The Ethics of Global Communication Online

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss important ethical aspects of online communication on the Internet. The significance is particularly related to the discussion of fundamentalism as the most important threat to free and open communication today. The topic relates to technoethics by examining information technological impact on communication. The ethical analysis of communication technology focuses on the question how online communication could promote open discourse in a manner that would impede fundamentalism. A sketch of an answer is offered in the final sections of the chapter.

Fundamentalism as applied in media is most often envisaged as internally linked to religion. Opposite to this view, it is argued in this chapter that we need to disconnect the conceptual linkage between religion and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is here characterised in terms of procedural traits of communication rather than by its particular contents, such that any values might appear to be fundamentalist, whether they relate to religion, gender, sex, ethnicity or others. This approach to fundamentalism diverges from mainstream accounts in much of the global communication of fundamentalism in media, as fundamentalism is often identified in terms of its substantive contents.

Fundamentalism might be conceived as suppression of challenges of particularity, whether a particular cultural practice or a story that is put forth with a claim to approval or condemnation without questioning. To make this concrete, we shall pay attention to a particular story from Nordic media. In January 2002 Swedish-Kurd Fadime was killed by her father in Sweden. The reason why she was killed was that she had a Swedish boyfriend. The murder was referred in media as a murder of honour, and it was seen as an expression of contest of the cultural norm forced marriage, a norm that is extensive in many Muslim societies. The murder and the debate following from it have necessitated a public reflection of a claim to participate in the public debate, and also reflection on referring to immigrants in terms of representative groups. Immigrants are often conceived as groups in the light of ethnicity, culture and identity. Additionally, these “groups” are considered to be represented by their leaders in accordance with Western, democratic principles. The contested practises of forced marriage and murder of honour do, however, separate the members within the minority societies just as well as separating minority groups from the society at large.

The murder of Fadime and the debate in Sweden and Norway following from it clearly demonstrates that Muslims in these two countries cannot and should not be defined on the basis of a uniform group concept. Fadime was killed by her father because she loved a Swedish man, and because she spoke her opinions of love and marriage openly in media. She argued against arranged marriages, in favour of the right to choose a partner of one own. We might formulate this case as a problem concerning the relation between the particular and the general, in cases where particular arguments are considered to be justified with respect to “the others”, whereas not looked upon as acceptable “for us”. We may ask: what is it that appeals to general circumstances, and how do these appeals relate to something beyond the particular, something of universal scope?

We may further ask how to describe the case above, what description is the correct one? No matter how we describe it – as an act of murder of honour or something else – our description will on any occasion be a normative act. This is because we look for solutions to the problems that we raise. This act could be considered a murder of honour – Fadime’s father wanted to rescue the family’s honour – or it could be judged to be a sick man’s misdeed as Fadime’s sister Fidan claimed (Eriksson and Wadel 2002).