The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics is not a handbook, but a voluminous twenty- seven piece anthology, which is devoted mostly to the intersection between information ethics and computer ethics, rather than to their union. Indeed, infor - mation ethics is (re)defined strangely here, in a way quite different from that envisioned by the field's principal founder and guiding light, Robert Hauptman. This is confirmed, first, by the Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data which has only one subject: Electronic Data Processing-Moral and ethical aspects, and, second, by the single most frequently occurring reference here being the journal Ethics and Information Technology.That having been noted, everything in the ethics of information and communications technology is covered here-and comprehensively. But this may be too much of a good thing, depending on the purpose of the enterprise: This reviewer's eyes blurred repeatedly at the barrage of names, acronyms, references, points, and counterpoints in essays which are almost all way too long to be digested easily in a single sitting. Moreover, familiarity with the issues involved-despite long definitional preludes before any ethical analysis starts-is presupposed. These factors make it hard for me to see how this book could be usefully adopted in the classroom. Additionally, at a U.S. retail sticker price of $140 (Books in Print), while not unusual for a hardcover book of this length, something over which the editors had no control, Wiley declined to send this journal a review copy. Because of time and space considerations, I will give detailed remarks on just nine of these essays, chosen by their title (which, if the old adage is right, is much the same as randomly). These include three of the more general and six of the more topical essays.First, the more general essays.Luciano Floridi on Information Ethics. Floridi introduces a tripartite explanatory model, treating information as a resource, a target, or a product of human and machine action, only to conclude correctly that the model is inadequate because it eliminates the complexity of interactions among these three intertwining roles of information. For example, when one lies to protect his privacy, one produces information to protect information as a resource and this may change others' information targets.He then veers to a discussion of entropy1 and ecology in the infosphere and "information objects," words taken from science and computing that, as I see it, contribute little to understanding the ethical issues. Floridi himself says that his discussion might be considered too philosophical in the worst sense; he may be right on that score, but I would characterize the final part of the discussion as scientistic2 in a way that good, precise analytic philosophy is not. If precision, logical analysis, and rigor aid in the understanding, well and good; if they obscure issues, the charge of scientism becomes palpable. The same
{"title":"The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics","authors":"J. S. Fulda","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-0931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0931","url":null,"abstract":"The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics is not a handbook, but a voluminous twenty- seven piece anthology, which is devoted mostly to the intersection between information ethics and computer ethics, rather than to their union. Indeed, infor - mation ethics is (re)defined strangely here, in a way quite different from that envisioned by the field's principal founder and guiding light, Robert Hauptman. This is confirmed, first, by the Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data which has only one subject: Electronic Data Processing-Moral and ethical aspects, and, second, by the single most frequently occurring reference here being the journal Ethics and Information Technology.That having been noted, everything in the ethics of information and communications technology is covered here-and comprehensively. But this may be too much of a good thing, depending on the purpose of the enterprise: This reviewer's eyes blurred repeatedly at the barrage of names, acronyms, references, points, and counterpoints in essays which are almost all way too long to be digested easily in a single sitting. Moreover, familiarity with the issues involved-despite long definitional preludes before any ethical analysis starts-is presupposed. These factors make it hard for me to see how this book could be usefully adopted in the classroom. Additionally, at a U.S. retail sticker price of $140 (Books in Print), while not unusual for a hardcover book of this length, something over which the editors had no control, Wiley declined to send this journal a review copy. Because of time and space considerations, I will give detailed remarks on just nine of these essays, chosen by their title (which, if the old adage is right, is much the same as randomly). These include three of the more general and six of the more topical essays.First, the more general essays.Luciano Floridi on Information Ethics. Floridi introduces a tripartite explanatory model, treating information as a resource, a target, or a product of human and machine action, only to conclude correctly that the model is inadequate because it eliminates the complexity of interactions among these three intertwining roles of information. For example, when one lies to protect his privacy, one produces information to protect information as a resource and this may change others' information targets.He then veers to a discussion of entropy1 and ecology in the infosphere and \"information objects,\" words taken from science and computing that, as I see it, contribute little to understanding the ethical issues. Floridi himself says that his discussion might be considered too philosophical in the worst sense; he may be right on that score, but I would characterize the final part of the discussion as scientistic2 in a way that good, precise analytic philosophy is not. If precision, logical analysis, and rigor aid in the understanding, well and good; if they obscure issues, the charge of scientism becomes palpable. The same ","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71122298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance Colin J. Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 259 pp. $28.00The author is no stranger to monographs on the topic of privacy either as solo author or as a co-author (most recently, a review of his Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective [2003] [written with Charles D. Raab] appeared in the Spring, 2008 issue of the Journal of Information Ethics [pp. 86-87]). Bennett (and at times with co-authors) has made consistent contributions to the literature on privacy. The latest offering, however, differs from his previous efforts, or others for that matter, in that instead of exploring some aspect of privacy rights, protection, invasion, etc., this book focuses on the "individuals and groups that have emerged from civil society" as privacy advocates not "those within the state or the market" nor those members of civil society who have self-identified as such advocates (p. iv). True to his training in political science, Bennett is interested in not only the "who" but the "how": how do these advocates identify problems, strategize, and mobilize responses, etc.? The "data" is drawn from observation, a documentary review of various sources, and thirty key informant interviews (the list of those interviewed appears in several places) with actors from North America, Europe, and Australia.The presentation proceeds logically as if it were an extended journal article or dissertation but it was in fact funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The first chapter identifies the research problem while subsequent chapters discuss the advocacy groups and the contrasting following chapters cover the actors as individuals. The strategies both groups and actors have developed and case studies or "key conflicts" constitute the next two chapters; discussion of how these advocates have formed social networks and whether privacy might in the future become a social movement conclude the seven chapters of the book. A list of the deceptively simple interview questions is included in an appendix. As is typical of the author's work, a detailed bibliography of the relevant literature appears but it also includes, as would be expected given the task at hand, numerous references to popular and news sources that help identify the "key conflicts" and advocacy responses as reported in the mass media.The surveillance grid or typology offered in the first chapter is very useful as is the overview that accompanies it; it is concise, to-the-point, yet referential to selected prior work. Bennett recognizes that to some extent he is studying himself here since he admits that he is a privacy advocate, a "perennial" scholar. Bennett offers a taxonomy of actor categories: activists, researchers, consultants, technologists, journalists, and artists. The exposition offers a refreshing view of the all-too-familiar strands of privacy problems by providing perspectives dr
{"title":"The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance","authors":"T. Lipinski","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-5880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-5880","url":null,"abstract":"The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance Colin J. Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 259 pp. $28.00The author is no stranger to monographs on the topic of privacy either as solo author or as a co-author (most recently, a review of his Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective [2003] [written with Charles D. Raab] appeared in the Spring, 2008 issue of the Journal of Information Ethics [pp. 86-87]). Bennett (and at times with co-authors) has made consistent contributions to the literature on privacy. The latest offering, however, differs from his previous efforts, or others for that matter, in that instead of exploring some aspect of privacy rights, protection, invasion, etc., this book focuses on the \"individuals and groups that have emerged from civil society\" as privacy advocates not \"those within the state or the market\" nor those members of civil society who have self-identified as such advocates (p. iv). True to his training in political science, Bennett is interested in not only the \"who\" but the \"how\": how do these advocates identify problems, strategize, and mobilize responses, etc.? The \"data\" is drawn from observation, a documentary review of various sources, and thirty key informant interviews (the list of those interviewed appears in several places) with actors from North America, Europe, and Australia.The presentation proceeds logically as if it were an extended journal article or dissertation but it was in fact funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The first chapter identifies the research problem while subsequent chapters discuss the advocacy groups and the contrasting following chapters cover the actors as individuals. The strategies both groups and actors have developed and case studies or \"key conflicts\" constitute the next two chapters; discussion of how these advocates have formed social networks and whether privacy might in the future become a social movement conclude the seven chapters of the book. A list of the deceptively simple interview questions is included in an appendix. As is typical of the author's work, a detailed bibliography of the relevant literature appears but it also includes, as would be expected given the task at hand, numerous references to popular and news sources that help identify the \"key conflicts\" and advocacy responses as reported in the mass media.The surveillance grid or typology offered in the first chapter is very useful as is the overview that accompanies it; it is concise, to-the-point, yet referential to selected prior work. Bennett recognizes that to some extent he is studying himself here since he admits that he is a privacy advocate, a \"perennial\" scholar. Bennett offers a taxonomy of actor categories: activists, researchers, consultants, technologists, journalists, and artists. The exposition offers a refreshing view of the all-too-familiar strands of privacy problems by providing perspectives dr","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71124800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the opening of his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, the French philosopher Alain Badiou (2001, p.1) remarks that "Certain scholarly words, after long confinement in dictionaries and in academic prose, have the good fortune, or the misfortune ... of sudden exposure to the bright light of day," unexpectedly catapulting such words to "centre stage." Ethics, Badiou contends, is undoubtedly one such word. And although we wish to resist the banal and tiresome process of academic list- making, the word information indubitably and unequivocally belongs next to ethics in and under the spotlight of post- modernity. Of course, Badiou plucks "ethics" from the darkness of philosophical obscurity only in order to show how the post- modern obsession with ethics simply reflects and reinforces "the logic of a capitalist economy" (2001, p.4). Similarly, the current essay attempts to rescue "information" from those who would reduce its essential contestability to so many "semantic quirks" (Machlup 1983, p.641). In so doing, it attempts to make explicit the proposition put forth by Robbins and Webster (1988, p.70) that "information is not a thing, an entity; it is a social relation, and in contemporary capitalist societies it expresses the characteristic and prevailing relations of power." And so, despite the many recent attempts at theoretical illumination the only point that seems to have been clarified is the essential contestability of both these concepts. Yet taken together, especially in Library and Information Science (LIS), information ethics is understood in a very general sense to be a self- verifying good and as such something that must be unquestionably defended, supported and promoted.The purpose of this essay therefore is to highlight the manifold limitations of information ethics in the specific context of Library and Information Science (LIS). In particular, we wish to suggest that in a world characterized by the commodity form of information an ethics of information is at once both imperative and impossible. This impossibility and this necessity originate from the very same source: capital-the definite social relation by which the means of production are transformed into the means of exploitation. Although information ethics is purported to analyze the "relationship between the creation, organization, dissemination and use of information and the ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct" (Reitz 2004, p.356) this has not led, on the whole, to any sustained process of consideration of the social meaning of the production and commodification of information. While there have been a smattering of exemplary and engaging critiques (Frohmann 2004; Stiglitz 2000; Schiller 1997; Enright 2008) dealing with the implications flowing from the generalization of the commodification of information, very few attempts have been made to comprehend the impetus that underpins the ceaseless movement toward ever more commodification. That i
法国哲学家阿兰·巴迪欧(Alain Badiou, 2001, p.1)在他的《伦理学:一篇关于理解恶的文章》(Ethics: An Essay on Understanding of Evil)的开篇中评论道:“某些学术词汇，在词典和学术散文中被长期禁锢之后，要么幸运，要么不幸……突然暴露在明亮的日光下，”意外地将这些词弹射到“中心舞台”。巴迪欧认为，道德无疑就是这样一个词。尽管我们希望抵制学术榜单的陈腐和令人厌烦的过程，但信息这个词无疑和毫不含糊地属于后现代性的聚光灯下的伦理学。当然，巴迪欧将“伦理学”从哲学的黑暗中拔出来，只是为了展示后现代对伦理学的痴迷如何简单地反映和强化“资本主义经济的逻辑”(2001年，第4页)。同样，当前的文章试图从那些将“信息”本质上的可争议性降低到如此多的“语义怪癖”的人那里拯救“信息”(Machlup 1983, p.641)。通过这样做，它试图明确罗宾斯和韦伯斯特(1988，第70页)提出的命题，即“信息不是一个东西，一个实体;它是一种社会关系，在当代资本主义社会中，它表达了权力关系的特征和主流。”因此，尽管最近有许多理论解释的尝试，但似乎唯一被澄清的一点是，这两个概念的基本可争议性。然而，总的来说，特别是在图书馆和信息科学(LIS)，信息伦理被理解为一个非常普遍的意义上的自我验证的好，这样的东西必须毫无疑问地捍卫，支持和促进。因此，本文的目的是强调在图书馆情报学的特定背景下，信息伦理的多方面局限性。我们特别要指出，在一个以信息的商品形式为特征的世界里，信息伦理既是必要的，又是不可能的。这种不可能性和这种必然性都是出于同一个根源，即资本，即生产资料借以转化为剥削资料的一定的社会关系。虽然信息伦理学旨在分析“信息的创造、组织、传播和使用与管理人类行为的伦理标准和道德规范之间的关系”(Reitz 2004，第356页)，但总体而言，这并没有导致对信息生产和商品化的社会意义的任何持续考虑过程。虽然有一些典型的和引人入胜的批评(Frohmann 2004;斯蒂格利茨(joseph Stiglitz) 2000;席勒1997;Enright 2008)处理信息商品化普遍化的影响，很少有人尝试去理解支撑不断走向商品化的动力。也就是说，商品形式本身倾向于被毫无疑问地视为一个预先给定的类别，似乎从哪里出现的。因此，对于那些认为自己是“批判性图书馆员”的人来说，有一种倾向是把“信息伦理”的出现，甚至是分析的优先级，简单地当作一种给定的东西，作为任何适当激进理论的起点。在这里，我们很想重申斯塔尔(2008，第348页)批评的一部分，因为他认为信息伦理可以导致“辩论的结束和意义和理解的具体化”，但我们当然可以断言，在抵制“信息伦理”的过程中，或者至少是将“信息伦理”问题化的过程中，我们没有看到任何回归到“中立性”的过程，而信息伦理是一种批判，甚至是必要的批判(Hauptman 1988)。虽然接受“信息”的含义似乎也没有用，例如，从产生其存在的特定资本主义社会关系中抽象存在的“信息”版本，政治史的反生产版本，因为它需要将政治和理论标准分解为几乎道德化的简单性的划分和分类。…
{"title":"You Can't Polish a Pumpkin: Scattered Speculations on the Development of Information Ethics","authors":"Nathaniel F. Enright","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.103","url":null,"abstract":"In the opening of his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, the French philosopher Alain Badiou (2001, p.1) remarks that \"Certain scholarly words, after long confinement in dictionaries and in academic prose, have the good fortune, or the misfortune ... of sudden exposure to the bright light of day,\" unexpectedly catapulting such words to \"centre stage.\" Ethics, Badiou contends, is undoubtedly one such word. And although we wish to resist the banal and tiresome process of academic list- making, the word information indubitably and unequivocally belongs next to ethics in and under the spotlight of post- modernity. Of course, Badiou plucks \"ethics\" from the darkness of philosophical obscurity only in order to show how the post- modern obsession with ethics simply reflects and reinforces \"the logic of a capitalist economy\" (2001, p.4). Similarly, the current essay attempts to rescue \"information\" from those who would reduce its essential contestability to so many \"semantic quirks\" (Machlup 1983, p.641). In so doing, it attempts to make explicit the proposition put forth by Robbins and Webster (1988, p.70) that \"information is not a thing, an entity; it is a social relation, and in contemporary capitalist societies it expresses the characteristic and prevailing relations of power.\" And so, despite the many recent attempts at theoretical illumination the only point that seems to have been clarified is the essential contestability of both these concepts. Yet taken together, especially in Library and Information Science (LIS), information ethics is understood in a very general sense to be a self- verifying good and as such something that must be unquestionably defended, supported and promoted.The purpose of this essay therefore is to highlight the manifold limitations of information ethics in the specific context of Library and Information Science (LIS). In particular, we wish to suggest that in a world characterized by the commodity form of information an ethics of information is at once both imperative and impossible. This impossibility and this necessity originate from the very same source: capital-the definite social relation by which the means of production are transformed into the means of exploitation. Although information ethics is purported to analyze the \"relationship between the creation, organization, dissemination and use of information and the ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct\" (Reitz 2004, p.356) this has not led, on the whole, to any sustained process of consideration of the social meaning of the production and commodification of information. While there have been a smattering of exemplary and engaging critiques (Frohmann 2004; Stiglitz 2000; Schiller 1997; Enright 2008) dealing with the implications flowing from the generalization of the commodification of information, very few attempts have been made to comprehend the impetus that underpins the ceaseless movement toward ever more commodification. That i","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"103-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IntroductionPolitical information, like much of what is comprehended as information, today, is often understood in a rather passive sense of being expressions that are consulted for understanding. This is a liberalist view that sees persons as choosers and consumers of information. In this article, we would like to go beyond this epistemology and discuss information from an expressive viewpoint, namely, that of an agent's expressive actions in relation to the State. Our discussion will pass through the topics of ideology, States of exception and States of emergency, and the distinctions between morals and ethics, law and justice. Far from being passive or synonymous with "facts," information will be understood as expressions by agents, both institutional and personal. Our final discussion in this article will be in regard to the writings of the political theorist and activist Antonio Negri in the context of his imprisonment and trial on terror charges from 1979 to 1983 (the writings issue from 1983-the year in which his case actually began to be tried). Here, we will suggest the dissonance between States and social movements as expressive agents and forces. Here we will see the denial of the ethical by the moral, justice by legal right, and the denial of a more open future for a nation by classes that control a State.Today, these topics could not be more timely. "Intellectual Freedom" and "Freedom of information" form core value for the Western library tradition, but as I write this the Library of Congress, as well as all other United States government agencies, have been forbidden by the federal government to allow access to U.S. diplomatic dispatches or "cables" made public by an internet organization named Wikileaks. As I write this, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been under legal threat by the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and several leading politicians in the U.S. have urged his arrest and trial for treason (despite his being an Australian citizen), with several other leading political and media figures also calling for his assassination as a "terrorist." The Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, on December 19, 2010, referred to Assange on a popular Sunday news program as a "hi- tech terrorist"1 and the commercial media has largely continued this view of Assange, echoing the dominant government line. The accused leaker of this material, a U.S. Army private, Bradley Manning, has been held for over seven months at the time of this writing in harsh solitary confinement without trial or conviction. Further, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, on December 7, 2010, said that the U.S. Justice Department should extend the investigation of these leaks to the New York Times, which published reports based on the Wikileaks releases.2 While the press coverage of the contents of the leaks has been relatively sparse in the U.S. press, European and other worl
{"title":"From Advocates to Terrorists: Ideology, the State of Exception and the State of Emergency, and Political Ethics","authors":"R. Day","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.65","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.65","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionPolitical information, like much of what is comprehended as information, today, is often understood in a rather passive sense of being expressions that are consulted for understanding. This is a liberalist view that sees persons as choosers and consumers of information. In this article, we would like to go beyond this epistemology and discuss information from an expressive viewpoint, namely, that of an agent's expressive actions in relation to the State. Our discussion will pass through the topics of ideology, States of exception and States of emergency, and the distinctions between morals and ethics, law and justice. Far from being passive or synonymous with \"facts,\" information will be understood as expressions by agents, both institutional and personal. Our final discussion in this article will be in regard to the writings of the political theorist and activist Antonio Negri in the context of his imprisonment and trial on terror charges from 1979 to 1983 (the writings issue from 1983-the year in which his case actually began to be tried). Here, we will suggest the dissonance between States and social movements as expressive agents and forces. Here we will see the denial of the ethical by the moral, justice by legal right, and the denial of a more open future for a nation by classes that control a State.Today, these topics could not be more timely. \"Intellectual Freedom\" and \"Freedom of information\" form core value for the Western library tradition, but as I write this the Library of Congress, as well as all other United States government agencies, have been forbidden by the federal government to allow access to U.S. diplomatic dispatches or \"cables\" made public by an internet organization named Wikileaks. As I write this, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been under legal threat by the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and several leading politicians in the U.S. have urged his arrest and trial for treason (despite his being an Australian citizen), with several other leading political and media figures also calling for his assassination as a \"terrorist.\" The Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, on December 19, 2010, referred to Assange on a popular Sunday news program as a \"hi- tech terrorist\"1 and the commercial media has largely continued this view of Assange, echoing the dominant government line. The accused leaker of this material, a U.S. Army private, Bradley Manning, has been held for over seven months at the time of this writing in harsh solitary confinement without trial or conviction. Further, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, on December 7, 2010, said that the U.S. Justice Department should extend the investigation of these leaks to the New York Times, which published reports based on the Wikileaks releases.2 While the press coverage of the contents of the leaks has been relatively sparse in the U.S. press, European and other worl","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"65-84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69756079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
These days in my encore career as a hospice chaplain, I have the satisfaction of using my knowledge of information ethics in amazing new ways. As one of the pioneers in our field, I look back on the issues we tackled prior to becoming main stream and I am grateful to be able to continue my involvement in critical issues surrounding death and dying as professional, pastor, and a participant observer. In the world of health care and hospice, the stakes are high and decisions about life and death require careful use of information and information technologies. I often think of the model I presented in 1992 to detail the scope of information ethics and am pleased at how well it covers the significant issues I think about in my work today providing support for families before and after loss. My work is personal as well as professional with real people, death, grief, change, and hope. Information use and education is a huge part of what hospice provides patients and families in making the best choices in tough situations.The Scope of Information Ethics: The BeginningsWhen I began to think about information ethics in the late eighties, the closest field for comparison was computer ethics. The scope I had in mind was larger and included not only what was then called "information" but also the world of knowledge including the philosophy of knowledge. While exploring the philosophy of knowledge, I found the fields of philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science. Needing to attempt something, I started with five working categories to try on others. They were: Access, Ownership, Privacy, Security, and Community. They fit nicely in a star shape and provided a visual image to stimulate discussion.The five can be placed on the star in a variety of places and various comparisons can be made among them. Each one of the five highlights a key element uniting a wide variety of issues, problems, and dilemmas in the years since I first described it as a place to begin for the scope of information ethics and continues to be useful in my hospice work.Information is so very powerful in matters of patient care, family/caregiver education, government regulations, and public policy. Balancing patient autonomy and family responsibilities is not simple. Choosing hospice or palliative care rather than active treatment is a decision more gray than black or white. New drugs and treatments become available, as technologies and laws change quickly. Valuing both patient autonomy and family or physician decisionmaking get complicated by the need to prepare advanced directives and then to maintain informed consent at every step as the patient declines. My involvement now is close to the people who need good information and help using it under pressure. Having a very different angle from which to view information ethics issues and how much they matter to people in their last months is extremely rewarding. In this brief reflection, I hope to offer some insights from the early
{"title":"The Beginnings of Information Ethics: Reflections on Memory and Meaning","authors":"M. M. Smith","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.15","url":null,"abstract":"These days in my encore career as a hospice chaplain, I have the satisfaction of using my knowledge of information ethics in amazing new ways. As one of the pioneers in our field, I look back on the issues we tackled prior to becoming main stream and I am grateful to be able to continue my involvement in critical issues surrounding death and dying as professional, pastor, and a participant observer. In the world of health care and hospice, the stakes are high and decisions about life and death require careful use of information and information technologies. I often think of the model I presented in 1992 to detail the scope of information ethics and am pleased at how well it covers the significant issues I think about in my work today providing support for families before and after loss. My work is personal as well as professional with real people, death, grief, change, and hope. Information use and education is a huge part of what hospice provides patients and families in making the best choices in tough situations.The Scope of Information Ethics: The BeginningsWhen I began to think about information ethics in the late eighties, the closest field for comparison was computer ethics. The scope I had in mind was larger and included not only what was then called \"information\" but also the world of knowledge including the philosophy of knowledge. While exploring the philosophy of knowledge, I found the fields of philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science. Needing to attempt something, I started with five working categories to try on others. They were: Access, Ownership, Privacy, Security, and Community. They fit nicely in a star shape and provided a visual image to stimulate discussion.The five can be placed on the star in a variety of places and various comparisons can be made among them. Each one of the five highlights a key element uniting a wide variety of issues, problems, and dilemmas in the years since I first described it as a place to begin for the scope of information ethics and continues to be useful in my hospice work.Information is so very powerful in matters of patient care, family/caregiver education, government regulations, and public policy. Balancing patient autonomy and family responsibilities is not simple. Choosing hospice or palliative care rather than active treatment is a decision more gray than black or white. New drugs and treatments become available, as technologies and laws change quickly. Valuing both patient autonomy and family or physician decisionmaking get complicated by the need to prepare advanced directives and then to maintain informed consent at every step as the patient declines. My involvement now is close to the people who need good information and help using it under pressure. Having a very different angle from which to view information ethics issues and how much they matter to people in their last months is extremely rewarding. In this brief reflection, I hope to offer some insights from the early","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"15-24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
[T]he power relations that characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to them imply.- Gordon, 1997, p. 3While librarians are strongly encouraged to "offer materials from a variety of identity perspectives" (J. Taylor) to make library collections more welcoming to transgender people, the same level of attention is not always applied to terminology used to describe transgender- related topics, and even trans- people themselves. Is it possible for librarians to use controlled vocabulary to accurately describe people's lives? What pieces of identity are leftbehind? In traditional library cataloging models, hierarchical taxonomic and classification structures are used to describe pieces of information. These schemas are lacking in any sort of mechanism to acknowledge people's sometimes amorphous and often fluid identities. This paper will specifically address Library of Congress-based cataloging practices, including classification, and their role in enforcing normative boundaries for queer sexualities and gender. Through the use of inaccurate language in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and problematic classification schemes, catalogers often unwittingly contribute to the creation of library environments that are passively hostile to transgender users.The idea that Library of Congress subject headings do a poor job of codifying reality is not new. Sanford Berman first addressed this issue in the late 1960s. He wrote, in Prejudices and Antipathies:[...] the LC list can only "satisfy" parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white- hued, at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant) in faith, comfortably situated in the middle- and higher- income brackets, largely domiciled in suburbia, fundamentally loyal to the Established Order, and heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable glory of Western civilization (3).He is far from alone in this sentiment; in their 2001 analysis, Hope Olson and Rose Schegl found 68 works discussing negative bias in LCSH. Many of these works were critical of the way the Library of Congress (LC) provides access to materials about women, African studies, people with disabilities, and LGBT people (Olson and Schegl 61). This paper focuses on the latter.Queers or Sexual Minorities?It is simultaneously essential and impossible to extricate transgender identities from lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities; queer- identified transgender people certainly exist, though LGBTQ advocacy work has not always been inclusive of both sexual and gender diversity. As mainstream gay and lesbian groups in the 1950s and 1960s began presenting as "normally" as possible in order to gain widespread acceptance, transgender identities were often considered deviant and misaligned with the groups' goals (Stryker 151). In other decades, such as the 1970s and 1990s, transgender and queer activists often aligned in the hopes of creating "an imagined politic
{"title":"Inflexible Bodies: Metadata for Transgender Identities *","authors":"K. Roberto","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.56","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.56","url":null,"abstract":"[T]he power relations that characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to them imply.- Gordon, 1997, p. 3While librarians are strongly encouraged to \"offer materials from a variety of identity perspectives\" (J. Taylor) to make library collections more welcoming to transgender people, the same level of attention is not always applied to terminology used to describe transgender- related topics, and even trans- people themselves. Is it possible for librarians to use controlled vocabulary to accurately describe people's lives? What pieces of identity are leftbehind? In traditional library cataloging models, hierarchical taxonomic and classification structures are used to describe pieces of information. These schemas are lacking in any sort of mechanism to acknowledge people's sometimes amorphous and often fluid identities. This paper will specifically address Library of Congress-based cataloging practices, including classification, and their role in enforcing normative boundaries for queer sexualities and gender. Through the use of inaccurate language in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and problematic classification schemes, catalogers often unwittingly contribute to the creation of library environments that are passively hostile to transgender users.The idea that Library of Congress subject headings do a poor job of codifying reality is not new. Sanford Berman first addressed this issue in the late 1960s. He wrote, in Prejudices and Antipathies:[...] the LC list can only \"satisfy\" parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white- hued, at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant) in faith, comfortably situated in the middle- and higher- income brackets, largely domiciled in suburbia, fundamentally loyal to the Established Order, and heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable glory of Western civilization (3).He is far from alone in this sentiment; in their 2001 analysis, Hope Olson and Rose Schegl found 68 works discussing negative bias in LCSH. Many of these works were critical of the way the Library of Congress (LC) provides access to materials about women, African studies, people with disabilities, and LGBT people (Olson and Schegl 61). This paper focuses on the latter.Queers or Sexual Minorities?It is simultaneously essential and impossible to extricate transgender identities from lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities; queer- identified transgender people certainly exist, though LGBTQ advocacy work has not always been inclusive of both sexual and gender diversity. As mainstream gay and lesbian groups in the 1950s and 1960s began presenting as \"normally\" as possible in order to gain widespread acceptance, transgender identities were often considered deviant and misaligned with the groups' goals (Stryker 151). In other decades, such as the 1970s and 1990s, transgender and queer activists often aligned in the hopes of creating \"an imagined politic","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"56-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IntroductionAccess to government issued identity documentation (ID) is not readily available for all Canadians. Trans- identified Canadians1 are one particular group that has a significant amount of difficultly accessing ID. The ramifications of the barriers to obtaining ID are significant and far reaching; and for transidentified people, can function as a justification for other forms of exclusion and violence based in transphobia. Transphobia consists of actions, behaviors or beliefs that are driven by an understanding (consciously or not) of the trans-body as less real than the non- trans body (Prosser, 1998). These actions, behaviors and beliefs function as forms of violence, whether explicit or implicit, intentional or otherwise, that are often thought to stem from fear. "Common sense" assumptions about gender-that everyone identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth and that norms of masculinity and femininity naturally follow these birth assignments-are used to justify transphobia in the form of stigmatization, discrimination, and various types of violence (Spade, 2008). Thinking about transphobia in this way, it is easy to see that policies that enact barriers to ID access for trans- people are an excellent example of institutional transphobia.Barriers to ID access for trans- people in Canada occur in a myriad of ways, and this article will look specifically at access issues in relation to passports. As trans legal scholar Dean Spade (2008, p. 749) notes: "the literature has thus far failed to look at the range of administrative gender reclassification policies and practices-including birth certificates, DMV policies, policies of sex- segregated facilities, and federal identity document policies-side by side, which has meant that the significance of the incoherence of these policies as a group has been obscured." This article will not go so far as to attempt such a lofty endeavor; however, through an examination of the barriers to information regarding gender reclassification, this article offers a different trajectory towards a similar goal. While the significance of these incoherencies is incredibly important, so too are the erasures of gender reclassification policies that occur through the lack of access to information regarding them, and the impact these erasures have on the interconnected government policies that affect trans- people (such as access to ID, placement in sex- segregated facilities, and access to healthcare). Moreover, these erasures perform a significantly more important function than simply an extension of institutional transphobia; they also function to naturalize and reify "common sense" assumptions about gender that underpin both the policies and transphobia, as well as various forms of misogyny.Through a consideration of the relationship between legal discourses and citizenship discourses as they relate to the transsexed body and the passport, this article undermines the commonsensical assumptions that unde
{"title":"A Passport to Trouble: Bureaucratic Incompetence as Censorship","authors":"Lane R. Mandlis","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.85","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionAccess to government issued identity documentation (ID) is not readily available for all Canadians. Trans- identified Canadians1 are one particular group that has a significant amount of difficultly accessing ID. The ramifications of the barriers to obtaining ID are significant and far reaching; and for transidentified people, can function as a justification for other forms of exclusion and violence based in transphobia. Transphobia consists of actions, behaviors or beliefs that are driven by an understanding (consciously or not) of the trans-body as less real than the non- trans body (Prosser, 1998). These actions, behaviors and beliefs function as forms of violence, whether explicit or implicit, intentional or otherwise, that are often thought to stem from fear. \"Common sense\" assumptions about gender-that everyone identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth and that norms of masculinity and femininity naturally follow these birth assignments-are used to justify transphobia in the form of stigmatization, discrimination, and various types of violence (Spade, 2008). Thinking about transphobia in this way, it is easy to see that policies that enact barriers to ID access for trans- people are an excellent example of institutional transphobia.Barriers to ID access for trans- people in Canada occur in a myriad of ways, and this article will look specifically at access issues in relation to passports. As trans legal scholar Dean Spade (2008, p. 749) notes: \"the literature has thus far failed to look at the range of administrative gender reclassification policies and practices-including birth certificates, DMV policies, policies of sex- segregated facilities, and federal identity document policies-side by side, which has meant that the significance of the incoherence of these policies as a group has been obscured.\" This article will not go so far as to attempt such a lofty endeavor; however, through an examination of the barriers to information regarding gender reclassification, this article offers a different trajectory towards a similar goal. While the significance of these incoherencies is incredibly important, so too are the erasures of gender reclassification policies that occur through the lack of access to information regarding them, and the impact these erasures have on the interconnected government policies that affect trans- people (such as access to ID, placement in sex- segregated facilities, and access to healthcare). Moreover, these erasures perform a significantly more important function than simply an extension of institutional transphobia; they also function to naturalize and reify \"common sense\" assumptions about gender that underpin both the policies and transphobia, as well as various forms of misogyny.Through a consideration of the relationship between legal discourses and citizenship discourses as they relate to the transsexed body and the passport, this article undermines the commonsensical assumptions that unde","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"85-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69756033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)Ethics, or moral philosophy, derived from ethos, is the principle, character, and behavior of knowing and doing what is right and just. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty" and "the rules of conduct recognized in certain associations," professional ethical responsibilities have long been expected of many professions including teaching, medicine, finance, and law, yet formal ethical standards for library and information professionals have only recently, relative to the age of the profession, been considered, developed, and published.Information ethics in library and information science, a term first expressed in 1988 (Hauptman, 1988, p. 3; Capurro, 1998), refers to the "production, dissemination, storage, retrieval, security and application of information within an ethical context" (Hauptman, 2002, p. 121). The ethical and moral obligations, challenges and conflicts which may result when people, information, and facilitators (i.e., librarians) interact, demonstrate the need for ethical standards to guide the facilitator, and indeed to ensure the optimal conditions for information to be created, used, and preserved. They are statements to guide and define ideals and standards of librarianship in the particular societal contexts in which they are formulated.Yet, information ethics standards must first be governed by national, federal, and local laws, covering aspects such as labor standards (what is a librarian required to do, or to not do?), technology (what technology can be used/ accessed, and how, especially at the tax-payers' expense?), information laws (what limits have been placed on access to information about potentially controversial subjects?), audience (who may or may not access a library's services and why? and how (or is) the privacy of the user ensured?). The American Library Association (ALA) Library Bill of Rights, for example, provides an ideal statement of principles, and refines those principles to refer specifically to intellectual freedom in the Code of Ethics; however, any conflicts, challenges or obligation in ensuring those standards and ideals would be governed by American law, making the code unenforceable (Wiegand, 1996, p. 84) at the professional level, and thus remaining hopeful ideals. The importance of recognizing ethical standards is not in question, yet the need for often unenforceable codes must be examined; why are formal codes necessary, what makes a code effective, and how can rhetoric, rights, responsibility, and reality be reconciled in the context of information ethics in library and information science?The ALA Code of Ethics includes the following in its short preamble: "...we recognize the importance of codifying and making known to the profession and to the general public th
如果没有做正确的事情的意愿，即使是最理性的伦理方法也是毫无防备的。-亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴(1918-2008)伦理，或道德哲学，源于精神，是认识和做正确和公正的原则、性格和行为。牛津英语词典将其定义为“道德科学;作为研究“人类责任原则”和“某些协会认可的行为准则”的部门，职业道德责任长期以来一直被期望包括教学、医学、金融和法律在内的许多职业，然而，图书馆和信息专业人员的正式道德标准直到最近才被考虑、制定和出版，这与该职业的年龄有关。图书馆情报学中的信息伦理，这一术语于1988年首次提出(Hauptman, 1988, p. 3;Capurro, 1998)，指的是“在伦理背景下信息的生产、传播、存储、检索、安全和应用”(Hauptman, 2002, p. 121)。当人、信息和促进者(即图书馆员)相互作用时，可能产生的伦理和道德义务、挑战和冲突表明，需要道德标准来指导促进者，并确保信息被创造、使用和保存的最佳条件。它们是在特定的社会背景下指导和定义图书馆事业理想和标准的声明。然而，信息伦理标准必须首先受到国家、联邦和地方法律的约束，涵盖诸如劳动标准(图书管理员需要做什么，不需要做什么?)、技术(什么技术可以使用/访问，以及如何使用，特别是在纳税人的费用下?)、信息法律(对可能有争议的主题的信息访问设置了什么限制?)、受众(谁可以或不可以访问图书馆的服务，以及为什么?)以及如何(或如何)确保用户的隐私?例如，美国图书馆协会(ALA)的《图书馆权利法案》提供了一个理想的原则声明，并对这些原则进行了提炼，使其在《道德守则》中特别提到知识自由;然而，在确保这些标准和理想的过程中，任何冲突、挑战或义务都将受到美国法律的管辖，这使得守则在专业层面上无法执行(Wiegand, 1996, p. 84)，因此仍然是有希望的理想。承认道德标准的重要性是毋庸置疑的，但必须审查通常无法执行的守则的必要性;为什么正式规范是必要的，什么使规范有效，如何在图书馆和信息科学的信息伦理背景下协调修辞、权利、责任和现实?美国ALA道德准则在其简短的序言中包括以下内容:“……我们认识到将指导图书馆员工作的道德原则编纂成文，并使之为专业人士和公众所知的重要性……”;图书馆和信息专业人员能否超越原则上的道德理想，有意识地应用和实施?许多国家图书馆/图书馆员协会的正式道德准则涉及国家章程、宪法或类似文件，有时直接或间接涉及全球人权，有些特别涉及《世界人权宣言》(UDHR)的内容。虽然《世界人权宣言》也没有法律约束力，但可以用来在道德或政治上影响违反宣言原则的国家、民族、领导人或政府，尽管文件的语言是主观的。道德准则是否应该以《世界人权宣言》为基础，即使它没有法律权威?一个代码可以适用于所有的信息(鲍德温，1996)，无论技术或格式?代码能否适应未知的隐私或安全问题(Moor, 2005)?代码是否可以出于某种原因排除任何人?…
{"title":"Global Information Ethics in LIS: An Examination of Select National Library Association English- Language Codes of Ethics","authors":"Jane Robertson Zaïane","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.25","url":null,"abstract":"Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)Ethics, or moral philosophy, derived from ethos, is the principle, character, and behavior of knowing and doing what is right and just. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as \"the science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty\" and \"the rules of conduct recognized in certain associations,\" professional ethical responsibilities have long been expected of many professions including teaching, medicine, finance, and law, yet formal ethical standards for library and information professionals have only recently, relative to the age of the profession, been considered, developed, and published.Information ethics in library and information science, a term first expressed in 1988 (Hauptman, 1988, p. 3; Capurro, 1998), refers to the \"production, dissemination, storage, retrieval, security and application of information within an ethical context\" (Hauptman, 2002, p. 121). The ethical and moral obligations, challenges and conflicts which may result when people, information, and facilitators (i.e., librarians) interact, demonstrate the need for ethical standards to guide the facilitator, and indeed to ensure the optimal conditions for information to be created, used, and preserved. They are statements to guide and define ideals and standards of librarianship in the particular societal contexts in which they are formulated.Yet, information ethics standards must first be governed by national, federal, and local laws, covering aspects such as labor standards (what is a librarian required to do, or to not do?), technology (what technology can be used/ accessed, and how, especially at the tax-payers' expense?), information laws (what limits have been placed on access to information about potentially controversial subjects?), audience (who may or may not access a library's services and why? and how (or is) the privacy of the user ensured?). The American Library Association (ALA) Library Bill of Rights, for example, provides an ideal statement of principles, and refines those principles to refer specifically to intellectual freedom in the Code of Ethics; however, any conflicts, challenges or obligation in ensuring those standards and ideals would be governed by American law, making the code unenforceable (Wiegand, 1996, p. 84) at the professional level, and thus remaining hopeful ideals. The importance of recognizing ethical standards is not in question, yet the need for often unenforceable codes must be examined; why are formal codes necessary, what makes a code effective, and how can rhetoric, rights, responsibility, and reality be reconciled in the context of information ethics in library and information science?The ALA Code of Ethics includes the following in its short preamble: \"...we recognize the importance of codifying and making known to the profession and to the general public th","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"25-41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language-the words we use, our syntax and our grammar-is always deployed in a context. We might refer to a collective group as y'all in one context (casually, among friends) but simply as you in another. When students enter our library instruction classrooms, they also enter a new discursive context, this one marked by Boolean syntax, arcane controlled vocabularies, and Aristotelian classification structures that divide the universe of knowledge in ways foreign to the naive user. For example, nothing about using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or SocINDEX database descriptors is natural, nor is the use of and and or as formal structures. Students who seek use of library resources inevitably must learn to navigate these strange new linguistic worlds.Library instructors must balance the demand to teach students how to search successfully in these formal linguistic contexts against a desire to respect the languages and modes of thought students bring from elsewhere into the classroom. As advocates for equity of access to materials, librarians must negotiate the realities of dominant, standard structures of language and organization-often our discursive homes-with the diversity of linguistic and cognitive approaches of our students. These politically and ethically impelled negotiations require us to teach library research as a context in which language struggles take place, rather than as an arena where some words and phrases are simply and acontextually correct. Indeed, when students are taught that only one language variety is "correct," instructors consciously and unconsciously reinscribe systems of linguistic dominance that allocate access, opportunity, and reward unevenly among social groups.Composition Studies has long explored this difficult balancing act. In the pages that follow, this article articulates the work done by composition scholars to understand and politicize the problem of multiple discourses in the classroom, as well as conceptualize a potential solution. Rather than arguing for or against the use of different language varieties, Composition Studies has used the concept of the contact zone to imagine the classroom as a space of dialogic struggle where no single language is "better" or "correct." Instead, the classroom and the blank page become sites of interpretive struggle for meaning.Following this discussion of the contact zone in the writing classroom, I suggest that teaching librarians might re-conceptualize the contact zone in our own field. Library advocacy work on the problem of standardized language has primarily worked to perfect and change that standard language so that it better reflects a pluralist embrace of the language of our users. While a vital part of an ethical linguistic practice, the focus on "correcting" library language reinscribes the idea that any language can ever be "correct" outside the context of its use. Curiously, the library field has paid less attention to conceptualizing the concret
{"title":"Teaching Other Tongues: Addressing the Problem of \"Other\" Languages in the Library","authors":"Emily Drabinski","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.42","url":null,"abstract":"Language-the words we use, our syntax and our grammar-is always deployed in a context. We might refer to a collective group as y'all in one context (casually, among friends) but simply as you in another. When students enter our library instruction classrooms, they also enter a new discursive context, this one marked by Boolean syntax, arcane controlled vocabularies, and Aristotelian classification structures that divide the universe of knowledge in ways foreign to the naive user. For example, nothing about using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or SocINDEX database descriptors is natural, nor is the use of and and or as formal structures. Students who seek use of library resources inevitably must learn to navigate these strange new linguistic worlds.Library instructors must balance the demand to teach students how to search successfully in these formal linguistic contexts against a desire to respect the languages and modes of thought students bring from elsewhere into the classroom. As advocates for equity of access to materials, librarians must negotiate the realities of dominant, standard structures of language and organization-often our discursive homes-with the diversity of linguistic and cognitive approaches of our students. These politically and ethically impelled negotiations require us to teach library research as a context in which language struggles take place, rather than as an arena where some words and phrases are simply and acontextually correct. Indeed, when students are taught that only one language variety is \"correct,\" instructors consciously and unconsciously reinscribe systems of linguistic dominance that allocate access, opportunity, and reward unevenly among social groups.Composition Studies has long explored this difficult balancing act. In the pages that follow, this article articulates the work done by composition scholars to understand and politicize the problem of multiple discourses in the classroom, as well as conceptualize a potential solution. Rather than arguing for or against the use of different language varieties, Composition Studies has used the concept of the contact zone to imagine the classroom as a space of dialogic struggle where no single language is \"better\" or \"correct.\" Instead, the classroom and the blank page become sites of interpretive struggle for meaning.Following this discussion of the contact zone in the writing classroom, I suggest that teaching librarians might re-conceptualize the contact zone in our own field. Library advocacy work on the problem of standardized language has primarily worked to perfect and change that standard language so that it better reflects a pluralist embrace of the language of our users. While a vital part of an ethical linguistic practice, the focus on \"correcting\" library language reinscribes the idea that any language can ever be \"correct\" outside the context of its use. Curiously, the library field has paid less attention to conceptualizing the concret","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"42-55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69756044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This issue represents a unique perspective in information ethics at this moment in time. There is a change occurring; indeed, a transition has been under way for some time, from those who set the path, those who defined this field, to a newly minted body of scholars who see the context for the parameters of information ethics in a vastly different way. We, this field of information ethics, still grapple with the same fundamental definitions of information ethics as were presented in the 1980s, the "inception" of this discipline. We still think about issues of creation, access, control, and dissemination of information. Yet, what constitutes the definition of "information" and what constitutes those activities around information is dramatically different. James Moor was one of the first to call attention to the different nature of "computer" data, describing it as greased and malleable; he called attention to the "policy vacuums" and "conceptual muddles" created by digital data. Those characteristics articulated in the 1980s have indeed proven true, and even Moor may be surprised at the extent to which those very characteristics have transformed not only research and scholarship but individuals and societies themselves. We have seen such arguments for "everything is miscellaneous," and "the world is flat"-those are indicative of the collapsing parameters resultant from the ways in which we create, use, and disseminate information in this moment. This forces us to a broader question.Where is the discipline of information ethics? It is increasingly diffused. It is, simultaneously more important and less important than ever. It is ever important because every discipline essentially grapples now with information ethics issues, and because of that, its "significance" as a "stand- alone discipline" is called into question. Scholars from across an array of disciplines are engaging more directly with issues of data integrity, ethical research practices, privacy, autonomy, identity, trust, reality, data sharing, data manipulation, fragmentation, orientation. Information ethicists have made these issues explicit over the years, but increasingly, disciplinary specificity is collapsing and these issues certainly do not reside in any one clear domain. This is happening because of the nature of digital data which is causing every scholar, researcher, bureaucrat, and individual to think differently about their relationship with the world, in both physical and virtual realms. Information ethics scholarship is changing, pushing boundaries in its scope and reach. A physicist, Vlatko Vedra, recently described the theory of quantum information, that everything, the universe itself, is information. Information is superior. If we follow his lead, everything, then, is information ethics? With that, one might also argue that nothing is information ethics, a stance I do not support.Information ethics has co- existed along with other "ethics" for many years: computer ethic
{"title":"Looking Back, Looking Forward, and Transformation in Information Ethics","authors":"E. Buchanan","doi":"10.3172/JIE.20.2.157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.20.2.157","url":null,"abstract":"This issue represents a unique perspective in information ethics at this moment in time. There is a change occurring; indeed, a transition has been under way for some time, from those who set the path, those who defined this field, to a newly minted body of scholars who see the context for the parameters of information ethics in a vastly different way. We, this field of information ethics, still grapple with the same fundamental definitions of information ethics as were presented in the 1980s, the \"inception\" of this discipline. We still think about issues of creation, access, control, and dissemination of information. Yet, what constitutes the definition of \"information\" and what constitutes those activities around information is dramatically different. James Moor was one of the first to call attention to the different nature of \"computer\" data, describing it as greased and malleable; he called attention to the \"policy vacuums\" and \"conceptual muddles\" created by digital data. Those characteristics articulated in the 1980s have indeed proven true, and even Moor may be surprised at the extent to which those very characteristics have transformed not only research and scholarship but individuals and societies themselves. We have seen such arguments for \"everything is miscellaneous,\" and \"the world is flat\"-those are indicative of the collapsing parameters resultant from the ways in which we create, use, and disseminate information in this moment. This forces us to a broader question.Where is the discipline of information ethics? It is increasingly diffused. It is, simultaneously more important and less important than ever. It is ever important because every discipline essentially grapples now with information ethics issues, and because of that, its \"significance\" as a \"stand- alone discipline\" is called into question. Scholars from across an array of disciplines are engaging more directly with issues of data integrity, ethical research practices, privacy, autonomy, identity, trust, reality, data sharing, data manipulation, fragmentation, orientation. Information ethicists have made these issues explicit over the years, but increasingly, disciplinary specificity is collapsing and these issues certainly do not reside in any one clear domain. This is happening because of the nature of digital data which is causing every scholar, researcher, bureaucrat, and individual to think differently about their relationship with the world, in both physical and virtual realms. Information ethics scholarship is changing, pushing boundaries in its scope and reach. A physicist, Vlatko Vedra, recently described the theory of quantum information, that everything, the universe itself, is information. Information is superior. If we follow his lead, everything, then, is information ethics? With that, one might also argue that nothing is information ethics, a stance I do not support.Information ethics has co- existed along with other \"ethics\" for many years: computer ethic","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"157-160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69756176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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