Narrative Ethics of Personalisation Technologies
Personalisation of digital content is becoming one of the major focus areas of contemporary research in human-computer interaction. Interactions between humans and computer systems such as information retrieval operations, digital learning and self-monito
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School of Computing, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland [email protected] 2 Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland [email protected] 3 School of Computer Science and Statistics, ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland [email protected]
Abstract. Personalisation of digital content is becoming one of the major focus areas of contemporary research in human-computer interaction. Interactions between humans and computer systems such as information retrieval operations, digital learning and self-monitoring are “tailored” to the needs of the human user. In this paper, we aim to increase our philosophical understanding of personali‐ sation and of its ethical implications. We utilise a framework of ethics of narrative technologies that is based on the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur to explicate how personalisation processes shape the person and interpersonal relations. We argue that personalisation processes can actively configure the narrative under‐ standing of a person they interact with – by which they can implicitly change or re-enforce a person’s normative worldview. Also, personalisation processes can abstract from the world of action by means of profiling – which can have signif‐ icant risks with regards to the consistency of a person’s character. Keywords: Personalisation · Ethics · Narrative technologies · Ricoeur
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Introduction
Computational processes become increasingly “close” to us: they interact with our bodies, movements and emotions and occupy a central place in our daily lives. In line with this development, “the person” has been brought to the centre of the research on design of computer systems. In the contemporary context of “Big Data” systems [1] and an increasing “information overload” on the web [2], it has become progressively impor‐ tant to get the right information in the right way to the right person at the right moment in time [3]. In marketing studies, this has led to questions such as how “to tailor electronic commerce interactions between a business and each individual customer” [4]. In computer science, it has led to improvements of methods for “user profiling”, “behaviour preference” and “personalised search engines and recommendation systems” [5]. Basi‐ cally, research in personalisation aims at adjusting digital content to the needs, prefer‐ ences, desires and whims of the person interacting with it.
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved D. Kreps et al. (Eds.): HCC12 2016, IFIP AICT 474, pp. 130–140, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44805-3_11
Narrative Ethics of Personalisation Technologies
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The process of personalisation invariably integrates underlying assumptions about what a person is and – more importantly – about what we can understand as the right information for the right person. It is an automated process of categorisation, and there‐ fore of inclusion and exclusion of both digital content
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