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

Abstract

IntroductionTraditionally, information ethics focuses on moral questions relating to 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, broader domain of professional ethics is of import, encompassing 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 creators/distributors of information products and services, information mediators, including librarians, and information users. Information and communication technology (ICT) supports different information life cycle activities and plays a pivotal role in shaping, understanding, and defining of information ethics.The development of modern ICT has profoundly changed information and knowledge landscape, and as a result, has fundamentally impacted field of information ethics. In this article we will examine this impact and illustrate how modern ICT has changed scope and application of information ethics in discipline of library and information science, and consider implications for embedding information ethics squarely within and across an LIS curriculum, in an immersive fashion. We thus structure article in following manner: We introduce topic by outlining impact of modern ICT on nearly all human activities. We, furthermore, elaborate on profound change that modern ICT brings about with regards to unbundling, distribution, reproduction, and manipulation of information. To gain a clear understanding of how ICT impacted information ethics it is important to understand relationship between technology and society. We discuss this relationship briefly in next part of article. Based on this relationship we illustrate in final section how modern ICT has influenced field of information ethics, and how we as LIS educators must consider this impact. This first column sets 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 fields of microelectronics, computing, electronic communications including broadcasting and Internet, bring about a profound transformation in information and knowledge landscape and has radically changed most of our way of living and 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 default technology for most of our socio-economic activities and 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 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 last couple of years and thirdly, it has become cheaper, making it more affordable and accessible to nearly everyone (Freeman & Louca, 2002).As such, introduction of new and modern ICT opens up new possibilities for libraries and information agencies. The most important is digitization and accompanying manipulation of information. …