James Drogan

My current teaching assignment at SUNY Maritime College includes a graduate level course, Management Information Systems in Transportation (syllabi for this course may be found in What I am Teaching).  One of the issues we take up is the ethics of information technology.

Browsing Boing Boing this morning, I came across Ethical guidelines for a world of invisible, endless machines which, in turn, led me the last chapter of Adam Greenfield's book, Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (New Riders Press, first edition, March 10, 2006).

Most of the discussions of the ethics of information technology seems to me to be, as might be the case in Greenfield's book, centered on the individual.  What we try do in my course is extend this notion of ethics to the enterprise and the manner in which it interrelates to other enterprises.  We've not come up with any good answers after two iterations of the course, but I think we're getting better at getting our minds around the issue.