Stories in Digital Media (SIDM) was a blog run by a few students and the professor Frieder Nake, part of the former Digital Media programme in the state of Bremen, Germany. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, the web and digital technology were advancing at an unprecedented pace in the social and artistic sphere. Developments were exciting, and we kept a log of some events and took time to reflect.

What you see here is a rendition of the content as it was back then, in a different, static archival representation. Enjoy this glimpse into a hopeful and exciting past.

Stuff that may be relevant for the Digital Media programme in Bremen.

Digital Media and Ethics ?

· Jan Wieferich · in Culture Programme Theory
I´ve got a question at the back of my head since a while. To sum up shortly, I get rid of the common definition of "media" in the journalistic/advertising way. Web 2.0 is not my playground. Flickr, facebook and all of the other "social" web services might be fun, but every child will abandon it´s favorite toy (Google Chrome) if it gets bored or hurt by it (Privacy Concerns Over Google Chrome’s "Omnibox"), or ? Due to the interdisciplinary aspect of digital media it´s not really clear which harms could be caused with them. For my instance, I miss a theoretical lecture on the ethics of digital media. So, is there an ethical responsibility while challenging digital media ? Which applications / technological features could be ethical doubtful ? Our degree course is introduced with the following description:
Digital Media in Bremen Communication, work, or leisure time: digital media are changing the world, while at the same time being subject to perpetual change themselves, often at a rapid pace. Only if we learn to live with this process of constant revision will we be able to mold the future according to our needs, both professional and personal.
How could we achieve this while we are not discussing the ethical point of view ? Is this question justified ? The critics on current topics like social networks are mostly driven by a lack of privacy and transparency how private data is treated. In the most cases the responsibility is given into the hand of the user, but does he really know what could be done with his data ? How could we prevent malpractice for him and for our own ?

1 Comment

  1. admin
    I think you already pointed out the main ethical concern in digital media, which is privacy. It's funny that I recently saw Batman - The Dark Knight, full fledged Popcorn cinema, were Bruce Wayne installed a device with which he could realize live visuals of the surroundings of every cellphone user without their consent. In the face of this eminent invasion of people's privacy, Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) pointed out that "this is too much power for a single man". Recent scandals in Germany and former ones in England (sets of printed data found abandoned at motorways or inside railway wagons), raise an awareness of data privacy in the public, while, at least in Germany, the public concern is more about the anxiety of involuntarily giving personal data to organisations of scammers, spammers and other mobs. The idealistic notion of data privacy is not very common since their meaning does not reach the more pragmatic everyday life of so called "simple men". Interestingly, my mother told me around her birthday this year, that it was common in Taiwan that parents normally don't tell the original birth dates of their new (house-)born children to the officials, but rather make the person "younger" or "older". The credo was: the less the state knows, the better. It would be ideal if the state knows less about us, but we know everything about it. Concerning other ethical issues, I think the discussion remains more or less the same. Other media was discussed since decades, the transversion of media (text, photo, video) to the internet often does not make any significant difference to the topics which are discussed (violence in computer games, violence in horror movies). Also, I think this is often more a hidden discussion about generation conflicts instead of about the obvious subject matter.

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