Transparency in the Digital Environment

Abstract

In this Editor’s Introduction to the CAL Special Issue on “Transparency in the Digital Environment,” I discuss some of its overarching themes and underlying concerns. I also present the eight articles that constitute this issue: What kinds of manifestations can transparency as an idea have in the digital environment? Transparency has proven to be a normatively attractive concept in ethical and legal debates of automated decision-making, data protection, platform governance, artificial intelligence, and so on. In many of them, the recurring worry is this: Who is accountable for the functioning of algorithmic systems? How can we know how these systems work? By way of an answer, transparency is often considered the solution. However, although we worry similarly about accountability in both analog and digital contexts, the latter poses technological, regulatory, and ethical challenges, which may not always find a perfect counterpart in the analog environment. I show how the articles in this special issue represent three different approaches to transparency: reformative, performative, and conceptual. I conclude that we should continue critical discussion on the big words that dominate the current debates of legitimacy in the digital environment.