Journal of Information Ethics最新文献

{"title":"The Commodification of Blackness in David LaChapelle's Rize","authors":"K. Kuehn","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.52","url":null,"abstract":"In 2005, fashion photographer David LaChapelle released Rize, a feature-length documentary about the inner-city Los Angeles dance movements of \"clowning\" and \"krumping.\" The prestige-press lauded Rize as \"a celebration\" (Scott, 2005), a spectacular \"visual miracle,\" and \"unexpected knockout\" (Travers, 2005). Many popular film critics praised Rize for revealing \"another side\" of South Central L.A., where young people use the art of dance to \"rise\" out of their social hardships. Most commonly, the film received accolades for its uplifting message. A review in the Washington Post, for example, noted: \"That in disenfranchised communities beset by multiple blights of poverty, drugs and gang violence, there have always been stubborn, heroic artistic responses. This is simply one of the most dramatic and one of the most inspiring\" (Harrington, 2005, p. WE37). In qualifying their admiration, critics commonly referred to the story as a \"feel-good\" movie about \"hope sprouting where there should be none\" (Burr, 2005, par. 1). Clowning and krumping were repeatedly treated as \"salvational subcultures\" (Harrington, p. WE37) that have \"provided young African-Americans-most stranded in the war zones of South Central-a path away from the guns'n'poses of the area's self-styled gangstas and drug lords\" (Brunson, 2005).The director, LaChapelle, is an internationally renowned photographer noted for his high-fashion celebrity photographs taken on surreal, extraordinary sets; thus, the film as a visual phenomenon is no surprise. His artwork typically plays with themes of excess aesthetically conveyed by a spectacular use of color and camp. LaChapelle's fantastic, vivid, and bizarre aesthetics are identifiable traits that run across his multi-media vita of music videos, advertisements, fashion, and fine art photography. Regarding his auteur status LaChapelle states, \"My pictures are entertainment, an escape from the world we live in today. I never deal with death and violence; they're too everyday\" (\"High Fashion Fantasies,\" 1998, p. 54). Applying this statement to Rize poses a number of questions regarding the ethical and social responsibilities of a documentarian; one such question might ask how LaChapelle reconciles his own logic within a film made about the gritty, tough streets of South Central where death and violence for many of the area's constituents are \"everyday\" phenomena?Although his statement can be read in a number of ways, this paper argues that LaChapelle's own artistic vision ultimately compromises his role as a social documentarian of an inner-city struggle. If documentarians \"speak for the interests of others\" (Nichols, 2001, p. 3), then a number of ethical issues arise in the act of representing a community of which the storyteller is not a part. Structures of power, for instance, are implicit to the re-presenter/re-presented relationship and complicated by inherent social, cultural, and economic differences of either party (consciously or not). At ","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"52-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Skin of the Other: Documentary, Ethics, Embodiment","authors":"Brian K. Bergen-Aurand","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.100","url":null,"abstract":"The face is a living presence; it is expression.... The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse.-Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 66)And the whole body-a hand or a curve of the shoulder-can express as the face.-Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 262)It is immediacy of a skin and a face, a skin which is always a modification of a face, a face that is weighted down with a skin.-Emmanuel Levinas (1991, p. 85)Disturbing EncountersJay Rosenblatt has remarked that seeing an image of Adolf Hitler eating was the disturbing encounter behind his 1998 film Human Remains. Human Remains is Rosenblatt's best known and most discussed film. It is also one of his most controversial because of its relation to the skin of the other and to the skin of its viewers. This simple image, of possibly the most infamous dictator in modern history, involved in the simplest and possibly most commonly shared human activity, provokes us to recognize Hitler as human and disturbs our simplistic image of him as a monster. The image gets under our skin and reminds us that ethics needs a body. It reminds us that only someone who can hunger can give food. Only someone who eats, sleeps, and is weighted with skin can be ethical. Only an embodied, vulnerable human being is able to respond to the call of the other. No longer an icon of inhumanity, the ultimate sign of evil, nor a superhuman idol outside the law, the simple image of Hitler eating disturbingly thrust upon Rosenblatt the unmistakable recognition that Hitler was and will always remain human and responsible for his actions. Provoked by an image, Rosenblatt turns in Human Remains to provoke his audience with sounds and images that call us to recognize and respond to our own disturbing encounters with the duality of the skin of the other.In her book, Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary, Sarah Cooper (2006) asks what it might mean in ethical terms not to see the face of the other as our own. What might it mean, ethically, if we were to acknowledge an irreducible alterity that comes from cinema but also slips the bonds of cinema? What if we acknowledge the difference the cinematic apparatus creates but cannot control? She claims, on the one hand, that within documentary film, as well as in all cinema, subjects of films \"might be seen to resist reduction to the vision of the film-maker who fashions them, aligning this irreducibility with the asymmetrical relation to the Other in Levinasian thought\" (p. 5). And, on the other, that some images \"not only escape the control of the film-maker who fashions them but also the spectator\" (p. 6). Some images, Cooper argues, because they provoke us to see in excess of what we expect to see, show us how elements of \"documentary may resist the reflective mechanism that would refer one back to oneself or one's own world\" (p. 8). When what we see exceeds what we expect, the limitations of film-making, the inability of films to completely objectify and totalize the world, di","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"100-113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Colonial Visual Archives and the Anti-Documentary Perspective in Africa: Notes on Jean-Marie Teno's Films","authors":"O. Tchouaffé","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.82","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.82","url":null,"abstract":"This paper gives evidence that visual documentation is not simply collections of images and sounds. During the colonization of Africa, conventional Western documentaries were integral to the culture of racism and impunity featuring Africans as props for a monumental construction of knowledge and iconography fuelled by so-called African racial and cultural inferiority. The pregnancy of this propaganda is still felt in contemporary Africa in terms of continental self-image, self-esteem, and life chances because these colonial documentaries had become a powerful cultural archive constricting the range of African representation and opportunities to negative cliches. Accordingly, as Jean-Marie Teno claims in Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992), one of the greatest victories of colonization was \"cultural genocide\" for the ways in which the local culture was erased by the colonial cultural machines sticking Africans into the purgatory of the gods of colonialism, condemning them as perpetual peripheral characters in the construction of their own history, identity, and salvation. As a result, a real and genuine African work of colonial healing, selfrespect, and dignity is a condition sine qua non for a real ascetic process of genuine cultural liberation.Considering documentary as archives, within this context, highlights the importance of justice to emphasize the Aristotelian premise that ethical principles require universal validity and application that cannot easily be buried by political expediency or provincial prejudice. For that matter, ethics in documentary stands to rupture with the naive notion of objectivity in order to confront the complex notion that documentary making is not immune from the compromises of power and, thus, can become quickly deficient in ethics. Ethics, within this context, is not simply a matter of abstraction. The work of documentary conjures a symbolic order with social and political implications; therefore, the documentarian is to be conscious of the influence of ideology, objectivity, and self-interest in visual documentation.1 In the work of Teno, it means the extent to which it is impossible to think about contemporary Africa and its struggle for democratic development while neglecting the power and legacy of centuries of Western cultural engineering in which Africans were used as props for colonial propaganda, the injustices that derived from this colonial symbolic order and the impact of its continuous imbrications in the daily life of ordinary Africans. These processes put real constraints on cultural decolonization.This work, consequently, relies on Teno and the \"anti-documentary\" perspective which highlights how the former colonized are taking advantage of the tools and techniques of the documentary to interrogate processes in which they were documented, produced, humiliated, and alienated by the colonizers and the ethical necessity to answer back and express a more legitimate representation of blackness in terms of h","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"82-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Problem of Brandon Teena: Ethics in the Story Documentary","authors":"George S. Larke-Walsh, J. Kelly","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.33","url":null,"abstract":"Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1998), released one year before the popular Hollywood film, Boys Don't Cry (Dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999), is suggested by Jennifer Devere Brody (2002) to be a \"more ethical and perhaps even more experimental [film]\" (p. 92) than its fictional counterpart. Much has been written about the various media representations of the Brandon Teena tragedy. Most have focused on the inconsistencies revealed in the different texts, or the various ways in which transsexual identity is displayed. Valid as those approaches are, our paper is not going to compare texts, or discuss transsexual identity. Instead, we seek to investigate the notion of ethics in The Brandon Teena Story by assessing how its structure balances both message and metaphor. Throughout this paper, the message to which we refer is the arguments that the film advances, while the metaphors are representative of the narrative, the visual effects, the symbolic imagery, and the score. The intention is to provide an analysis on the ethics of representation in documentary, especially, as in this case, when the main subject of representation is absent. The documentary will be closely examined in order to interrogate the general assumption that it is more ethical in its presentation of facts. We hope to reveal much more about the film's views on the subject of Brandon Teena's murder than may initially be apparent. The purpose of such analysis is to unveil how the documentary addresses Brandon Teena's \"story\" in such a way that submerges the issues of gender identity beneath other social discourses. We intend to show how the documentary presents Brandon as a \"problem\" rather than a person.The events that ended Brandon Teena's life are a mix of fraud, sexual abuse and finally murder. While there have been various media recreations of the events that led to Brandon's death, it has been argued by Judith Halberstam (2005) that Kimberly Peirce's film Boy's Don't Cry \"more than any other representation of the case has determined the legacy of the murders\" (p. 24). The fictional film was greatly influenced by the earlier, lesser-known documentary. Though these films provide similar accounts of the crimes there are several key differences between the two that affect the messages they provide. It is understandable that Brody, as stated above, may find the documentary \"more ethical\" than the Hollywood film, since documentary through its association with \"presenting\" facts rather than \"constructing\" fiction, tends to encourage such opinions. However, in the case of the Brandon Teena topic, a crime story about a transsexual who is raped and murdered, what exactly does more ethical mean? Does it suggest that we have a clearer understanding of Brandon's identity, or a clearer understanding of the sequence of events (cause and effect) that led to his murder? In our opinion, the interesting, but frustrating aspect of nearly all the texts that attem","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"33-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contra Queer: The Metaphoric Incommensurability between Queer Politics and Coming Out","authors":"Alice Liao","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.17","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionEvoking Andrew Holleran's observation that \"every new friendship in the gay life entailed an explanation of How I Got Here,\" Patrick Merla concludes that \"coming out\" has become a central event in a gay man's life, and \"the way in which the man comes out reverberates throughout his life\" (Merla, 1996). Coming out, that is, the act of enunciation of an individual's non-heteronormative sexuality, is key to the social narrative of being gay in America. This \"event\" is central also to a lesbian's life and within lesbian identity. As in Weiss's discussion, the coming-out narrative is reflected in lesbian independent films (Weiss, 2004) as well as other cultural contexts. In the genre of lesbian feminist fiction, moreover, the coming-out narrative has been the paradigmatic model of writing since the 1970s (Wilson, 1996; Jolly, 2001). To broaden the scope still, those who are bisexual, transsexual, and even those with disabilities and cancer, those who are rape victims, straight spouses of homosexual partners, and non-racially marked ethnicities all need to come out (Field, 1993; Buxton, 1994; Carbado, 2000; Arnold, 2000; Lesbian and Breast Cancer Project Team, 2004; Lo, 2006). Indeed, the \"coming out\" narrative is pervasive and central in the conceptualization of non-heteronormative identity formation and community development and has been adopted in different venues and contexts that are not directly related to sexuality. There is something about the coming out experience that is conformatory, that confers an acceptable identity onto someone, that assures the subject group support and inclusion.Yet, \"coming out\" is not a definitive or fixed event or process as the term itself might imply, but rather an individually variable experience(s) whose meaning is contextually and historically dependent. By demonstrating the heterogeneous use of the term \"coming out,\" I hope to problematicize the naturalization of \"coming out\" as an inevitable process in identity formation and a narrative in identity expression. Contrary to its \"naturalness,\" the term \"coming out\" has been deployed as a trope to frame our conceptualization of nonheteronormative identity and expression. The exact time when sexuality becomes, if at all, a constitutive part of one's identity may vary across culture and history. Foucault notes, in the Western culture, the discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth century caused a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy and scrutiny of the sexuality of those who did not like the opposite sex and for these people to make the difficult confession of what they were (Foucault, 1990, 38-39).Adoption and Transformation of the Coming Out Metaphor in Post-Stonewall U.S. History\"Coming out\" of non-heteronormative individuals is a relatively recent phenomenon in Western culture. In fact, research on the historical discourse of gay culture indicates that \"coming out\" gained its social significance as a strategic pract","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"11 1","pages":"17-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How Digital Perfection Disempowers Scholars","authors":"J. S. Fulda","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"It is commonly assumed that the perfection of digital copies, as opposed to the \"noise\" in analog copies, represents an enhancement of information transmission. Actually, however, that analog \"noise\" was \"signal\" to those receiving the analog copies. From the recipients' perspective, the fullness of the signal they once received from analog copies abated with the noiseless digital alternative.When I was a sophomore in college, one of my professors in elaborating what made for an A and what made for a B said that he had no option but to assign the one or the other, that he could not do what he witnessed as an between an A and a B. He remarked to the class that when transcripts of his record were sent out, way before there were computers, the Registrar handcopied this hybrid glyph making sure to reproduce it with its full ambiguity. Such, he said, he could not do for us, for all grades in the mid-'70s were entered into a database and mainframe-generated labels were placed on transcripts of record. What made his story compelling, what held the class' attention, was the cutesy implausibility of someone manually copying such a hybrid grade without resolving it into either of its constituents. In the analog world, such a \"perfect\" copy was an anomaly. In the digital world, were there such a glyph, it would be the norm.I want in this essay to point out the consequences of the loss of this technological noise to scholars. One of the most difficult to obtain desiderata for scholars who work hard and long on their papers is genuine, helpful, informed, and informative feedback on their work. Too often, such feedback concentrates on such inessentials as the number of references, the length of the paper, and a lot of to-do about pronominal constructs (not just the \"he\"/\"she\" controversy, but also the nuanced switching between the editorial \"we,\" the authorial \"I,\" and the autobiographical \"I\"). The only comments that can ever be helpful to the author are those that did not occur to him - obviously, the author is aware of the length of his submission, the length of his bibliography, and his choice of pronominal constructs. All too often, moreover, such unhelpful comments are delivered with a degree of invective made possible only by the blind-review process.Formerly, authors would often get a polite note of rejection from the editor, denying the paper further review. Sometimes, the short note would cite \"a scope of the journal\" issue, the number of submissions received compared with the number that could be accommodated, and the like. The next sentence usually informed the authors not to take such judgments as an indication of the worth of their own paper and may even have praised the paper, directly or indirectly. Since editorial review almost always precedes formal review by referees, it is essential for an author to understand what that last sentence means in his case: It may mean nothing, simple boilerplate, or it may mean a simple case of submitting to th","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"5-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Documentary Film Beyond Intention and Re-Presentation: Trinh T. Minh-ha and the Aesthetics of Materiality","authors":"Antony Fredriksson","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.2.67","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.2.67","url":null,"abstract":"Pluralism-the incommensurability and, at times, incompatibility of objective ends-is not relativism, nor, a fortiori, subjectivism, nor the allegedly unbridgeable differences of emotional attitude on which some modern positivists, emotivists, existentialists, nationalists and, indeed, relativistic sociologists and anthropologists found their accounts.-Isaiah Berlin, 1990, p. 87... the agent is awash with many images, many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another. To sort things out to a point at which they seem like an assembly of definite and identifiable voices is already an achievement.-Bernard Williams, 2002, p. 195The documentary easily lends itself to an exploitative attitude in which the director projects collective conceptions or subjective views on the world. On the other hand, the notion of the documentary alludes to an attitude in which the author is sensitive towards features, gestures and material traces that cannot be constructed or directed. The latter notion is similar to Theodor Adorno's (2004) idea of the aesthetics of materiality. Materiality, in the sense that Adorno uses the word, refers to two different aspects of depiction. First, materiality refers to the medium itself and the technique that is used. Film as a medium; the different technical operations, the apparatus and the different stages of production provide certain material conditions for depiction. Secondly, materiality refers to the material qualities of the object in the film -features, gestures and other material traces that are registered irrespective of the intentions of the author. In acknowledging these material aspects, Adorno expresses a certain understanding of the morality of depiction. This involves an ethic where the portrayer refrains from erasing the different material traces that reveal the mediating purpose of depiction. According to Adorno the artwork mediates by participating in the historical world; it does not communicate a ready made image of something beyond its boundaries (Sinha, 2000, p. 157). When the director preserves the material traces in the film recording that bear witness of a world beyond the intentions or conceptions of the author, he/she accepts that the cinematic space, just like the social and historical world, is not directly controllable or maneuverable.Contrary to the Aristotelian line of thought, the aesthetics of Adorno is not based on a relation of likeness between the representation and the object that is represented. In his reading of Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Martin Jay (1997) notes that there is something contradictory or nonsensical in the notion of Aristotle's mimesis. On one hand, mimesis refers to the imitation of nature, a duplication that is based on the idea of the sufficiency of nature. Another meaning of mimesis is the substitution (recreation, simulation) of nature; this entails a change or a refinement of that which already exists. In the first case we can speak of reproducti","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"67-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright","authors":"R. Deazley, M. Kretschmer, L. Bently","doi":"10.11647/OBP.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Read for free online: this volume conceives a new history of copyright law. Privilege and Property is recommended in the Times Higher Education Textbook Guide (November, 2010).","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64769626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Locating Agency: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Professional Ethics and Archival Morality","authors":"D. Wallace","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.172","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionThe world is on fire. Societies all over the world struggle incessantly and aggressively over the control of information to shape commonly held understandings of the present and the meaning to be derived from the past. These constructions and reconstructions have the potential to both legitimate and operate in opposition to structures of domination and injustice. Such dynamics feature regularly in the mass media. Consider the following:* Scholarly access to the world's largest Holocaust archives- the International Tracing Service (ITS)-had, until recently, been denied for over sixty years. This is remarkable given that these files were likely to reveal the names of unknown victims and shed new light on the structure and administration of forced labor and extermination camps.* Japan's ongoing struggles to remove from its high school textbooks long acknowledged responsibility for major war crimes committed by the Imperial Army during World War II.* How political considerations regularly confound attempts in the U.S. to formally recognize the Armenian genocide of the early twentieth century. Turkey continues to forcefully deny its responsibility for this genocide, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and uses its geostrategic importance to the U.S. to defeat recognition.* Key portions of Serbia's military archives from the Bosnian war were withheld from the International Court of Justice, leading several insiders to comment that such secrecy helped to absolve Serbia from charges of genocide and exempt it from monetary reparations.* Access to Bulgaria's cold war intelligence archives was contested amidst charges that they would identify current political and business leaders as collaborators with the communist era security services.* Brown University recently mined its archives as part of an effort to investigate its historical culpability in slavery and the slave trade. It launched a series of public events to stimulate discussion on institutional responses to the relationship between the present and past injustices.* In 2006, a U.S. National Archives audit found that up to one-third of 25,000 documents secretly removed from public access at its facilities since 1999 were inappropriately re-classified by various agencies.What is striking from these examples is not isolated to their profound nature. Equally remarkable is their ordinariness. A myriad of similar struggles could have easily been highlighted. The intersection among archives, professional ethics, archival praxis, the agency of individual archivists, and struggles for social justice is constantly at play across the globe. In such settings, archives and archivists can serve as instruments for sustaining, undermining, and challenging power and injustice. Yet, normative discussions of archival ethics largely evade these issues, and the promulgation of professional codes of ethics provides little value for understanding and reacting to these complexities.Given these evasi","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"19 1","pages":"172-189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ethics from the Bottom Up? Immersive Ethics and the LIS Curriculum","authors":"J. Britz, E. Buchanan","doi":"10.3172/JIE.19.1.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3172/JIE.19.1.12","url":null,"abstract":"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 ins","PeriodicalId":39913,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Ethics","volume":"70 1","pages":"12-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69754644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}