8Note that copyright, which protects creative works, requires that the work be somehow fixed; that
is, made durable by being written down or recorded. Fixing a working means that the work has become
part of the material world as well as the intangible world of ideas. [cite Knowledge Power]
9
disseminate when it is transformed into a durable form: writing on a piece of paper or electronically
encoded bits on a digital storage device.8
[Figure 1 about here]
Agents also acquire information through direct observation of the world or indirectly (e.g., hearing
what someone else knows or downloading a file). The agent learns about the world by being in the world,
sensing the elements of environment and communicating with, empathizing with, and observing others.
Agents learn directly for their own experience or vicariously by watching or learning about the experiences
of others. Indirect acquisition of information is fundamentally a social activity because it requires an Other
from whom the information comes, either by accident, by choice, or by force. Computer-mediated
exchanges of data in the category of social interaction because, somewhere along the line, a human being
had to create the code, specify the content, and create the infrastructure for such exchanges to occur.
Moreover, the ultimate use of such information is only meaningful in as much as it is meaningful to a
human being (or a collectivity of human beings).
However, the practical difference between face-to-face interactions and computer-mediated ones
can lead to a false detachment of the observer from the observed. It is easy to realize that face-to-face
acquisition of information fundamentally involves an ethical stance. As Emmanuel Levinas argued, the
recognition of another human (a precondition for interaction) creates an ethical responsibility in the agent
toward the Other (Levinas 1996). The ethical responsibility would be to treat information concerning the
other with great care, not acquiring or using it in any way that would harm the other. By creating a
distance between the human agent and the human other, computer-mediated acquisition of information
Convention