Communication Ethics book part for Review. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

To review:

  • Communication can be modelled as a set of connections along which messages flow from a sender to a receiver on some medium. A given interaction may require several such connections to model; even a simple web request requires two connections (one from the person requesting the page, one to return the page to that person).
  • Several elaborations on the model exist in the real world, which can complicate the model primarily by adding more entities to the chain of responsibility, who have the opportunity to fiddle with the message(s).
  • We take as an axiom that communication is symmetric. There is no intrinsic ethical value in being the sender or receiver, or in possessing some message that somebody else wants.
  • There is no analog, only digital, and things that aren't digital quite yet, but could be if enough people cared.
  • We observe that only humans communicate. We also note that we either must accept this as true, or give up any hope of having a rational system of ethics that can actually claim something is ethical or unethical.

Now that we have examined the history of communication, laid down our goals in building an ethical system, and created a model we can use to model actions in the real world and communicate about their effects, we are finally ready to begin applying what we've built to real-world situations.