Basic Concepts

Abstract

To begin with, the first chapter will clarify the difference between “technique” and “technology”. Technique is considered the extension of a human action through the use of various kinds of tools. Technology, on the other hand, is considered a technical system, a field where it is possible to develop acts which are largely independent from human actions and where there are devices able to interact with the environment within which they carry out their procedures. The following section develops the distinction between technique and technology by considering the more specific field of information and communication processes and by introducing the world of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The distinction between techniques and technologies of information and communication is exemplified through the history of the tools and devices used over time for writing, printing and reading. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between “information” and “communication”. Information is the transmission of data from a sender to a receiver. It mainly consists of mechanical relationships and indeed characterizes the very functioning of some machinery. Communication is the ability to create and share a common space among interlocutors. This is a typically human process. Considering that the topic of this book is the ethics of information and communication technologies, in this first chapter it is also necessary to explain the meaning of the term “ethics” and to describe the main trends present in contemporary ethics. The subject of “applied ethics” and the relation between applied ethics and general ethics are just introduced and discussed here, as much as the difference between the ethical and the deontological approach. In the final section of this chapter, I will lay out another difference concerning our daily experience within the areas of information and communication. It is the difference among the use of specific techniques, the interaction with various technologies and the possibility, that we have more and more today, of living in virtual environments. Considered both from a deontological and ethical point of view, this involves the development of two specific lines of in-depth study on our theme: the study on communication devices and that on communication environments. They will be developed in the second and in the third chapter of this book.