A proxy culture

Luciano Floridi

pp. 487-490

in: Philosophy & Technology 28 (4), 2015.

Abstract

We do not check out a hotel personally; we rely on TripAdvisor. We may have never met a person, yet we are ‘friends’ on Facebook. We may press ‘like’ but engage only in some kind of slacktivism. It does not matter whether we haven’t got a clue about how to reach a place downtown, as long as we have access to Google Maps and follow the instructions. Five stars on Amazon may be sufficient to convince us of the quality of a product, even if we have never tried it ourselves. Being a ‘best seller’ in The New York Times Best Seller list is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.