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Classification

323.44/5 22 (GBV;LoC)

DDC

323.44/5 22 (GBV;LoC)

Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST 58(2007) no.2, S.302 (L.A. Ennis):"This is an important and timely anthology of articles "on the normative issues surrounding information control" (p. 11). Using an interdisciplinary approach, Moore's work takes a broad look at the relatively new field of information ethics. Covering a variety of disciplines including applied ethics, intellectual property, privacy, free speech, and more, the book provides information professionals of all kinds with a valuable and thought-provoking resource. Information Ethics is divided into five parts and twenty chapters or articles. At the end of each of the five parts, the editor has included a few "discussion cases," which allows the users to apply what they just read to potential real life examples. Part I, "An Ethical Framework for Analysis," provides readers with an introduction to reasoning and ethics. This complex and philosophical section of the book contains five articles and four discussion cases. All five of the articles are really thought provoking and challenging writings on morality. For instance, in the first article, "Introduction to Moral Reasoning," Tom Regan examines how not to answer a moral question. For example, he thinks using what the majority believes as a means of determining what is and is not moral is flawed. "The Metaphysics of Morals" by Immanuel Kant looks at the reasons behind actions. According to Kant, to be moral one has to do the right thing for the right reasons. By including materials that force the reader to think more broadly and deeply about what is right and wrong, Moore has provided an important foundation and backdrop for the rest of the book. Part II, "Intellectual Property: Moral and Legal Concerns," contains five articles and three discussion cases for tackling issues like ownership, patents, copyright, and biopiracy. This section takes a probing look at intellectual and intangible property from a variety of viewpoints. For instance, in "Intellectual Property is Still Property," Judge Frank Easterbrook argues that intellectual property is no different than physical property and should not be treated any differently by law. Tom Palmer's article, "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified," however, uses historical examples to show how intellectual and physical properties differ.
Part III, "Privacy and Information Control," has four articles and three discussion cases beginning with an 1890 article from the Harvard Law Review, "The Right to Privacy," written by Samuel A Warren and Louis D. Brandeis. Moore then includes an article debating whether people own their genes, an article on caller I.D., and an article on computer surveillance. While all four articles pose some very interesting questions, Margaret Everett's article "The Social Life of Genes: Privacy, Property, and the New Genetics" is incredible. She does a great job of demonstrating how advances in genetics have led to increased concerns over ownership and privacy of genetic codes. For instance, if someone's genetic code predisposes them to a deadly disease, should insurance companies have access to that information? Part IV, "Freedom of Speech and Information Control," has three articles and two discussion cases that examine speech and photography issues. Moore begins this section with Kent Greenawalt's "Rationales for Freedom of Speech," which looks at a number of arguments favoring free speech. Then the notion of free speech is carried over into the digital world in "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society" by Jack M. Balkin. At 59 pages, this is the work's longest article and demonstrates how complex the digital environment has made freedom of speech issues. Finally, Part V, "Governmental and Societal Control of Information," contains three articles and three discussion cases which provide an excellent view into the conflict between security and privacy. For instance, the first article, "Carnivore, the FBI's E-mail Surveillance System: Devouring Criminals, Not Privacy" by Griffin S. Durham, examines the FBI's e-mail surveillance program called Carnivore. Durham does an excellent job of demonstrating that Carnivore is a necessary and legitimate system used in limited circumstances and with a court order. Librarians will find the final article in the book, National Security at What Price? A Look into Civil Liberty Concerns in the Information Age under the USA Patriot Act by Jacob R. Lilly, of particular interest. In this article, Lilly uses historical examples of events that sacrificed civil liberties for national security such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the McCarthyism of the Cold War era to examine the PATRIOT Act.
The book also includes an index, a selected bibliography, and endnotes for each article. More information on the authors of the articles would have been useful, however. One of the best features of Information Ethics is the discussion cases at the end of each chapter. For instance, in the discussion cases, Moore asks questions like: Would you allow one person to die to save nine? Should a scientist be allowed to experiment on people without their knowledge if there is no harm? Should marriages between people carrying a certain gene be outlawed? These discussion cases really add to the value of the readings. The only suggestion would be to have put them at the beginning of each section so the reader could have the questions floating in their heads as they read the material. Information Ethics is a well thought out and organized collection of articles. Moore has done an excellent job of finding articles to provide a fair and balanced look at a variety of complicated and far-reaching topics. Further, the work has breadth and depth. Moore is careful to include enough historical articles, like the 1890 Warren article, to give balance and perspective to new and modern topics like E-mail surveillance, biopiracy, and genetics. This provides a reader with just enough philosophy and history theory to work with the material. The articles are written by a variety of authors from differing fields so they range in length, tone, and style, creating a rich tapestry of ideas and arguments. However, this is not a quick or easy read. The subject matter is complex and one should plan to spend time with the book. The book is well worth the effort though. Overall, this is a highly recommended work for all libraries especially academic ones."

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Content

An information view of history -- Organs of the human brain, created by the human hand : toward an understanding of information technology -- Information society or cash nexus? : a study of the United States as a copyright haven -- As sharp as a pen : direct semantic ratification in oral, written, and electronic communication -- In the catalogue ye go for men : evaluation criteria for information retrieval systems -- Meta- and object-language for information retrieval research : proposal for a distinction -- Forms of labor in information systems -- W(h)ither information science?

Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST. 56(2003) no.12, S.1360 (C.Tomer): "Humanizing Information Technology is a collection of essays that represent what are presumably Julian Warner's best efforts to understand the perpetually nascent discipline of information science and its relationship to information technology. It is clearly a formidable task. Warner succeeds occasionally in this endeavor; more often, he fails. Yet, it would be wrong to mark Humanizing Information Technology as a book not worth reading. On the contrary, though much fault was found and this review is far from positive, it was nevertheless a book well-worth reading. That Humanizing Information Technology succeeds at all is in some ways remarkable, because Warner's prose tends to be dense and graceless, and understanding his commentaries often relies an close readings of a wide array of sources, some of them familiar, many of them less so. The inaccessibility of Warner's prose is unfortunate; there is not a single idea in Humanizing Information Technology so complicated that it could not have been stated in a clear, straightforward manner. The failure to establish a clear, sufficiently füll context for the more obscure sources is an even more serious problem. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this problem stems from the frequent examination of the concept of the "information society" and the related notion of information as an autonomous variable, each of them ideas drawn largely from Frank Webster's 1995 book, Theories of the Information Society. Several of Warner's essays contain passages in Humanizing Information Technology whose meaning and value are largely dependent an a familiarity with Webster's work. Yet, Warner never refers to Theories of the Information Society in more than cursory terms and never provides a context füll enough to understand the particular points of reference. Suffice it to say, Humanizing Information Technology is not a book for readers who lack patience or a thorough grounding in modern intellectual history. Warner's philosophical analyses, which frequently exhibit the meter, substance, and purpose of a carefully crafted comprehensive examination, are a large part of what is wrong with Humanizing Information Technology. Warner's successes come when he turns his attention away from Marxist scholasticism and toward historical events and trends. "Information Society or Cash Nexus?" the essay in which Warner compares the role of the United States as a "copyright haven" for most of the 19th century to modern China's similar status, is successful because it relies less an abstruse analysis and more an a sharply drawn comparison of the growth of two economies and parallel developments in the treatment of intellectual property. The essay establishes an illuminating context and cites historical precedents in the American experience suggesting that China's official positions toward intellectual property and related international conventions are likely to evolve and grow more mature as its economy expands and becomes more sophisticated. Similarly, the essay entitled "In the Catalogue Ye Go for Men" is effective because Warner comes dangerously close to pragmatism when he focuses an the possibility that aligning cataloging practice with the "paths and tracks" of discourse and its analysis may be the means by which to build more information systems that furnish a more direct basis for intellectual exploration.
Like Daniel Bell, the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), who used aspects of Marx's thinking as the basis for his social forecasting models, Warner uses Marxist thought as a tool for social and historical analysis. Unlike Bell, Warner's approach to Marx tends to be doctrinaire. As a result, "An Information View of History" and "Origins of the Human Brain," two of the essays in which Warner sets out to establish the connections between information science and information technology, are less successful. Warner argues, "the classic source for an understanding of technology as a human construction is Marx," and that "a Marxian perspective an information technology could be of high marginal Utility," noting additionally that with the exception of Norbert Wiener and John Desmond Bernal, "there has only been a limited penetration of Marxism into information science" (p. 9). But Warner's efforts to persuade the reader that these views are cogent never go beyond academic protocol. Nor does his support for the assertion that the second half of the 19th century was the critical period for innovation and diffusion of modern information technologies. The closing essay, "Whither Information Science?" is particularly disappointing, in part, because the preface and opening chapters of the book promised more than was delivered at the end. Warner asserts that the theoretical framework supporting information science is negligible, and that the discipline is limited even further by the fact that many of its members do not recognize or understand the effects of such a limitation. However cogent the charges may be, none of this is news. But the essay fails most notably because Warner does not have any new directions to offer, save that information scientists should pay closer artention to what is going an in allied disciplines. Moreover, he does not seem to understand that at its heart the "information revolution" is not about the machines, but about the growing legions of men and women who can and do write programming code to exert control over and find new uses for these devices. Nor does he seem to understand that information science, in the grip of what he terms a "quasi-global crisis," suffers grievously because it is a community situated not at the center but rather an the periphery of this revolution."

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Abstract

Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? The recent surge in online community participation has become a cultural phenomenon enmeshed in ongoing debates about the health of American civil society. But observations about online communities often concentrate on ascertaining the true nature of community and democracy, typically rehearsing familiar communitarian and liberal perspectives. This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites to show that while the values of individual autonomy, egalitarianism, and freedom of speech dominate the discursive content of these communities, the practical realities of online life are clearly marked by exclusivity and the demands of commercialization and corporate surveillance. Promises of social empowerment are framed within consumer and therapeutic frameworks that undermine their democratic efficacy. As a result, online communities fail to revolutionize the civic landscape because they create cultures of membership that epitomize the commodification of community and public life altogether.

Content

Inhalt: The virtual community -- A high-stakes battle : the context of virtual communities -- A cultural topography of virtual communities : the rough terrain of autonomy and control -- An alternative framework for understanding virtual communities -- The institutional landscape : the market of virtual communities -- The evolving landscape of virtual communities -- Technology, the self, and the market : eyeing the horizons of a brave new democracy -- Epilogue

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Abstract

How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books. Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In The Qualified Self, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives?what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit?didn't begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today's digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it's part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life. Humphreys refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn't agree with her. Diaries, Humphreys explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven ?quantified self,? but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed.

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Abstract

According to Paul Levinson, it would be improper to portray information technology as the cause of change in our world. However, Levinson clarifies that its role in enabling change can hardly be overestimated. He also points out--through riveting examples--that inventions have unintended consequences and uses. Why is it, for example, that the move from polytheism to monotheism failed when attempted by the pharaoh Ikhnaton, yet took solid root among the Hebrews who were taken out of Egypt by Moses only about 150 years later? Levinson argues that communication technology played a key role: The awkward Egyptian hieroglyphics failed to carry the ideology as well as the Hebrew alphabetic system. From there, Levinson examines the early social changes that became possible because of what the author calls "the first digital medium"--the alphabet. He considers how the Reformation, economic and political movements, and the scientific revolution were largely enabled by the printing press. He then discusses the influence of photographic communications and electronic technology such as the telegraph, the telephone, and broadcasting. Levinson devotes the second half of the book to our present digital revolution, from word processing to the Internet and beyond. One of his key points is that new technology doesn't necessarily displace the old so much as it expands it. Therefore, he doesn't see any end to using paper anytime soon. However, he sees great need for changes in the way we view creative rights. He proposes what he calls an"electronic watermark" for intellectual property--a universal patent number that will be embedded in intellectual property and will notify users in any medium of the property's creators. Levinson puts forth his ideas in a manner that is both formal and engaging. He has a knack for making his reader feel intelligent and respected--and never more so than when he looks at issues of ethics and a speculative future.

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Abstract

In this title, a leading philosopher of the internet explains how knowledge and expertise can still work - and even grow stronger - in an age when the internet has made topics simply Too Big to Know. Knowing used to be so straightforward. If we wanted to know something we looked it up, asked an expert, gathered the facts, weighted the possibilities, and honed in on the best answer ourselves. But, ironically, with the advent of the internet and the limitless information it contains, we're less sure about what we know, who knows what, or even what it means to know at all. Knowledge, it would appear, is in crisis. And yet, while its very foundations seem to be collapsing, human knowledge has grown in previously unimaginable ways, and in inconceivable directions, in the Internet age. We fact-check the news media more closely and publicly than ever before. Science is advancing at an unheard of pace thanks to new collaborative techniques and new ways to find patterns in vast amounts of data. Businesses are finding expertise in every corner of their organization, and across the broad swath of their stakeholders. We are in a crisis of knowledge at the same time that we are in an epochal exaltation of knowledge. In "Too Big to Know", Internet philosopher David Weinberger explains that, rather than a systemic collapse, the Internet era represents a fundamental change in the methods we have for understanding the world around us. Weinberger argues that our notions of expertise - what it is, how it works, and how it is cultivated - are out of date, rooted in our pre-networked culture and assumptions. For thousands of years, we've relied upon a reductionist process of filtering, winnowing, and otherwise reducing the complex world to something more manageable in order to understand it. Back then, an expert was someone who had mastered a particular, well-defined domain. Now, we live in an age when topics are blown apart and stitched together by momentary interests, diverse points of view, and connections ranging from the insightful to the perverse. Weinberger shows that, while the limits of our own paper-based tools have historically prevented us from achieving our full capacity of knowledge, we can now be as smart as our new medium allows - but we will be smart differently. For the new medium is a network, and that network changes our oldest, most basic strategy of knowing. Rather than knowing-by-reducing, we are now knowing-by-including. Indeed, knowledge now is best thought of not as the content of books or even of minds, but as the way the network works. Knowledge will never be the same - not for science, not for business, not for education, not for government, not for any of us. As Weinberger makes clear, to make sense of this new system of knowledge, we need - and smart companies are developing - networks that are themselves experts. Full of rich and sometimes surprising examples from history, politics, business, philosophy, and science, "Too Big to Know" describes how the very foundations of knowledge have been overturned, and what this revolution means for our future.

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Abstract

In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, "the father of European documentation" (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots -- to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social "big data" as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

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Abstract

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life. From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.

Content

Inhalt: The new order of order -- Alphabetization and its discontents -- The geography of knowledge -- Lumps and splits -- The laws of the jungle -- Smart leaves -- Social knowing -- What nothing says -- Messiness as a virtue -- The work of knowledge.

Footnote

Rez. in: Publishers Weekly. May 2007: "In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break-they're already breaking-in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world.""

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Content

Seb Franklin sets out a media theory of racial capitalism to examine digitality's racial-capitalist foundations. The Digitally Disposed shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Reading archival and published material from the cybernetic sciences alongside nineteenth-century accounts of intellectual labor, twentieth-century sociometric experiments, and a range of literary and visual works, The Digitally Disposed locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism. Franklin makes the groundbreaking argument that capital's apparently spontaneous synthesis of so-called free individuals into productive circuits represents an 'informatics of value'.On the one hand, understanding value as an informatic relation helps to explain why capital was able to graft so seamlessly with digitality at a moment in which it required more granular and distributed control over labor, the moment that is often glossed as the age of logistics. On the other hand, because the informatics of value sort populations into positions of higher and lower capacity, value, and status, understanding their relationship to digitality requires that we see the digital as racialized and gendered in pervasive ways. Ultimately, The Digitally Disposed questions the universalizing assumptions that are maintained, remade, and intensified by today's dominant digital technologies. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality.