A Philosophical Observatory of the Digital

     Even if we would watch obsessively the web, it would be ingenuous to believe that such a digital Observatory could run behind all fast changes which are announced daily, all important international conventions, all new social uses and commercial successes, all democratic challenges, all digital arts festivals or exhibitions. Such an encyclopaedic task would just sound utopia, and would request human and financial resources which would also be utopia. Even worse, we would take the risk to get lost in such an accumulation of details and blind to the most significant trends.
     We have made a better choice: a philosophical watch of the main evolutions of the digital era, industries and cultures, which computing experts and technology managers are not in an easy position to analyse with a critical distance, being inevitably fascinated by the sole technological logics. Even Polytechnics High School in Montreal, which counts plenty of programmers and engineers, has paradoxically recruited two philosophers likely to identify and analyse digital imaginaries, new social uses and emergent trends. This global approach, which takes in account sociological, psychological, ideological and cultural parameters, may sound most difficult in a fast changing environment, but it is therefore what we most lack.
Meteorology is not limited to take notice daily and locally of rains or winds. Its main aim is to understand the large tendencies and forecast the changes to come in a larger term. But meteorology limits itself to factual understanding, whereas philosophy of the digital doesn’t limit itself to technologies. It takes also in account another parameter, far more complex:  human behaviours and values in interaction with technological evolutions.

Hervé Fischer