Ethics from the Bottom Up? Immersive Ethics and the LIS Curriculum

IntroductionTraditionally, information ethics focuses on the moral questions relating to the life cycle of information as it pertains to its generation, gathering, organization, storage, retrieval, and use. As a field it broadly examines issues related to privacy, security, access to information, intellectual freedom, quality and integrity of information, as well as intellectual property rights. In addition, the broader domain of professional ethics is of import, encompassing the ways we as professionals engage with, and respond and react to those ethical issues. The main stakeholders impacted by this array of ethical issues can be divided into three groups. These are the creators/distributors of information products and services, information mediators, including librarians, and the information users. Information and communication technology (ICT) supports the different information life cycle activities and plays a pivotal role in the shaping, understanding, and defining of information ethics.The development of modern ICT has profoundly changed the information and knowledge landscape, and as a result, has fundamentally impacted the field of information ethics. In this article we will examine this impact and illustrate how modern ICT has changed the scope and application of information ethics in the discipline of library and information science, and consider the implications for embedding information ethics squarely within and across an LIS curriculum, in an immersive fashion. We thus structure the article in the following manner: We introduce the topic by outlining the impact of modern ICT on nearly all human activities. We, furthermore, elaborate on the profound change that modern ICT brings about with regards to the unbundling, distribution, reproduction, and manipulation of information. To gain a clear understanding of how ICT impacted information ethics it is important to understand the relationship between technology and society. We discuss this relationship briefly in the next part of the article. Based on this relationship we illustrate in the final section how modern ICT has influenced the field of information ethics, and how we as LIS educators must consider this impact. This first column sets the context for a deeper consideration of information ethics pedagogy, which will be explored further in subsequent issues of JIE.Everything Is InformationModern information and communication technology, which is defined by Preston (2004, p. 35) as "the cluster or interrelated systems of technological innovations in the fields of microelectronics, computing, electronic communications including broadcasting and the Internet," bring about a profound transformation in the information and knowledge landscape and has radically changed most of our way of living and the way in which we do things. As such it is seen as ubiquitous, invading most facets of our existence. It has created a new and unprecedented form of dependence and most organizations and institutions, including libraries, rely on some form of ICT for their daily operations. It is clear that ICT has become the default technology for most of our socio-economic activities and the organizational changes and benefits that it brought about are no longer in question (Introna, 2005).The impact of these technologies arises from three of its characteristics. In the first place it is an enabling technology that has not only become instrumental in most of our activities, but also contributes to further technological development and changes. Secondly, it has grown, in terms of its capacity, exponentially over the last couple of years and thirdly, it has become cheaper, making it more affordable and accessible to nearly everyone (Freeman & Louca, 2002).As such, the introduction of new and modern ICT opens up new possibilities for libraries and information agencies. The most important is the digitization and accompanying manipulation of information. …