Ethics: What is the Research Scenario in the Brazilian Symposium WebMedia?

Abstract

In 1995, a year after the W3C Consortium opening, the first edition of the Workshop on Multimedia and Hypermedia Systems, currently WebMedia, took place. Brasil took this tram when it was still leaving the station. However, thirty years after the Web foundation stone was laid by Tim Berners-Lee, he presents harsh criticism of its consequences, uses, and applications. Such as misinformation, mass manipulation, immoral use and abuse of personal data, corporate monopoly, and threats to democracy. He followed and kept up to date on the Web’s ethical aspects. Did WebMedia also follow and keep up? How does ethics explicitly permeate WebMedia research published between 2005 and 2021? Through the methodology of Systematic Literature Review and guided by the main question, we seek to present a quantitative and qualitative overview of this topic based on papers published in the most prominent Brazilian symposium dedicated to the Web and Multimedia. Considering the results, and unlike Berners-Lee, members of the WebMedia community put aside the ethical aspects, whether applied to the Web or Multimedia ethics or research ethics, mainly focusing on technical aspects. As an area with profound intersectional potential wastes potential. Nevertheless, there is still time to recover. We discuss this result, offering interpretations containing further questions, concerns, and future work.