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.