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Ethics & Information Technology Ethics & Technology Essay

ETHICS & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Ethics & Technology

The first aspect of this article that struck the author is how human beings began as hunter-gatherers of food, materials for shelter, and defense -- and now human beings are hunter gatherers of information. Just as hunting and gathering affected the kind of society humans were millions of years ago, hunting and gathering information in the 21st century affects the kinds of societies present in the west and in other cultures that are technologically advanced as well as technologically integrated to a substantial degree. While the materials that we hunt may have changed, the urge and commitment to hunting and gathering remains strong in the human species.

The article is a general meditation on ethics during the information age, now, and what the implications for ethics are with the advent of technologies that change our daily lives. In this way, the topic of this article is relevant. No matter at what point in human history we are in, technology affects human beings on many levels including socially, economically, politically, and otherwise. From early forms of technology such as fire and writing, to current...

Technology is often an exercise in defining the ethics of the people who make it and use it. Technology in of itself is neutral, but how societies use technology is a reflection of many aspects of that society, including its ethics. Thus, that Mason wishes to study the implication and primary ethical situations the technology of the information age present and reflect about the 21st century societies that have integrated them into their ways of life.
Mason summarizes the main ethical questions of the information with an acronym: PAPA. Broken down, PAPA stands for Privacy, Accessibility, Property, and Accuracy. Privacy is one of the most obvious issues in the information age especially with serious issues such as identity theft and computer cracking in general. Some of the largest corporations have been cracked and these intrusions have been publicized, such as the crackers (not to be confused with hackers) who infiltrated companies such as Sony, Citibank, and News Corp (Fox). Accessibility is a very basic issue -- there are many…

Sources used in this document:
References:

Introna, L.D. (2002) The (im)possibility of ethics in the information age. Information and Organization, 12, 71 -- 84.

Mason, R.O. Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age. Available from http://www.ida.liu.se/~TIMM32/docs/4etical.pdf. 2012 May 29.
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