Human Rights for the Digital Age

Journal of Mass Media Ethics 29 (1):2-18 (2014)
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Abstract

Human rights are those legal and/or moral rights that all persons have simply as persons. In the current digital age, human rights are increasingly being either fulfilled or violated in the online environment. In this article, I provide a way of conceptualizing the relationships between human rights and information technology. I do so by pointing out a number of misunderstandings of human rights evident in Vinton Cerf's recent argument that there is no human right to the Internet. I claim that Cerf fails to recognize the existence of derived human rights. I argue further that we need to consider what other human rights are necessitated by the digital age. I suggest we need a Declaration of Digital Rights. As a step toward the development of such a declaration, I suggest a framework for thinking through how to ensure the human rights are satisfied in digital contexts.

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Author's Profile

Kay Mathiesen
Northeastern University

References found in this work

The law of peoples.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by John Rawls.
Taking rights seriously.Ronald Dworkin (ed.) - 1977 - London: Duckworth.
The Law of Peoples.John Rawls - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (203):246-253.
On human rights.James Griffin - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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