The Portable Panopticon
Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:11AM 
David Horner and I gave a lunchtime seminar to colleagues yesterday on our new paper, “The Portable Panopticon: morality and mobile technologies” which we will presenting at ETICA in Spain in April. It seemed to go well with some good questions and comments from colleagues at the end. Katie Piatt has blogged it (thanks for the photo, Katie) and made some interesting observations and suggestions about how we might adapt to the widespread diffusion of smart phones and the potential ethical issues that might raise.
Abstract of the paper below:
“James Moor has argued that we need ‘better ethics’ for emerging technologies. What he means by ‘better ethics’ is: firstly, that ethical analysis of technologies should not be a post hoc activity but rather something dynamic which is done in tandem or anticipation; secondly, that the ethical response to emerging technologies and the formation of appropriate technologies requires collaboration between ethicists, technologists, policy makers and so on; thirdly, more sophisticated ethical analysis will be required. Moor argues that emerging technologies, whilst the product of new technological paradigms, need to be matched by analyses forming new ethical paradigms. Broadly, we need frameworks to identify radical emerging information and communication technologies and appropriate frameworks for identifying and analysing new moral issues. In this paper we argue that the development and widespread use of mobile technologies constitute if not a revolution then a subrevolution that may have widespread social and ethical impacts. We define mobile technologies as the set of hardware, software, and network infrastructure that greatly extend the conventional functionality of the mobile phone. Current and emerging applications include video, photography, high-speed internet access, social networking and GPS location services. We aim to present this suite of technologies within the framework of Moor’s three stage model of technological development. We locate mobile technologies in the ‘permeation’ phase of development when we might first begin to detect the lineaments of novel ethical challenges. We argue more specifically that one of these challenges is a new and important phenomenon: what we describe as the ‘portable panopticon’. The concept of the panoticon has been broadly used to designate the potential for centralised surveillance and all that that connotes for privacy. We suggest that with mobile technologies we face a more distributed threat to personal privacy. What differentiates this threat from conventional conceptions of the panopticon is its decentralised nature. This arises from a combination of the increased power and functionality coupled with the widespread, individual ownership of these mobile devices.”
