The speaker for this session is Professor James Connelly, Professor of Politics, School of Law and Politics and Director of the Institute of Applied Ethics, University of Hull.

Saying it as it is: Speech acts, context and tempered agency in a digital world

When is a tweet a tweet, when is it commentary, and when is it a political intervention? This was generally a rhetorical question until a year or so ago. Now it is not. What is the performative nature of digital acts in a digital world? How new is this? Have the distinctions between public and private been irrevocably shattered in the digital world we now share, whether wittingly or unwittingly? Speech is action: in certain contexts it always was, but we are currently catching up with what this means in a digital context. The nature and meaning of an action is sensitive to, and in part defined by, its context. In the past we were more certain than we can ever be in the present that there were clearly demarcated contexts, among them the public and the private, and we judged actions and utterances partly in accordance to their context because their context in turn tended to define their reach in the world. We no longer – or should not longer – think this. There are (and always were) many, various, fluid and overlapping distinctions between the public and the private; with the rise of digital technology there is an urgent need to extend our understanding of the complex nature of the relationship between the public and the private. From a discussion of the contested nature of the public and private, I argue that no hard and fast distinction between public and private is possible. I address individual responsibility and the nature of the speech act, in particular, its changing nature in cyber contexts and the many different layered and overlapping contexts of utterance and action.