The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era

Citation

Greg Morgan (2015), "The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era", Library Review, Vol. 64 No. 4/5, pp. 403-404. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-04-2015-0034

Opening The Onlife Manifesto is like joining an animated symposium in full swing. Philosophers, scientists, lawyers, social epistemologists and information and communication technology (ICT) thought leaders, among others, are engaged in commentary, asking questions, explaining the positions they hold and defining concepts. The chief topics are the pressures created by pervasive ICT and rethinking modernity. These people are avid and learned. Yet, none speaks for long; they make space for each other.

That is the experience of reading reflections, studies and exegesis that arise from a European Commission-funded exploration of ICT transitions on human society. Luciano Floridi’s early comment “This is only a beginning […]” shows how, in a social environment, marked by rapidly advancing hyperconnectivity, freedom entails plurality and natality – what Nicole Dewandre calls “the confidence in recurrent beginnings”.

Every information professional should think about the transformative effects of ICT and socio-ecological sustainability. As one example, what can distinguish public from private space once technologies deliver to you everything about my life online that you want to know? When, thanks to very big data and instantaneous searching, I am not aware you have obtained that data? Mireille Hildebrandt invokes Arendt (public, private, social life) to explore notions of public space in the computational era and the challenge of design inherent in smart environments. How can we design:

[…] sustainable public performance, an empowering capacity of the self and a range of exposures that incorporates the need for self-expression, identify performance as well as the generosity of forgetfulness, erasure and the chance to reinvent oneself?

What makes a society knowledgeable more than full information? Does e-comment constitute collective wisdom? Issues of statehood, empowered citizenship, identity, mandate, reputation, legal protection, social responsibility, equality and governance force the reader to think about who constitutes “the public” anyway. There is no valid distinction now between “online” and “offline”: Floridi coined “onlife” to assist the examination of societal concerns around digital transitions.

The contributors aim to be constructive. They are not seeking to arouse fear about the future but to address shortcomings in current and traditional conceptual constructs so that we can respond with positive, ethics-based decisions to radical ICT-driven transformations within society. These are the blurring of reality and virtuality, and of distinctions between human, machine and nature; information scarcity is giving way to information abundance; and stand-alone entities and binary relationships to “the primacy of interactions, processes and networks”. ICT environmental factors affect humans’ self-conception, mutual interactions and socialising, metaphysics (“our conception of reality”) and agency (“our interactions with reality”). Expect breadth here. Charles Ess discusses concepts of selfhood and relational selves in traditional Confucian societies and emergent democracies. Dewandre inspects the past, the present and the future in policy-making to highlight the urgency of placing more value on the capacity of present-time human interactions to create “a rich experience of plurality and freedom”. This shows the inadequacy of assumptions that digital transitions are simply a quick fix to solve mere access problems. The big question is: how will we stay human amid hyperconnectedness?

The table of contents and introductory remarks help readers find their way in. The index aids re-reading. There are extensive bibliographic references. Sometimes, there is a degree of repetition and the editorial touch could have been stronger. Floridi understandably avoids an executive summary or an explicitly conclusive conclusion. The global relevance of this open-ended conversation transcends a Digital Agenda for Europe, and each chapter carries an open access licence to encourage you to pick up the talk and take it to your places of confluence and influence. Do not stand back – for humanity’s sake, get into the debate and be part of envisioning the future.