From: Iowa Journal of Communication. 31(Spring): pp 8-20.
For Class use only!
BALANCING THE ETHICAL CONUNDRUMS OF INTERNET RESEARCH:
AN EXISTENTIALIST VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES
---------
Jim Thomas / Northern Illinois University
18 May, 1999
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
Cyberspace reflects our values and our faults,
sometimes in terrifying exaggeration. Cyberspace is a
mirror you can edit. It's a mirror you can fold into
packets and send across continents at the speed of
light. It's a mirror you can share with other people,
a place where you can discover community. But it is
also a mirror in the classic sense of
smoke-and-mirrors, a place where you might be robbed
or cheated or deceived, a place where you can be
promised a rainbow but given a mouthful of ashes
(Sterling, 1993).
-------------------------------------------------------------
What surprises me about online research is not that there have
been so many egregious violations of ethical principles, but that
there have been so few. There has been no lack of commentary on
computer ethics and Internet (Net) behavior in general (e.g., Forester
and Morrison, 1990; Stoll, 1995) or Net research ethics in particular
(King, 1996; Waskul, 1996). Problems have been identified, solutions
proposed, and the gravity of and rationale for appropriate behaviors
debated in the context of the standards of this or that ethical
perspective. Yet, debates do not subside, and scholars and others
continue to look for ways to maintain the ethical integrity of
research and other Net activity.
Rather than debate philosophical issues of ethics and justice and
attempt to establish explicit unambiguous ethical rules from the
top-down, we first might take a step back and examine the problem from
the ground up. In this paper, I offer an exploratory account of
selected issues as seen from the trenches. My premise is rather
simple: Precise ethical precepts tend to be of little help to those
immersed in Net and other potentially risky research, and who
simultaneously also may be responsible for teaching research ethics to
students and others. I argue that we need not invent new ethical
rules for online research. We need only increase our awareness of and
commitment to established ethical principles.
ENTER THE INTERNET
Rapid and dramatic social changes, such as those accompanying the
"computer revolution" of the past decade, often bring problems
occurring because technology-induced social transformations outpace
our ability to immediately understand and adjust to the corresponding
new social situations. This lag contributes to a perception that
technology challenges the seemingly-solid base of norms and values
that provides the cultural cement for civilized behavior. The ethical
issues arising from the Internet's expansion illustrate the gap
between comfortable boundaries of conventional research activity and
the actions of those who would test those boundaries on the Net.
Conventionally, we think of researchers as academics or other
professionals for whom academic associations and the funding agencies
that sponsor their work develop and impose rigorous standards defining
the rights of research subjects and the obligations that researchers
owe them. This has changed. Now, anybody with access to the Net
becomes a potential researcher. For some professionals, such as
social scientists, attorneys, or media personnel, Net resources
provide tools that, while more sophisticated, are functionally similar
to traditional information-gathering methods. There are textual and
other archives, personal documents, a myriad of informants, and places
either to lurk and observe covertly or to fully immerse and overtly
participate. Further, the Net empowers more people to engage in
research. For example, laypersons tracing their genealogy might
discover that they can easily snoop on their neighbors' finances or
past criminal record (e.g., http://www.jaye.org/ACPSOR.html).
Highschool students looking up assignments learn that they can also
snoop their peers' files to copy the assignment or, better, find a
similar assignment on the Web (e.g., http://www.schoolsucks.com).
Professors who, while recognizing the importance of copyright
protection of journal articles (especially their own), sometimes
believe that protections of copyright do not apply to electronic
media. The result is that we must expand the definition of "Net
research" and develop a more inclusive pool of who counts as a
researcher in order to reach a wider audience for whom ethical issues
become increasingly relevant.
The importance of reaching a wider audience was illustrated a few
years ago when a study of online pornography (Rimm, 1995) became the
cover story in Time magazine (Elmer-Dewit, 1995). Riddled with
ethical lapses (Thomas, 1996a), the research passed through at least
ten levels of potential gatekeeping, including attorneys, journalists,
researchers, and media editorial staff, without a single question
being raised (Thomas, 1996a). The lesson? Discussions of ethical
issues in online research should be addressed to the general public as
well.
I emphasize that I am neither an ethical zealot nor a moralist,
and there is some irony in my continued research in and writing on
research ethics. Perhaps my own lapses in field research and
elsewhere have sensitized me to the complexity of "right" behavior and
made me more aware of the lapses of others. As a teacher of research
ethics in methodology classes, I emphasize to students the importance
of reflecting on the consequences of their research for themselves,
their subjects, and society. As an ethnographer who studies culture
from the participants' point of view by participant observation, I
study the prisoner culture created and maintained by "bad guys." I
also have studied on-line conventional and underground computer
culture, including hackers and software pirates. From my background
as a would-be philosopher in graduate school, I retain bit from the
ethical and moral writings we ploughed through. However, while
philosophical writings are useful for academic conferences and
esoteric papers, they too often provide too little substantive
direction to researchers and others in the trenches. Distinctions
between teleological and deontological ethical systems are not always
useful for solving the nitty gritty dilemmas that occur without
warning, such as whether to turn in a hacker informant who has
illicitly obtained government proprietary software or hacked into
corporate computers. After all, Ferrell (1997) makes a compelling
case to justify research based on researchers' direct involvement in
illegal activity.
WHEN IS NET BEHAVIOR AN ETHICAL TRANSGRESSION?
Most people, I believe, want to "do the right thing," even on the
Net. But, while writing this paper two weeks before the deadline, I
was interrupted by four incidents that challenged my belief. The
incidents suggested that, while people may generally prefer doing
right, the Net may be like bars and other social settings where a
"time out" ethos exists, excusing participants from many conventional
social obligations (Cavan, 1966). The issues raised here are not so
much whether the behaviors are wrong, but where the line lies between
right and wrong, and how the line is defended.
In the first incident, a persistent hacker broke into several of
our University computer systems. The Unix server of about 200 users
that I maintain was among them. There was no evidence that users'
files were compromised or that file systems were damaged maliciously.
Doing so, of course, would be an egregious violation of the "hacker
ethic" (Levy, 1984). However, over a seven day period, I invested
over 30 hours of increased system monitoring and tightening security.
The two colleagues who did the bulk of the technical work invested
more. The incident dramatically ate into the time required for grading
student work and meeting deadlines. Evidence suggested that the
intruder was participating in a popular hacker game, and likely saw
nothing unethical about the conduct. To me and my colleagues, the
intrusion was an unethical violation of trust that was demonstrably
unfair to our students who needed our time and attention. It also
unjustly added to an already heavy and uncompensated work burden.
In a second incident, students in my courses turned in their
final papers. Among a batch of about 40, I verified two lifted nearly
verbatim from Internet sites, and a half dozen more that contained
substantial "appropriated discourse." When confronted with what I
considered an egregious ethical violation, two students acknowledged
that they knew they were violating a norm, but neither saw it as a
significant ethical lapse. In their view, they knowingly violated
university policies, but both--each A-/B+ students, felt that their
need to complete the assignment under end-of-term pressures to excel
mitigated against ethical culpability. Cruising the Net for papers,
they felt, was not an ethical violation, because they were good
students who could do superior work on their own. Were the students
being unethical? Or, were they engaging in what Matza and Sykes
(1961) called "techniques of neutralization" to recast challenged
behaviors as acceptable?
A third incident involved a university homepage competition in
which the winning page would be determined by tallying the electronic
votes of university computer users. The intent of the competition was
to encourage the university community to browse each homepage and vote
on the merits of the pages. The competitions' nominees represented
individual users, small staff units, academic departments, and one
large student computer research laboratory. Representatives from the
computer laboratory staged a "vote-in" by mobilizing hundreds of
students who used the lab to vote directly for the lab's page without
viewing the others. There was heated debate within the offending
department over whether this constituted an ethical violation.
However, the more interesting issue was that few of the department's
faculty or lab personnel considered that stacking the electronic vote
might raise an ethical issue. It did not occur to those involved that
it might be unfair to web page authors without a large constituency,
or unjust to authors who chose to adhere to the spirit of the
competition, to win a competition by violating its intent. The
special relevance here is that the participants, from the homepage
author to the lab's director and the technological committee
ultimately responsible for lab oversight, initially saw nothing to
question about the behavior.
The final incident involved a senior professor respected for his
integrity and sense of justice, who posted an entire copyright
protected article from a national newspaper on a university discussion
group accessible by students and faculty. He included a three
paragraph justification offering four reasons for the full repost.
First, the work had been published two weeks previously; hence it was
dated. Second, the repost was intended for "scholars" in a university
medium; hence, it was fair use. Third, the work was a small portion of
the entire newspaper; hence, it was a negligible infraction. Fourth,
old newspapers have no value, "fit only for wrapping fish;" hence,
there was no commercial loss to the paper. Did the professor stray
over the boundary of ethical behavior? This is a thin line. However,
as one who runs online discussion groups for students, I often
admonish them for reposting copyright protected articles. As a
consequence, while I find no reason for ethical outrage against my
colleague, I do find the questions raised to be of specific relevance
to the issues of Net ethics.
Each of these incidents arguably subverted such core social
values as trust and honesty, respect for privacy, principles of
fairness and justice, and protection of intellectual property.
However, what I find most interesting about these incidents is that
there is no consensus on whether there was an ethical violation or, if
there was, that it constitutes "any big deal." The reason for the
disparity in judgment likely reflects not so much a decline of concern
with ethical issues as it illustrates the degree to which ethical
precepts and appropriate social responses to them are, at root, a
social construct. As a consequence, we cannot examine Net research
ethics independently from the larger settings in which they arise.
THE IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF ETHICS
To the extent that ethics are a social construct, all ethical
systems reflect an ideological component that supports an underlying
cultural value system. Ideology refers to those shared beliefs,
attitudes, and basic assumptions about the world that justify, shape
and organize how we perceive and interpret the world. As a set of the
most-basic collective assumptions and rationalizations about our
social world, ideology provides the basic framework for decisions and
policies pertaining to social and political activity. More
specifically, ideologies are the relatively invisible conceptual
machineries for maintaining social order.
Examples of ideological preferences include belief in "due
process for all," which guides our criminal justice system; "my
country right or wrong," which underlies such corresponding beliefs as
"flag burning is wrong" and "it's unethical to avoid military
conscription;" or adherence to the principle of free enterprise, which
guides our economic system and generates ethical criticisms of people
who advocate political alternatives such as socialism. Because
ideologies are preconscious, emotionally charged, and pervasive, their
substance tends to be less visible than other beliefs and shared
tenets. Because ideologies function to preserve and justify the status
quo by reproducing basic cultural conceptions of social order, right
and wrong, and who does (or does not) have the right to enforce or be
protected by ethical precepts, the ideological basis of research
ethics cannot be ignored.
Ethical Theories
Each of the four incidents above reflect competing ideologically
based value systems that generate ethical precepts justifying or
proscribing the behaviors in question. They can be examined within
the context of two standard ethical positions. The intent below is
neither to defend or attack the ethics of those involved in the
incidents nor to map out a detailed ethical position for making
judgments. Rather, with acknowledged over-simplification, the goal is
to illustrate some of the ideological influences on ethical thinking
as a way to underscore the relationship between each.
Mapping out the broad brush strokes of competing ethical
perspectives helps us more easily understand the principles by which
ethical problems are identified and solutions to them sought. It also
helps us understand the fundamental premises of our own and others'
positions. Parenthetically, although many of us tend to use the terms
"ethics" and "morality" as synonyms, they are not the same. Ethics
refer to the character or conscience of a person in relation to a
group, and morality refers to the value system of a group in relation
to the individual. Stanage (1995) summarizes ethics as
person-in-culture, and morality as culture-in-person to remind us that
the two may not always coincide. Here, I maintain the distinction.
two broad philosophical perspectives. The first, deontological
positions, is based on "rule following" and proceeds from formally
specified precepts that guide how we ought to behave. An example would
be professional codes of ethics in the social sciences, which codify
researchers' obligations and responsibilities to research subjects.
Deontological positions are further subdivided into act-deontological
and rule-deontological. In the former, basic judgments of value are
particularistic or situational, drawing on shared principles of, for
example, "justice" to establish the proper course of action in a given
situation. In the latter, behavior is guided by concrete, universal
rules, such as "thou shalt not lie."
Second is the teleological perspective, associated with, but not
exclusive to, utilitarianism. Teleological perspectives operate from
the premise that ethical behavior is determined by the consequences of
an act. The goal or end of an act should be weighed with a calculus
that, on balance, will result in the greatest social good or the least
social harm. Utilitarianism, the most common form of teleological
theories, is also divided into two variants: Act-utilitarianism and
rule-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarianism holds that correct actions are
contingent on the particular nature of the situation, and the guiding
principle is the degree to which the specific act will maximize the
greatest balance of good. Rule-utilitarianism emphasizes the primacy
of general rules of conduct, but these rules are derived from the
principle of the greatest universal utility.
Ethical egoism, a variant of utilitarianism, holds that an
individual's primary obligation is to self-interest, and that even
when making second or third person judgments, the guiding criteria
remain those of personal self-interest (Frankena, 1963).
The Ethics of Hacking
In the first incident, a tension exists between the professed
hacker philosophy of freedom of exploration and system administrators'
goal of protecting the integrity of the system for users. Hacking
behavior has been justified as ethical by defining it as a
knowledge-producing activity that confers upon "intruding researchers"
the right to explore systems to see how things work. A corollary to
this view is that hackers actually enhance Net ethics by ultimately
requiring tighter security to protect users. A second rationale for
hacking is the adage that "information wants to be free." Hackers are
a type of freedom fighter intent on liberating knowledge and
preventing it from becoming monopolized by potentially malevolent
corporate or governmental forces. Hacking is justified by a narrow
utilitarian rationale that takes two forms. The first derives from a
primitive act utilitarian view in which the exploration underlying
computer intrusion, as a type of research, contributes to the stock of
public knowledge (e.g., 2600 Magazine; any "hacker" homepage). In a
less noble and more primitive variant, hacking is simply a form of
Nietzschean ethical egoism in which individuals pursue the course of
action most likely to fulfill individual self-interests, such as
Maslow's concept of self-actualization and knowledge enhancement.
Both views can be justified by an appeal to a social context in which
hacking, on balance, provides greater long-term good than harm.
For system administrators, on the other hand, hackers are a
malevolent force whose behaviors unfairly sap their limited time,
fiscal, and other resources. System administrators are charged with
assuring the users' private files are secure. Even if intruders do not
target private files, once the potential for compromise exists, user
trust in the integrity of the system dissolves. Opposition to
intrusions and other disruptions can be based either on utilitarian or
deontological theories. For utilitarians, uninvited explorations cause
short term harm by draining system and personnel resources, and result
in long term harm by subverting user trust. Worse, they lead to
decreased system openness by restricting users' rights and privileges
in the name of security. An alternative rationale by which hacking
would be judged unethical is based on a rule-deontological
perspective. This view, Kantian in nature, establishes as a type of
categorical imperative a principle that would be held by any
reasonable person similarly situated: Intrusions are a fundamental
violation regardless of context or perceived utility.
THE ETHICS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY VIOLATION
Using the incident of the professor's copyright transgression as
a second example, both defense of and opposition to reposting the
intellectual property of another can be made on utilitarian grounds.
For the professor, the context of the situation and motive for the act
trumped the laws protecting intellectual property. As with the hackers
who publicly distribute information about the security holes of
computer systems or make available proprietary information in the
belief that "knowledge wants to be free," the professor, too, argued
that the utilitarian ends (contributions to knowledge) outweighed the
normative and legal prohibitions protecting others' intellectual
property.
Conversely, utilitarianism also provides two reasons why, on
balance, reposting causes more harm than good. First, reposting may
reduce the commercial or other value of the work. Second, the
professor's action, on balance, subverts principles of fairness and
long-range respect for ethical Net behavior by symbolizing the wrong
ethical message to students and others.
Although cursory, this overview should nonetheless be sufficient
to illustrate that the behaviors themselves do not necessarily reflect
an inattention to ethics. It also suggests that, at root, ethical
arguments tend to be used to provide an account for justifying a
preferred ideological perspective rather than an attempt to determine
a universalistic guide to "what's right."
ETHICS OR PRAGMATISM: WHERE TO FROM HERE?
One dominant theme of existential literature centers on the
delicate balance required when navigating between the Charybdis of our
behavioral demons and the Scylla of ethical, normative, and
institutional obligations. Typified by Camus's Sisyphus (1955) and
his view that the human condition is necessarily an indelicate balance
between uncertain alternatives, or Michel, Gide's (1958) immoralist
who rebels against conventional norms of appropriate conduct, we are
reminded of the often irreconcilable choices when weighing what we
prefer to do against what we ought to do. The lesson, of course, is
that rigid adherence to scripted ethical or moral precepts may be
neither a virtue nor a beneficence.
Those of us involved in the type of research that may skirt the
edge of ethical propriety often come away with muddy shoes resulting
from unsuccessful balancing attempts. When this happens, two
consequences ideally follow. First, it provides the opportunity to
constantly reassess the relationship between the goals of research and
the means of gathering and processing data. Second, it reinforces the
need to constantly raise ethical issues with colleagues, students, the
media, and the general public. But, we ought also take care to avoid
self-righteousness by presuming that ethical standards are absolute
and can be applied to every situation. Several caveats arise when
discussing implementation of research ethics through policy or
legislation.
First, reification of ethical principles tends to do more harm
than good. Reification gives primacy to rules, which relegates their
context to secondary status. Even if consensus on ethical
prescriptions and proscriptions could be attained, elevating absolute
principles to some standard of immutable "realness" risks several
consequences that, ironically, could subvert ethical awareness in at
least two ways. Not only could research become subject to the
religiosity of puritanical gatekeepers, but excessive control invites
existential rebellion (Milovanovic and Thomas, 1989).
Second, we should remember that ethics are distinct from other
forms of socially preferred behavioral guidelines. Conflating ethical
principles with legislation, institutional policies, or basic courtesy
norms as if the same obligations were owed each dilutes the power of
ethical principles by making "thou shalt nots" equivalent to "don't
wear grunge to the opera." This result is a weakening of the
foundation of fundamental standards for all behavioral standards,
including computer-centered research.
Third, there is a danger of confusing ideological predilections
with ethical predications. It is helpful to remember that, while
most of us agree that we ought not do that which is ethically wrong,
we often disagree on what counts as "ethically right." The principles
by which we assess value judgments are normative and socially
contingent, and rarely as clearly defined as they seem. We can agree
that it is wrong to take a life without cause, but we may not agree
that it is also wrong to copy a commercial software program or never
to observe research subjects without permission. Often enough, our
views of personal privacy, our definitions of public/private spaces,
and our conception of social or personal harm are based not so much on
ethical principles as on ideological, or even idiosyncratic,
preferences.
Fourth, it is useful to distinguish between "pseudo ethics" and
legitimate ethical imperatives. An ethical imperative is, very
broadly, an "ought statement" (distinguished from convention and value
judgments) that, if not followed, would cause demonstrable harm. A
"pseudo-ethic" is a behavioral dictate mandated by the norms of a
particular group that, if not followed, potentially challenges the
interests of that group. Many of our institutional policies on
research ethics derive from the latter. Organizational self-interest
and liability concerns become translated into ethical discourse, and
the ethical discourse becomes translated into the rhetoric of
self-interest based policy formulation, legislation and enforcement.
Does this all mean that ethical decisions are relative and that
discussions of research ethics are of little use? Not at all. My
intent has been to suggest the complexity of Net behaviors as well as
to illustrate some of the ambiguities underlying any set of definitive
rules. I have always followed two broad principles in my own research
(Thomas, 1996b, Thomas and Marquart 1988): First, always protect
informants. This precept includes keeping promises and never putting
them at risk. Second, always protect the integrity of research
inquiry. Although this precept is complex in the abstract, in practice
it simply means that, if the researcher cannot protect informants
without sacrificing scientific principles, then stop the project.
There are two broad courses we can pursue in implementing
research ethics. The first, a rather Sartrean approach in which we
identify explicit ethical rules and commit ourselves completely to
their realization and accept responsibility for the consequences,
seems a bit dogmatic. At best, it entails little latitude for
discretion, and offers too little recognition of the world of greys
that blur most black and white images.
For those who prefer Camus (1956), a second course seems more
beneficial, or certainly more viable. In this view we recognize the
ambiguity of social situations in which most value decisions are made
and commit ourselves not to rules, but to broad principles of justice
and beneficence. While this view makes establishing formal rules
impractical, if not impossible, it does allow an act-utilitarian and
somewhat pragmatic set of guidelines to steer us through the murky
situations we often encounter.
The policy implications for this latter view do not lie in
establishing more stringent policies for human subjects review
committees or in creating and enforcing new rules. Instead, we could
adopt a number of strategies, including the following.
First, educational institutions at all levels could expand
discussions of ethics across the curriculum. Second, professional
organizations should build ethics sessions into their annual
conferences. Third, journal editors should assure that editorial
boards and peer reviewers are attuned to the subtle ways that ethical
issues creep into research, and publish periodic special journal
issues on ethics. Fourth, professional associations should increase
the visibility of ethical issues by systematically and aggressively
sharing with media, politicians and others the results of ethical
deliberations and critiques, as well as by monitoring governmental and
media lapses in reporting or using research. Fifth, professionals
should more rigorously police themselves, not by punitive responses,
but by open challenge and remedial debate when perceived lapses occur.
Finally, we must recognize that Net research ethics cannot be
separated from broader social milieu. Hence, we should take a global,
rather than parochial, view of the problems.
CONCLUSION
Once, when invited to participate in a forum addressing the
presumptively new challenges of Internet technology to ethical
precepts, I recalled an exercise many of us experienced as children.
We are first asked to look around the room and silently identify and
remember as many blue items as we can. Next, we are asked to close
our eyes tightly. No peeking! Then, with our eyes still closed, we are
asked to name anything we recall that was colored red. Most of us
either could not identify a red object, or named one only after
considerable cognitive and mnemonic strain. The exercise illustrated
the manner in which perception, cognition, and memory are often
pre-patterned by assumptions, suggestions, and preformed conceptions
that channel our gaze and corresponding responses in narrow directions
that cloud our perceptions, understandings, and actions.
The fundamental ethical questions posed by new technology are not
new. Basic beliefs in the precept that it is better to do good than
ill do not change. What changes is that the relationship between
behaviors and the ethical conceptions by which we judge them shift and
become ambiguous, vague, and perceived through a sometimes foggy
prism. The problem for those involved in Net activity, then, is not
one of deriving new ethical principles or (for the Kantians amongst
us) revising or identifying new categorical imperatives. Our task
instead is one of understanding the social bases of the relationship
between technology and conflicts over the meaning of familiar
concepts, and how changes in one affect the images and language by
which we define and act upon the other.
If required to sum the above in a paragraph, my points would be
these: First, we ought not assume that all researcher peccadillos are
ethical transgressions. Accidents, errors in judgment, or misreading
of a situation may account for seeming lapses. A safe adage is, "Never
attribute malice to that for which stupidity will suffice."
Second, we ought not assume that formal responses to
transgressions, especially those that are punitive, are necessarily
appropriate or ethical responses. We must more carefully debate what
it is we are trying to control and more carefully devise a concerted
social response.
Third, We ought take special care when considering what we want
policies to prescribe in the new electronic age, and we ought
recognize the reciprocal relationship between individual
responsibility and the legal and organizational power utilized to
enforce it.
Fourth, we should remember that we are living during a time of
dramatic social changes. Although fundamental ethical principals
remain reasonably constant, the context in which we apply them shifts
ambiguously. Rather than resort to comfortable, but inapplicable,
standards, we ought more aggressively confront the shifting new
contexts in which we are required to act and more aggressively debate
these issues as a society. It seems unwise to relinquish the terrain
of discourse primarily to those with a vested interest in maintaining
their preferred (but limited) view of ethical boundaries.
Fifth, as participatory researchers remind us, our view of ethics
may reflect the class, race, or ethnocentric biases of white middle
class males. This is, of course, not necessarily bad. But, it does
mean that we ought not take our value preferences as universal.
Finally, we ought remember that the ethics of cyberspace do not
begin in cyberspace. They begin--among other places--in the homes,
the classrooms, the workplace, boardrooms, legislatures, and on
playgrounds.
Like the Golding novel Lord of the Flies, too many areas of
cyberspace are left to intellectually, emotionally, and existentially
immature colonizers (of all ages) who discover freedom without having
developed a corresponding sense of responsibility. Issues such
privacy, sexual harassment, racism, or courtesy are, for some,
esoteric irrelevancies. I do not think that the ethical standards f
social scientists are weakening. Nor do I see ethical depravity among
Net or other researchers. What I do see is ignorance and unreflective
pursuit of egocentric goals, often without corresponding consideration
of the ethics underlying the means toward those goals. As a society,
we need a more systematic and unifying system of integrating--at the
societal level--our ethical expectations within the rapidly changing
technology that clouds the current system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Camus, Albert. 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays. New
York: Vintage.
____. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage
Books.
Cavan. Sherri. 1966. Liquor License: An Ethnography of Bar Behavior.
Chicago: Aldine.
Diffie, Whitfield and Susan Landau. 1998. Privacy on the Line: The
Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Elmer-Dewit, Philip. 1995. "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn." Time
Magazine, pp. 38-43. July 3.
Ferrell, Jeff. 1997. "Criminological Verstehen: Inside the Immediacy
of Crime." Justice Quarterly, 14(March): 3-23.
Forester, Tom and Perry Morrison. 1990. Computer Ethics: Cautionary
Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing. Oxford (England): Basil
Blackwell.
Frankena, William K. 1963. Ethics. Englewood Cliffs (N.J.):
Prentice-Hall.
Gide, Andre. 1958. The Immoralist. New York: Vintage Books.
King, Storm A. 1996. "Researching Internet Communities: Proposed
Ethical Guidelines for the Reporting of Results." The Information
Society. 12(2): 119-128.
Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Garden City: Doubleday.
Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes. 1961. "Juvenile Delinquency and
Subterranean Values." American Sociological Review, 26(5): 712-19.
Rimm, Marty. 1995. "Marketing Pornography on the Information
Highway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories, and
Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000
Cities in and Territories." Georgetown Law Journal, 83(1995):
189-1934).
Milovanovic, Dragan and Jim Thomas. 1989. "Overcoming the Absurd:
Prisoner Litigation as Primitive Rebellion." Social Problems,
36(February): 48-60.
Stanage, Sherman. 1995. "Adult Education as Ethical and Moral Meaning
through Action." Unpublished paper, Department of Philosophy, Northern
Illinois University.
Sterling, Bruce. 1992. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the
Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam Books.
_____. 1993. "Comments on Cyberspace and Education." Computer
underground Digest, 5(54):
http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS5/cud554.txt
Stoll, Clifford. 1995. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the
Information Highway. New York: Doubleday.
Thomas, Jim. 1996a. "When Cyber-Research Goes Awry: The Ethics of the
Rimm 'Cyberporn' Study." The Information Society. 12(2): 189-197.
_____. 1996b. "Introduction: A Debate about the Ethics of Fair
Practices for Collecting Data in Cyberspace." The Information Society,
12(2): 107-117.
Thomas, Jim and James B. Marquart. 1988. "Dirty Knowledge and Clean
Conscience: The Dilemmas of Ethnographic Research." Pp. 81-96 in D.
Maines and C. Couch (Eds.), Information, Communication and Social
Structure. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas.
Waskul, Dennis. 1996. "Ethics of Online Research: Considerations
for the Study of Computer Mediated Forms of Interaction." The
Information Society. 12(2): 129-140.
Return to Jim Thomas's Homepage