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Consequences of Computing:
A Framework for Teaching
Introduction - Page 4 of 36
Contribution of Other Disciplines
Over the past 10-15 years, the social and ethical context of computing has emerged as a focused
research area with its own organizations, specialist journals, specialist conferences, and
graduate programs. For those new to this area, some suggestion of the role the various
disciplines play in understanding the social and ethical context of computing may be in order.
Work in the area is scattered widely in journals, conference reports, and books. The references
to this report list many resources in the area and may be useful for those wanting an
introduction. The short discussion here simply suggests how a variety of disciplines inform our
understanding of the social and ethical context of computing.
Much of the work in social and ethical issues in computing has been done within computer science
itself. Classical works include Norbert Weiner's "The Human Use of Human Beings" [56] and
Joseph Wiezenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason" [57]. Computer scientists currently
publishing in the field include many of those on the steering committee. In the late 1970's
sociological inquiry was started by Hiltz & Turoff with their book "The Network Nation" [21].
Other sociologists have followed this work by carefully looking at computers in the workplace
and in education [5, 49]. Anthropologists have also contributed to our understanding of
computing with their careful observations of people at work [51]. Psychologists, particularly
social psychologists, have been investigating interaction over networks, the use of computers at
work, and gender and computing for more than a decade now [24, 34, 49]. Much of the primary
social science research has now been collected in textbooks for both graduate and undergraduate
students [22, 31, 42, 45].
Philosophers and ethicists began looking in the 1970s at the ethical issues computing technology
raised. Primary scholarly work has accumulated on topics such as the duties of professionals,
the purposes of codes of ethics, responsibility for computer systems behavior, intellectual
property, privacy, and organizational ethics and whistleblowing [7, 8, 18, 35, 39]. Several
textbooks have also been published summarizing this work [26, 27, 14].
There is clearly a great deal of work being done in the social and ethical aspects of computing,
and the work has been well summarized for students in textbooks. With the emergence of
graduate programs in the area, our knowledge of the social and ethical issues in computing has
clearly reached a maturity that allows us to establish some standards about what undergraduate
computer science students should know.
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