Relatedness-technologies and the availability trap

Abstract The adoption of new technologies, especially those that affect interpersonal relationships, makes actions possible that were previously impossible to perform. However, with that ability to perform these new actions, new reasonable expectations and even moral duties can emerge. Relatedness-technologies, i.e., communicative technologies aimed at creating the feeling and experience of connection between people across distances, are one such example. These often (and often unintentionally) expand one’s moral duties towards others as they increase the range of our actions, by way of making us more available to others due to their always-on, always-online features. The adoption of such technology, thus, can make us morally duty-bound to be available. Ending the use of a given technology may, thus, come with a higher moral justification than beginning to use it. In this paper, we explore this phenomenon, which we dub the “availability trap”, and elaborate upon its ethical issues, closing with a proposal on how to decrease negative consequences of these technologies for interpersonal relationships.