiner and Andreas Ross) about how the US (The NY Times, The Washington Post but also CNN) and UK (Dominic Lawson) newspapers refused to publish the Mohammed satirical car...

A TFN exclusive by Soraj Hongladarom (Edited by Jared Bielby)

The attack at the office of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris a few months ago reignited a debate which has engaged philosophers for millennia. The debate centers on whether there exists the possibility of finding a set of truly universal ethical guidelines, the type of guidelines that would settle once and for all universal ethical “truth” to which every nation and culture worldw...

The world comprises and exhibits radical complexity. It’s evolving faster than our feeble attempts to grasp and model it. Many believe our time to be a transition from a simpler and stabile time to a future when equilibrium will be completely beyond our grasp. Drowning in waves of information and bludgeoned by images and sounds of digital media, many people have lost a sense of orientation and its attendant teleology, longing for security and...

 by Julian Ashbourn 

What we used to call ‘natural philosophy’ became what we now call ‘science’. The transformation reminds us that philosophy used to play a much more important role in the world, from the ancient civilisations through to medieval times, being more connected with the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, there was also a good deal of superstition and various religious doctrines with which to absorb the thinking of the masses....

A TFN exclusive ~ by Fernando Flores Morador (Ed. Jared Bielby)

Philosophers of Economics describe two kinds of values: use-values and exchange- values. This dualistic description of the ontological nature of value has become a cliché and is present in any analysis of economic value since the time of Aristotle. We think that this description of the nature of value is insufficient. We assume that economically speaking, any act or item is ma...

Originally Posted by ziggytheblue in the World of Knowledge. Re-posted with Permission.

Do we have the right to access information that is essential to human development? Isn’t it a human right? The short answer is no, although quite a few people think it is. Meanwhile, copyright has a basis in human rights – although nobody thinks so.

There are two levels at which the access to information is addressed by legal frameworks. A...