The 20 Questions Game - The Journey to Personhood
Vol.1,No.1(2007)
Abstract
Pages:
p. 155–185
By the term “personality” is defined in law the most coherent quality of
empowered and protected subjectivity. As post-modernity features the division of
the individual self, utilising in addition the intervention of technological themes to
explore variants of activity and expression, contemporary legal science is
challenged, on frequent occasions, with assessing the parameters of subsequently
emerging trends and clearing the reshaped landscape by defining in its language
the characteristics of advancing practices. With all these in mind, and overwhelmed
by concepts of scattered identity as appearing within the ICTs context, we are
facing a new problem of potential fallacy: could permanent manifestations of the
person be accepted as extensions of the legally protected personality? Are e-mail
accounts, online game characters and others similar projections of the individual on
the information streamline, parts of the natural self that law enshrines or, simply,
an enthusiastically overrated deception? Taking into account instances of legal
persons contesting human rights in court and proprietary items being addressed
-for functional purposes- by national legislations as persons, we may imagine the
importance of granting personality rights or, at least, conceding to a limited
ground of thereupon set line of defence. Opposite to the growing overpopulation of
laws, which results in sluggish administration of justice, we need to reach to
conclusions while carefully dealing with the conflict between legal and societal
realism: the first calls for symmetry and prudence; the second demands for seeking
out to preserve the most threatened value in our age of advancing commercialism
and thin identity: the human individual.
empowered and protected subjectivity. As post-modernity features the division of
the individual self, utilising in addition the intervention of technological themes to
explore variants of activity and expression, contemporary legal science is
challenged, on frequent occasions, with assessing the parameters of subsequently
emerging trends and clearing the reshaped landscape by defining in its language
the characteristics of advancing practices. With all these in mind, and overwhelmed
by concepts of scattered identity as appearing within the ICTs context, we are
facing a new problem of potential fallacy: could permanent manifestations of the
person be accepted as extensions of the legally protected personality? Are e-mail
accounts, online game characters and others similar projections of the individual on
the information streamline, parts of the natural self that law enshrines or, simply,
an enthusiastically overrated deception? Taking into account instances of legal
persons contesting human rights in court and proprietary items being addressed
-for functional purposes- by national legislations as persons, we may imagine the
importance of granting personality rights or, at least, conceding to a limited
ground of thereupon set line of defence. Opposite to the growing overpopulation of
laws, which results in sluggish administration of justice, we need to reach to
conclusions while carefully dealing with the conflict between legal and societal
realism: the first calls for symmetry and prudence; the second demands for seeking
out to preserve the most threatened value in our age of advancing commercialism
and thin identity: the human individual.
p. 155–185
Copyright © 2014 Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology