Rethinking Responsibility in the Digital Age: A Narrative Approach

Abstract

Researchers, policymakers, and industry are increasingly aware of the urgent risks and threats arising in the digital age. Their awareness of this urgency has led to a rise of interest in responsibility. While this ‘turn to responsibility’ has been well-intentioned, an underappreciated problem is that the dominant, centuries-old view of responsibility is not up to this task – it is unable to make sense of the increasingly extended scope of responsibility in the digital age because it is mired in outdated assumptions about causality, agency, and human action. Inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, we show the benefits of rethinking responsibility as an ongoing process of becoming responsible—that is, becoming responsible by being imputed through the narrative emplotment of extended sociomaterial events. We illustrate the benefits of this conception for the digital age using vignettes from plagiarism detection, social media, and AI. The paper concludes by proposing a Ricoeur-inspired narrative topology of the multidimensional time-space of responsibility emplotment. The paper calls on the MIS community and society more broadly to draw on this topology to reflect on their imputations and take up responsibility, individually and collectively.