The UO NetPhi website is an experiment in conceptualizing data technology, with all of its attendant perils and promises.  As data tech ushers in broad cultural, political, ethical, and epistemic changes at rapid velocities we find ourselves in need of new conceptual tools and intellectual instrumentalities for negotiating the worlds we are making and the selves we are becoming.  The central focus of Net Phi is accordingly the creation, analysis, and synthesis of concepts appropriate to informational cultures and internetworked milieus.

A UO Philosophy course, "The Internet, Society, & Philosophy" (PHIL 123), is the central hub for the ongoing regular work of the UO Net Phi experiment(s).  In PHIL 123 we currently explore key problem areas for inquiry in the present: privacy (concealment, confidence, secrecy), democracy (polarization, filtering, segmentation), and computational bias (discrimination, unfairness, and inequality). Other topics of exploration in past iterations of the course have included: property (ownership, intellectual property), personhood (identity, selfhood), and epistemology (trust, transparency).

In the context of the course, student collaboratories (=collaboration + laboratory) develop projects to address the social, cultural, moral, legal, political, and practical vacuums we find ourselves facing vis-a-vis the internet.  This website is mainly an archive for those projects.

UO Net Phi and PHIL 123 are currently managed by Prof. Colin Koopman of the UO Philosophy Department.  This original iteration project was made possible with the assistance of Nathan Pai Schmitt, Melissa Ruhl, Jher, UO Information Services, and generous funding by a Teaching Fellowship from the Oregon Humanities Center and a Williams Fund Grant from the Office of the President.