Introduction
The issue of use, accessibility and protection of information is severe nowadays. It is mainly because information technologies have now acquired an almost meaning of some mythology (in a philosophical and hermeneutic sense). Digitalization and computerization occur everywhere in the field of medicine, education, and marketing. In addition, digital reality has made information technologies such as the Internet accessible and understandable for children and adolescents. Now the use of information technology is not the prerogative of exclusively qualified specialists or the intellectual elite.
In the middle of the last century, there were newspapers, magazines on various topics (cooking, fashion, travel), libraries, radio, and television. In addition, the culture of consumption grew, and society gradually got used to absorbing a variety of food products, using fashionable clothes and equipment, and depleting information. People (especially residents of small towns) sometimes did not separate truthful information from fake; therefore, initially, using gossip, rumors, radio, and some government (local government) institutions. The information issue, including the Internet and how it changed the world, has influenced and continues to control aspects of each person’s life and the state. Currently, the complex problem of information developed in the planes of politics, law, society, and ethics.
Political Issues
The issue of information through the prism of politics readers can view both at the abstract level (ideology, propaganda, information, or hybrid war) and the local level of specific mechanisms in the territories of a country. Local governments independently resolve issues of local censorship, print media, entertainment, and their bans.1 Together with city dwellers, they prioritize any information and news.
In the story of Ruth Brown, the authors show the imbalance between global public policy, which is accountable to an entire people, and the policy of the local government. In addition, state policy is in television and international media, and citizens of other countries can see it. In the geopolitical field, any statements of this kind serve as a gesture that is deeply filled with meaning.
The political censorship in the small town was different from the television censorship or what people think of when they hear this combination of words. The administration bans Ruth Brown from providing African Americans with magazines or books on politics2. Political satire, analysis, or direct reporting of events are prohibited, as they may be amenable to discussion and reflection. The essence of this prohibition and censorship reflects the absurdity: the political sphere is fundamentally public. This sphere is not behind-the-scenes decisions and mysticism but the sphere of questions, debates, condemnations, and sometimes even intrigues, no matter how dirty they may be.
However, the woman rejects this prohibition since it contradicts her views and aspirations to make various information more accessible to all population segments, regardless of their education, origin, and skin color. Ruth Brown understands what she is doing, so she enlists the support of friends. She understands the risks and thinks over what kind of materials it would be better to provide African Americans so that their information space starts to fill with new events, cultures, and people.
The selection of printed materials became a sensation for the city and when Ruth Brown worked as a librarian. “Her selection of library materials was deemed to undermine the ideology of the dominant political group; it was her decision to move outside the private, domestic sphere into very public activity”.3 This gesture, which is essentially about political engagement, touched on the social aspect. Residents of the city turned out to be psychologically and traditionally unprepared for such an information explosion; it seemed wrong, immoral, and even wild.
As mentioned above, the sphere of politics is also the sphere of publicity. Accordingly, any information must be public or potentially public. There must be mechanisms and specific permissions to publish certain information (depending on the requirements of the situation and circumstances). Ruth Brown shows by her example how the space of an ordinary city library can become a full-fledged institution of public information. It lifts the prohibitions on hiding political secrets, making communication accessible. People are not required to prove their position or loyalty to a particular (political) group to obtain this information.
Legal Issues
The legal issue of information protection and its accessibility has only acquired a large scale in recent decades. There are tools for solving such cases, new terms, and new professions. It does not mean that in the days of Ruth Brown, the information did not need to be protected, and there were no attempts to regulate information flows. However, the American (and, in general, civilized) society did not yet acquire a noticeable status of an information society. The social transition had just matured, and the institutions had yet to change fundamentally.
The breakthrough of information technology was the spread of the Internet, which updated the definition of information, methods of obtaining information, accessibility, and openness. It has had an impact on the field of law and intellectual property. Now the Internet “unconstrained by national boundaries, and with a few – albeit important – exceptions, light legal and regulatory constraints, the internet has become the information medium with truly global content”.4 Mastodons of jurisprudence faced with the fact that the developed laws for print publications, creative activities do not adapt to the technology of the Internet.
Control over who gets access to information (ubiquitous in Ruth Brown’s story) is now nearly impossible. Access to information is becoming more and more personal, fast, and invisible. “Information is no longer even perceived to be ‘free’ in an economic sense, however ‘free’ access may be in the sense that there is no legal or technical obstacles to obtaining it”.5 There are also more and more users of social networks and individual websites every day. These are not situations where only the city’s wealthiest people, the intellectual cream of society (journalists, professors, artists, politicians) have access to specific literature, TV, and radio channels. Even a child in the modern world can use a small tablet or phone to turn on the Internet and find an animated series that he or she likes. Internet connectivity is available at snack bars, parking lots, or gas stations.
American society in those years was such that the traditional aspects of segregation and prejudice against African Americans were enshrined in legislation. Therefore, referring to the story of Ruth Brown again, law and tradition are intertwined here, and it is not always obvious which prevails. The people who met Mrs. Brown’s activity were not lawyers and judges, but they expressed disagreement and disapproval. These people grew up in established traditions, and their ancestors raised their children under certain moral principles.
Here the attentive reader may find a contradiction since American legislation enshrines freedom of speech and religion in the Bill of Human Rights. This document is central to American democracy, and political figures repeatedly refer to the Bill in their intentions. At the moment, it is the core idea of the Bill that is contained in the basis of modern intellectual property law. The development of these laws was controversial and painful, but they are now working in a digital society as they should. The digitalization of communities influenced the accelerated construction of new rules for the use of intellectual property and information.
Social Issues
Social groups are divided according to different criteria: origin, gender, status, professional affiliation, and others. The most powerful often try to control the least powerful. Such groups are prone to living in difficult conditions, low wages, and prejudice. Information often in all social relations takes the role of mythology, which gives indulgence to the disrespect of some people to others. With the help of information, you can also isolate some people from the reality in which other people revolve and exciting events occur. In society, isolation is a harsh punishment and turns a person into an actual victim or a scapegoat. Gender and racial, social minorities were subject to such punishment and information isolation. Since Ruth Brown was concerned with the racial prejudices of her society, it is necessary to address isolation based on race. The above is an excellent example of how African Americans have been denied reading political literature and magazines.
The mythology that has been constructed around African Americans (especially men) has to do with the prejudice that such men are like beasts and savages who cannot control themselves. “Blacks had to be relegated to unskilled jobs such as stock chasing that placed them under white control. The rules of racial segregation thus rested on the assumption that African American men possessed great physical strength that had to be controlled, precisely the same assumptions that animated the “black man as beast” myth so central to American racism”.6 In such a situation, it is not surprising that ordinary citizens of the city did not understand and reject the idea that African Americans also want to develop, read and learn new information. It was evident that African Americans were working in low-paid jobs with low qualifications, doing dirty work. However, their interest in culture and science seemed ridiculous to them.
Nowadays, one-piece insulation is almost impossible when it comes to such regulation by a group of people. However, this is still real at the local level, and people sometimes use it for deliberate punishments (finding a victim or a scapegoat in a social group). People often combine it with communicative isolation, and bullying is an example of this. In addition, bullying in the Internet space is also natural and manifests itself in the deliberate distortion of the information field around a person or a small group of people.
Ethical Issues
One of the central ethical concepts in the information topic is the concept of freedom. Freedom is a basic need and fundamental human right, along with life and happiness. In general, various ethical concepts, from ancient to modern, belonging to the new ethics, highlight the right to housing, earnings, and work, etc. The right to privacy is highlighted in the information section since modern access to information has an emotional component. Here freedom is equated with personal life, and the absence of informational freedom (for example, constant open surveillance) is correlated with the lack of personal space.
The public and local authorities have been replaced by state administration and giant corporations in the modern world. They currently own social networks, the most important and most popular websites, respectively, and they have complete control over information flows. The news that their queries or browser histories are being viewed and saved for most people can be embarrassing, but the lack of information freedom goes deeper. “When governments or corporations watch our mental and intellectual activities, the injury is not the tort harm of embarrassment, but a more vital one that cuts to the very core of what is meant to live in a free, self-governing society”.7 Such informational lack of freedom in society can deprive people of the sense of intellectual creativity.
By providing African Americans with equal and fair access to information, Ruth Brown only provided people with fundamental rights despite the residents of the city. Regardless of origin, information can form a human personality, so she understood that information should be accessible, complete, and diverse. Ethically, information isolation leads to an intellectual lack of freedom and enslavement in prejudice. A person is deprived of the right to development and choice since an ignorant person does not realize that a choice exists. Such people are easy to control and manipulate, using them for purposes of the ‘elite,’ whether it be for earning money, obtaining labor, or for other purposes that seem acceptable. Perhaps people of that time were accustomed to considering African Americans as a controlled layer of society that did not have the right to privacy and freedom of thought.
Conclusion
Investigators can consider the complex information problem from a political, legal, social, and ethical angle. It is necessary to combine these four approaches to see all the specifics and details of this problem. Otherwise, in the theoretical study and justification, an unfair and unlawful bias may occur in one direction, which, in turn, will ignore the others. Society and information do not develop in a vacuum; they are two dynamic and flexible constructs.
The political issue is that information at different levels can perform various functions. One of the leading state functions of information is ideology, which is constructed not only for the state and society itself but also for a specific geopolitical gesture, especially if a particular state plays an important and serious role in the geopolitical space. At the local level of the city government, the perception of this information may be completely different and may not reflect the global television trend. The nature of politics is a priori public; concealment of data from any strata of the population is absurd and profanity on those who decided to hide something.
The legal issue has undergone many changes over the past decades, and legal structures have become more flexible. This flexibility comes from the development of the Internet, which has influenced data protection and intellectual property laws. For a long time, information on the Internet was not regulated by law since it was impossible to apply previous developments to a new type of information accessibility. With the advent of the Internet, access to data has become fast and has allowed the anonymity of reading, commenting, and creating. The Internet made access to any information resource a personal matter of every citizen. As a rule, now friends, relatives, and neighbors do not often see (and cannot make it a subject of discussion) what kind of literature an individual buys and reads. Neighbors are not informed about what interests individuals have in magazines and what information requests: politics, embroidery, cosmetics, or motorcycles.
A social issue affects information in terms of its use by different social groups. Often these minorities were African Americans or women, and knowledge of all kinds served as mythology and justification for creating information isolation. In addition to mythology, the social aspect raises an essential topic of information isolation. African Americans were informationally isolated from most urban dwellers, and social traditions reinforced this isolation.
The ethical question is almost entirely constructed around the philosophical category of freedom. The right to information is one of the fundamental human rights, as it allows a person to fully represent the society around him and his role in it. Depriving a person of information is unfair and cruel, as it violates intellectual freedom. Intellectual freedom is considered the core of a modern person who can profess any religion and adhere to any political views.
Bibliography
Boyle, Kevin. “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory”. Journal of American History 84 (1997): 496-523.
Feather, John. Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change. Facet Publishing, 2017.
Richards, Neil. Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Robbins, Louise S. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.
Selby, Mike. Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South. Lanham: Row & Littlefield, 2019.
Footnotes
- Boyle, Kevin. “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory”. Journal of American History, no. 84 (1997): 496-523.
- Robbins, Louise S. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 66.
- Robbins, Louise S. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 156.
- Feather, John. Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change, (Facet Publishing, 2017), 71.
- Feather, 104.
- Boyle, Kevin. “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory”. Journal of American History, no. 84 (1997): 505.
- Richards, Neil. Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187.