[Sigia-l] IA ethics etc - Social Irresponsibility of Engineers

[Eric Scheid]

Roger Clarke writes a lot of academic leaning articles on internet
technology. In a recent forum on ENUM he spoke out against he tendency of
engineers to promote just the upsides of whatever technology they are
working on.

This resonates with the (disparaged) designer attitude of "lets do X because
it's neat!" (where X is DHTML menus, Flash intros, etc etc).

As well as the long paper that he presented (ENUM - A Case Study in Social
Irresponsibility), he also wrote up a much shorter and also more generally
applicable article:

Is Social Irresponsibility Alive and Well?
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/SocRespISOC02.html

> It isn't the engineer's responsibility to solve all the fearsome conundrums
> that arise from these technologies. But engineers have the responsibility to:
> 
> *    anticipate that their work will have social implications;
> *    not avoid public debate about those implications;
> *    ensure that public debate takes place about those implications;
> *    actively inform that public debate, in particular by writing and
>      publishing tutorials on their work that are accessible by
>      representatives of and advocates for the affected public; and
> *    where public debate is having trouble getting started,
>      actively stimulate it.

Although not word for word applicable to IA in general, it nonetheless
speaks to me on an ethical level as a UCD-informed IA.

e.