Guest editorial
Date | 13 May 2019 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-05-2019-097 |
Pages | 114-118 |
Published date | 13 May 2019 |
Author | Marty J. Wolf,Alexis M. Elder,Gosia Plotka |
Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
Guest editorial
Editorial for creating, changing and coalescing ways of life with technologies
“Congealing”is a word that evokes senses of unpleasantness where perhaps something
inviting had once been. It also impliesthat things are becoming less fluid and more rigid.
As we began organizing ETHICOMP 2018, we wanted a theme that reflectedthe impact
of technologies on human cultures, practices and lives. Our initial draft of the theme was
“Creating, Changing, and Congealing Ways of Life with Technologies.”And while we were
eventually persuaded to use a more congenialway of putting the idea (it became “Creating,
Changing, and Coalescing Ways of Life with Technologies”), in some ways, it remains true
for us that “congealing,”and itsconnotations of something less pleasant, gets at the original
idea. As we incorporate technologies into our practices, much attention is paid to how they
change our ways of doing things. But technologies can also help ways of life set-up and
harden like yesterday’s leftovers–not appealing, yet difficult to budge and sometimes quite
unhealthy. Once a particular process is built around a piece of technology, it can become
entrenched and increasingly difficult to change. For a historical example, consider how
difficult it was to adapt records and software on the eve of the 21st century in response to
the so-called “Y2K”problem.In early software development, efficient use of memory was an
important design consideration. It had become a standard practice to use a 2-digit field for
the year, which would roll to from “99”to “00”in the year 2000, causing problems for date-
dependent functions. Technologies can also reflect and reinforce existing cultural
tendencies. For a recent example, consider the human resources software created by
Amazon that used its existing hiring data to train a machine-learning system to rate
applicants. The resulting system turned out to be biased against women applicants,
downranking resumes that included the word “woman”or “women’s.”Amazon ended up
scrapping the project altogether. Becauseof these kinds of effects, we wanted to encourage
people to think beyond well-worn paradigms like “technologies are disruptive”to consider
other kinds of effects they can have.
As it happened, the imagery of “congealing”proveddistasteful enough that the steering
committee opted for a more neutral term. But even with the less-dramatic wording the
conference ended up attracting a rich and diverse range of papers that examined
technological issuesfrom a variety of angles, exactly as we had hoped.
This diversity of approaches underscores the value of interdisciplinary inquiry into
computing ethics. What we have in this special issue represents a cross-section of
engagements with the impact of technologieson ways of life, and one that invites readers to
consider both positive and negative effects in a staggering range of applications. From an
empirical engagement, with the challenge of coming up with a “fair”algorithm, to an
intersectional feminist examination of the Human Brain Project, to a philosophical analysis
of how robotic technologies invite us to confront our assumptions about biological
exceptionalism, these papers encourage readers to think carefully and critically about the
social and ethical impactsof technologies on ways of life.
For this volume, we have, therefore, organized papers according to these three themes:
Creating, Changingand Coalescing.
Creating
From papers that explore howtechnologies create ways of life, as in “technologies of the self
and other,”which provides a detailed examination of how self-tracking technology affects
JICES
17,2
114
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.17 No. 2, 2019
pp. 114-118
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-05-2019-097
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