INTRODUCTION
Corporate and personal behaviors express responsibility and obligation in doing business. Usually, accountable and obligated actions are explicitly given in legal contracts. The legalized versions that enforce responsibility and obligation are dependent upon moral expectations framed by a social contract.
Obligations and responsibilities influence and frame our everyday experiences. While some obligations and responsibilities are shaped into legal contracts, many of the obligations and responsibilities that govern our daily situations never see the light of day except in felt senses of duty and concerns under girding actions. Obligations and responsibilities are localized social and moral constructs arising from a communal sensibility of people in the ebb and flow of everydayness. Obligations are norms that structure human interaction and locate human relationships within a moral universe of discourse. Obligation is doing one’s duty in the face of situational demands. Responsibility is owning up to the effects and consequences of actions in a social situation. Responsible behavior is local and personal.
Responsibility, also, is related to a constellation of supporting values, of which accountability and privacy are significant in their social reach. Accountability works best when private and confidential arenas of action are recognized. Being responsible carries an expectation of privacy. Other constellated expectations are access to information, freedom of speech, and information ownership, both physical and intellectual (Dhillon, 2002).
Obligations and responsibilities are social expectations framing relationships. These social relationships are based on a silent and intuitive communal agreement, the social contract. A social contract is implicit to any society and culture. Although the foundation for many written social and legal documents, the social contract is never written. It is a set of common understandings and assumptions framing situational behavior. A social group is an eventful result of a social contract: A social contract entails association. There are three great theorists on the social contract: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
BACKGROUND
Previous Ideas on the Social Contract
Hobbes
The social contract for Hobbes is a tacit affair that allows a communal association to form. Community is a natural restraint on humanity’s natural perversity and propensity to selfishness and conflict. The social contract is the basis of societal authority, or the power of a society to sanction behavior. The social contract is a restraint on humanity’s Darwinian-like tendency to reduce all interactions to power relationships and to coercion (Hobbes, 1988). The social contract confers the rights of citizenship and the duties—being responsive (responsible) to the now common or mutual interests (Halverson, 1972; Hobbes; Solomon, 1992, 1993).
Locke
Persons begin, for Locke, with the freedoms to act, to do what they will with their property, and to live as they see fit. All people are equal to one another. This is a natural state; it rests on natural law. The mutual agreement tojoin together as a community and political body rests on a social contract (Kendall, 1959; Locke, 1960). The social contract for Locke is based on natural law which argues that persons have certain rights. The notion of the social contract, according to Locke, is expressive of the values of freedom and fairness (Barker, 1970).
Rousseau
For Rousseau, each person naturally tends to self-preservation and maintenance of personal concerns. Socially agreed-upon norms are the basis of any authority within any group. The social contract is conventions of association; it is a solution to situations created when peoplejoin together to defend self and property (Rousseau, 1998). Individuals establish a society by agreeing to give up any natural rights for rights based on the collective. Individuals are dependent upon the community; the common will overrides individual will (Crocker, 1968).
Information Technology as a Frame for E-Social Contract
Information technology is a metaphor of hardware and software applications to informational situations and flows, that is, information systems, corporate or personal. Technology is an ideological stance that argues that all solvable problems are defined within technological space (Barbour, 1993; Postrel, 1998). Responsible living in today’s world requires understanding technology (Monsma, Christians, Dykema, Leegwater, Schuurman, & van Poolen, 1986). Information technology enhances accountability or responsibility in business affairs (Galvin, 2000; Stoll, 1999).
Views of IT
There are several different views of information technology. These views frame our sense of the social contract. Information technology insinuates itself into our social existence and affects the nature of the social contract (Friedman, 2000). One approach sees information technology as a mere tool, a subsystem within its sociocultural environment. Societal members use information technology framed by the cultural sensibilities of the users. This view considers information technology to be value neutral. A second frame is that information technology is the culture which orients the person and the society. Information technology is the world in which we live, by which we live, and through which we live. Our mode ofbeing in the world is technological; everything is technique. Information technology provides a new context for living. This frame changes the notion of the social contract. This paradigm is the foundation of the information society. A third sense, a hybrid, is that information technology contributes in major ways to how we understand and live in the world, but it is only one aspect of our experiences. In different ways, and to varying degrees, these perspectives frame how we are in the information society.
The Internet and E-Everydayness
The Internet and the World Wide Web are manifestations of information technology as cultural paradigm. Where there is a culture, there is a morality. Where there is a moral sense, there are obligations and responsibilities. The World Wide Web is a digital society that is intentionally created by its users. Users of the World Wide Web must be self-regulators according to accepted standards and rules (Berners-Lee, 1999; Chapman & Dhillon, 2002; Stoll, 1995). The Internet is viewed as a society of multiple local communities. These local communities encapsulate social and ethical values. The Internet is based on a social contract of sorts. The Internet expresses a normative architecture. It is a structure for responsible self-governance. The architecture is made up of free choice, free speech, honesty, and openness or disclosure (Dyson, 1997; Negroponte, 1996; Rheingold, 1993). The information highway, the Internet and World Wide Web, reflect a new social contract (Gates, 1995). The new social contract is digital and its major foci are about decentralization and globalization (Negroponte, 1995; Poster, 1995).
Information Society and E-Lebenswelt
The information society is a significant context for understanding social contract. The information society shows up in the Internet and the World Wide Web (Webster, 1995). The information society is the global connectivity of commercial interests, governmental venues, as well as individual and personal ways of being linked together globally (Friedman, 2000). The information society shapes and frames not only sociocultural environments, but also human thinking (Webster, 1995).
The information society reduces the physical social aspects of human interaction to nothing more than individuals and information flows (Borgmann, 1999). The information society is nothing but information and people. Ultimately, even people exist as information entities. Information is the focus of everything; it is everything. Because informational flows are the basis, society is not centralized; there is a diffusion of information (Brown & Dugwid, 2000). Worldwide connectivity is the information society. Contemporary life for citizens in the information society is digital behavior. Cultural behavior in the information society is the semantic behavior based on digital existence (Borsook, 2000). Information society is a cultural force, a shaper of obligations manipulating the social fabric; its foundation is the e-social contract.
MAIN THRUST OF CHAPTER
The E-Social Contract
The e-social contract is a digital affair. Cyberspace revises the social contract. The digital social contract resides in the expectations, assumptions, and constraints of online actions, such as conversations carried on in emails, chat rooms, and instant messaging services. The e-social contract resides in guest topics and other forms of relationship building on the Web. The e-social contract informs behavior on the Internet; these are the tacit conventions of right or appropriate behavior at the right times in the right places to the right people. The digital social contract assumes a virtual trust of others encountered in cyberspace. This revision of the social contract in cyberspace as the e-social contract has at least three different faces to show the world, virtual though it may be. They are virtual communitarianism, virtual radical individualism, and virtual social capitalism.
Virtual Communitarianism
Virtual communities are communities of practice which are constituted by a set of expectations. These expectations are the values of reciprocity and trust (Blanchard & Horn, 2000; Stoll, 1995). Davenport (2002) argues that anonymity does not lead to responsible behavior. Responsibility maintains claims of rights and freedoms. The consequences of anonymity are inappropriate behaviors that take advantage of the situation. Responsible behavior is trustworthy because it is public or visible behavior. Public behavior is framed by the purpose of public space (or the virtual community or cyberspace) and what the public space has been created for (Erickson, Halverson, Kellog, Laff, & Wolf, 2002). Each virtual community generates its own set of sanctioned online behaviors and underlying policies which are expressions of the e-social contract. A virtual community has jurisdiction only over individuals who freely elect tojoin the group. Such normative prescriptions freely entered into have more moral force than civil governments. Communal norms or rules are tacit and implicit in the relationships that create the group and remain so until individuals abuse them or raise issues, which make the normative structures visible (Dyson, 1997). The Internet constructs a social contract for the empowering of individuals (Kinney, 1995).
Virtual Individualism
The new virtual individualism, or e-individualism, is a radical individualism and libertarian in its approach. It is a form of neo-Darwinism. This neo-Darwinism is digital in nature. Digital Darwinism is an approach that argues that the economic, biological, and Internet environments influence one another. This is a philosophy that is the ideology of technolibertarianism. The worldview of the individualist or the technolibertarian holds human nature to be a model of rational economic behavior that is always guided by enlightened self-interest. The individual is responsible or accountable for holding his or her way within the virtual marketplaces and locales in cyberspace. Digital existence is a matter of being able to compete, that is, to innovate and adapt to the situation. This worldview rejects an implicit social contract, electronic or otherwise, unless you count enlightened self-interest. Technological adaptation to its environment means pushing individual adaptation in societal and economic spheres. These spheres of influence are evolutionary. Evolutionary change is a consequence of technological change (Borsook, 2000; Schwartz, 1999; Kinney, 1995; Stewart & Williams, 2000).
Virtual Social Capital
Virtual social capital refers to an implicit willingness of individuals to work together in online settings. An important element that shows up is trust. Virtual social capital maintains digital communal behavior. A commonality of purpose is the stuff of virtual social capital. Commonalities of purpose show up in the interrelationships among virtual individuals on the Internet. Such interrelationships are social networks; they are cooperative relationships (Preece, 2002). The e-social contract is the structure of virtual social capital. Virtual social capital is the stuff of communal relationships in cyberspace. A sense of community implies that trust is an important element of social association. The unspoken and unwritten obligations of social living online show up in common trust and loyalty. Societal endeavors are grounded in shared beliefs, mores, and collaborative activities. The virtual community of practice (the basis for virtual social capital) demands adherence to its worldview. This is apparent even in cyberspace. Virtual social contract shows up in a common semantic universe and worldview. This worldview and its common senses are grounded in the e-social contract, which is a tacit set of reciprocal expectations and commitments among individuals in cyberspace. The e-social contract is the tacit set of presuppositions grounding appropriate virtual behaviors, commonly held beliefs, and expectations ofbenefits in the interactive settings of cyberspace (Cohen & Prusak, 2001; Dyson, 1997; Preece, 2002).
FUTURE TRENDS
As with any social setting, the tenuous and intuitive frame of the e-social contract will continue to bound and channel what is considered to be proper behavior in cyberspace. Where rifts and breaks happen in the delicate social fabric woven out of the e-social contract, the cybercitizens will strive to patch the tears in the online social cloth. This patching logically will be in the guise of generating formal codes of ethics and laws. Much of this has happened already, even from the beginnings of human interaction in cyberspace. Because of the dialectic between virtual individual actions and virtual communal sensibilities, need for articulated formal boundaries (and interpretations of the e-social contract) will continue.
CONCLUSION
This discussion has looked at the foundational contexts of behavioral expectations of travelers of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The journey in this essay began with a discussion of responsibility and obligation. These ideas are framed by the ideas of the social contract, information technology, and the information society. Information technology as a cultural frame of reference is discussed as a ground for the e-social contract. The essay sees the Internet, cyberspace, as an electronic lebenswelt.
KEY TERMS
Digital Darwinism: An ideology framing economic and social situations that argues that only the economically and socially fit will survive because of their ability to adapt to the digital world.
E-Social Contract: Tacit set of conventions underlying the information society and any kind of digital interaction across the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Information Society: Communal interaction based on the global informational systems of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Social relationships are informational flows and people are informational entities or links.
Information Technology: Hardware and software that constitute informational systems, as well as techniques for handling informational content and flows.
Obligation: The moral construct or concept of duty framing intentional behavior and its effects in communal situations.
Responsibility: The moral construct or concept of taking ownership of acts and the consequences in social situations.
Social Contract: Tacit and assumed set of conventions about human social involvement that frames all communal associations.
Technolibertarianism: A companion political ideology to digital Darwinism that argues in an age of global connectivity for radical individualism and no governmental regulation of digital life.
