1998 Presentations

ABSTRACTS - 1998 EEI21

(Click on a presenter's name for biographical information.)

Alfred Bork, The University of California-Irvine Netiva Caftori, Northeastern University; Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Computers and Major Ethical Problems of Society Our society has major problems, some ethical in nature. We also have a powerful new technology, changing society, the computer. Much discussion concerning ethics and computers is concerned particularly with new ethical problems associated with computers, such as those generated by the internet. Our intent here is different; we ask how this technology can be used to solve some major ethical problems of our world. Our discussion is very incomplete, and needs much further consideration. We consider only one problem, violence, as an example. Other possibilities will, we hope, come up in the discussion, and in future work in this direction. VIOLENCE One such major problem in our society is the prevalence of violence. Throughout history, we have been a violent species. This is seen both is everyday life, and in the wars that plague our society. Current attempts to control violence have been almost entirely unsuccessful. Humans seem to be one of the cruelest of all species. Violence goes back to early childhood, before the days of school. So we need to start with very young children. Efforts of parents and religions have not helped; indeed, many of these are themselves violent. Special trainers can work with young children and their parents, and can lead them to understand that violence is not a desirable way to interact with other people, but very few such trainers are available, considered worldwide. Major leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have shown us some of the details. How can computers help to produce a less violent society? The key is, as suggested, to help very young children toward a non-violent way of life. We can provide such learning with carefully prepared highly interactive computer-based learning material, using the special trainers already mentioned as the designers of the learning units. We can now use voice input and voice output, so that the users will not need to be able to read. Initial material might be in English, but other languages could soon follow. Can such interactive learning material be prepared and used with young children and parents? Will it produce a less violent society? We believe the chances are promising. The design and development of highly interactive units is an understood process, needing no new technology, although it is seldom done. Voice input is also well developed, with several commercially available products. But more experience is needed with children's voices. The issue of how effective such units will be can only be decided empirically. DEVELOPING HIGHLY INTERACTIVE LEARNING UNITS At least four stages enter into the production activities, project management, pedagogical design, implementation, and formative evaluation and improvement. Specialists are needed in each area for quality units. Pedagogical design and formative evaluation are particularly important. Pedagogical design can be done with small groups of people, probably teachers, who are familiar with the children to be reached, and are skilled in nonviolent approaches. The central problem is to ask the right questions, to understand at each moment what the child is thinking. The purpose of these questions is to decide what learning sequences are to be presented next. Much of the questioning will be situational in nature; what would the child do in the situation? In formative evaluation the object is to see how well the material works with the intended students. Weak places can be improved, and the process can then be repeated. Motivational issues must also be evaluated; we want the units to hold the attraction of all students. Interaction helps here. VOICE INPUT This technology has been commercially available for many years. But it has seldom been used with the young children we are interested in. The child's vocabulary is small, making the speech recognition task a bit simpler. THE FUTURE Why is this not done? The process is not inexpensive, so support is necessary. This very important experiment should be tried.

Elizabeth Bowman, The University of Tennessee-Memphis, Mary McCain, The University of Tennessee-Memphis Critical Legal Issues of the Patient Record Management Information from health records is unique in the number of laws and regulations governing its use. The speakers will discuss the role of the health information manager in maintaining the record in compliance with these requirements. The laws and regulations governing health records in all formats, paper or computerized, will be covered including: patient privacy and release of information issues, AIDS, adoptions, required reporting to states. There will also be discussion of laws applying only to health information in an electronic format including admissibility in court, state "paper and pen laws," electronic signatures, the impact of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and how facilities are dealing with these laws and issues as they incrementally move toward implementation of a computer-based patient record format.

J. J. Britz, The University of Pretoria Information Poor - Information Rich: Critical Evaluation, Description, and Proposed Solution In this article the concepts information rich and information poor are critically evaluated. A new description of information rich and information poor is formulated. It is seen from a development perspective and based on three interrelated concepts namely knowledge, information and an information infrastructure. The following prerequisites for information wealth are identified: the ability to give meaning to information, the level of information literacy, the availability of essential information, and a well-developed information infrastructure. A solution is further more proposed to solve the problem of information poverty. The Economic Systems Approach is seen as a possible economic framework to solve the problem of information poverty. In the application of this framework the following aspects need to deserve attention: the person concerned in the context of development, die level of information literacy, the enhancement of local knowledgeand the acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of the global information based economy.

Jack Buchanan, The University of Tennessee-Memphis and The University of Memphis Information Technology and Clinical Services Can technology really help deliver better health care services at lower cost? In most industries, technology has been used to improve productivity and thus to decrease costs. In the health care industry, however, technology is most often blamed for increased costs. It is our challenge to use technology to improve productivity in the delivery of health services. The medical community has been slow to adopt an electronic patient record and most clinical records remain paper based. Partly for this reason, the medical community has been slow to significantly use modern information technologies to assist in patient care. If a person is ill or injured in a strange city, or goes to a different provider in his own city, it is likely that his financial status will be known within minutes. It is almost certain that his previous medical records will not be available prior to the initiation of treatment. There is a significant chance the previous records will not be obtained prior to discharge. This usually means that procedures and tests will be repeated, either because of lack of knowledge of the previous tests or difficulty in obtaining those results. Although the advantages of location independent delivery of a comprehensive clinical record are obvious, the amount of information to be distributed, the necessity that comprehensive boundary crossing approaches be developed, and the inadequacies of previous technology have been factors delaying deployment. Failures of technology, however, represent only part of the reason for slow deployment of comprehensive electronic clinical information systems. To use information technology to adequately support clinical medicine, we need to more clearly focus on the process of clinical service delivery itself, potentially redefining clinical service delivery to more appropriately include technological aids. As we try to reengineer health care information systems we need to define who needs the information. Clearly, it is the primary care giver who integrates the clinical information. Specialty specific information which, by definition, pertains to only part of the problem, is most useful when it is put in a clinical context with the rest of the information about the patient. Only the primary care practitioner is in a position to do this information integration. It is tempting to say that the primary care giver needs only a summary of more specialized information and, in most cases, this is correct. However, for some cases, it is only from the clinical context that the relevance of certain details may be apparent. Thus, while summaries are useful, electronic pointers to all of the data must be provided to the practitioner so he has it available when it is needed. While it is useful to have this information in the practitioner's private office, it must also be readily available at the patient's bedside or nursing station and at the time and location of the delivery of the clinical services. Since we don't always know, a priori, where the patient and the caregiver will be (and they may not necessarily always be at a common location), we should ideally have access to this information anywhere, anytime. Anytime one talks about comprehensive, ubiquitous, electronic data bases, issues of confidentiality arise. However, present paper based patient records are far from secure. Busy medical records departments routinely release complete patient records on the basis of a scribbled signature from someone wearing a white coat. From a legal point of view, adequate safeguards against misuse are generally in place. The financial industry is showing us that issues of authentication and authority are relatively straightforward. In addition, while it is important that confidentiality be designed into our systems, mechanisms for override, with subsequent justification, must be installed for cases of patient emergency. It would be particularly unfortunate if comprehensive patient information could not be accessed at the time of medical emergency for lack of a password.

Wanda V. Dole, State University of New York at Stony Brook Jitka M. Hurych, Northern Illinois University Values for Librarians in the Information Age The North American library profession has been concerned with ethical issues since its beginning. Ethical issues raised in the early years dealt primarily with librarians' responsibility to the employer or patron. The focus later shifted to questions of professional identity, organizational environment, and social responsibilities. Rapid technological change and the advent of the Information Age are forcing the library profession to rethink its mission and responsibilities. This paper explores some of the ethical issues that academic librarians are struggling with at the end of a millennium as they face the Information Age. In the first part of the paper, the authors discuss currently accepted values and codes of ethics for librarians and question the adequacy of these values and codes for the Information Age. The second part of the paper reports the results of a survey administered to librarians in two Northern American universities, students in an introductory library science class, and librarians at a conference in the Crimea. The purpose of the survey was to examine the values which the librarians and prospective librarians considered most important and to identify differences in the priorities of values assigned by the groups studied.

Thomas Froehlich, Kent State University Ethical Aspects of Internet Tools and Resources: Are Search Engines Ethical? A technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. Technologies include intellectual technologies, such as cataloging and indexing, and software technologies, such as search engines, metasearchers and subject directories on the Internet. Search engines have intrinsic properties that make them inherently and irredeemably flawed, because they attempt to infer intellectual properties, such as the meaningful content of a web site, from physical properties. Search engines rely primarily on query term location and query term frequency, sometimes boosted by other computable factors, such as link popularity. It is true that there may be a correlation between physical properties and intellectual properties. For example, the occurrence of a query term in the title of a document or web page often does mean that the document is about that term, at least in part or for the most part, and that the term is important; similarly, term frequency may be an indicator about the relative importance of that term in a particular web page and thereby about the relative importance of that web site with respect to that term as a query term. But this correlation is a weak one and certainly not directly causal: for example, any term in a title or URL of a web site does not mean the article is about that term. Consider the web site entitled and URLed as "web pages that suck" which is hardly about the joys of breast feeding. The attempt to reduce intellectual properties to physical properties is just another version of a longstanding idiocy of making the problem fit the technology rather than the reverse: search engine software developers make the information seeking problem fit the technology rather than making technology fit the problem. This is because of the nature of computers: they can count and determine location (as long as the location is easily identifiable, e.g., a title field), but they cannot determine meaningful connections. So too is it with metasearchers and subject directories. What is problematic about these tools is that they are offered as if they were legitimate intellectual technologies: they rarely, if at all, explain their limitations, drawbacks, purview (what section of the Internet they cover), or means of ranking the output. Social responsibility insists that, like information professionals, they should promote, to the extent possible, informed consent. But the domination of economics on the Internet mitigates against admissions of the flawed nature of each engine or the possibility of informed consent. To the extent that they pretend to be authoritative and have intellectual substance and do not promote informed consent, they can be regarded as unethical. Furthermore, they embrace, sustain and perpetuate an ideology: the domination of culture by technology, which in turn is driven by the domination of economics in cultural, social and political life. This drive has led to attempts to make commodities of all intellectual work, to demean public interest in and free access to information, and to turn the Internet into a giant shopping mall, where the goods are not simply material. Such an ideology has fostered a rampant consumerism, and deployed capitalism without conscience around the world as the new theology. Capitalism without conscience means that profits and jobs overshadow all other kinds of concerns: public interest, environmentalism, and other forms of social responsibility.

Mikhail Goncharov, Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology Internet Technologies in Russian Libraries: Main Projects and Basic Servers In 1995-1997 a new trend became evident in the development of telecommunication and network technologies and their applications in library practice due to the expanded scope of activities in libraries, governmental organizations, and independent foundations. A new impetus was given to a number of projects which contributed significantly to the improvement of the state of these technologies in Russian libraries and allowed them to approach the international level. It is first of all the project "Russian Libraries on the Internet", the "LIBWEB Network Project", and the project of Russian Corporate Cataloging Center. A brief review of operating library web-servers in Russia is given in this article.

David Kemme, The University of Memphis Corporations, Electronic Markets, and Consumers: The Socialist Controversy of the 21st Century I. Introduction II. The Old Socialist Controversy A. Social Welfare Maximilzation vs. Socially Conditioned Demand B. Economic Agents: Households, Firms and Government C. Information Coordination: Markets vs. Central Planning D. Pareto: Walrasian simulation to market solution E. The perfect information-perfect calculation requirement F. Individual welfare maximilization leading to social welfare maximization III. The Failure of Central Planning A. Existence vs. Efficiency of Socialism B. Convergence C. Information Needs and the Failure of Centrally-Planned Socialism IV. The Role of Information & Electronic Markets A. Atomistic competition: Electronic markets as a Walrasian system B. Asymmetric information and unequal market power C. Rent seeking by firms via pre-bundling and lowering transactions costs D. Bounded rationality and incomplete contracting by households: directed consumption revisted E. Individual welfare maximilzation vs. social welfare maximization V. The Ethics of Imperfect Information A. Imperceptible bundling changes and directed consumption B. Consumer awareness and alternatives to pre-bundling and directed consumption C. The role of government: privacy, information access and use VI. Conclusions

J. Wayne King, Lenoir-Rhyne College A. Dale King, Lenoir-Rhyne College Social Responsibility in an Information Technology Age The computer is a man-made device which requires political, legal, and ethical responsibilities. In assessing the social responsibilities associated with information technology as we move into the new millennium, the organization must address three simple questions: 1) Is It Legal?; 2) Is It Balanced?; and 3) How Will It Make Me Feel? An ethical environment within an organization utilizing information technology can be easily established, with or without an ethics officer, if the organization follows the guide of these questions. This ethical environment will demonstrate a corporate conscience which could lead the organization into the next century.

Wallace C. Koehler, The University of Oklahoma J. Michael Pemberton, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville Towards a Model Code of Ethics for Information Professionals: The Technology Lacuna Despite their historic fragmentation and typically arms-length relationships, the information disciplines (e.g., librarianship, archives management, records management, information science) have much in common. There are, in fact, forces at work driving them ever closer towards one another. Among these convergent forces are common information technologies, certain economic conditions (e.g., downsizing), and what we believe to be a shared set of ethical principles. While codes of ethics can be followed only at the individual level, the professional associations necessarily play a significant role in the development, publication, revision, and promotion of ethical principles. Here we show that a textual analysis of the codes of ethics sponsored by a variety of associations for information professionals reveals a set of shared foundational canons. To learn if there were a core set of ethical principles shared by the information professions and if a type of syncretic code might emerge, we analyzed texts of codes issued by information associations. From 267 such associations identified on a world-wide basis we learned that most associations do not have written codes. Analysis of 35 codes which we collected showed that there were 78 facets in six major areas of concern: client/patron rights and privileges, selection of materials, professional practice, access issues, employer responsibility, and social issues. Based on this analysis, we suggest a foundational code of ethics which may be set out as follows: Whenever possible, place the needs of clients above other concerns. Understand the roles of the information practitioner and strive to meet them with the greatest possible skill and competence. Support the needs and interests of the profession and the professional association(s). Insofar as they do not conflict with professional obligations, be sensitive and responsive to social responsibilities appropriate to the profession. Be aware of and be responsive to the rights of users, employers, fellow practitioners, one's community, and the larger society. We believe that knowledge of these foundational principles could be of value to future framers (or revisers) of codes in the information disciplines. Notable by its absence in our analysis is reference to information technology as an ethical concern, though Rubin and Froehlich suggest that it is one of nine major areas of concern to librarians.1 Either this issue is over looked by developers of the various codes-- including those of recent origin--because (1) it was simply overlooked, (2) it is seen somehow as irrelevant since information technology is not a moral agent, or (3) is subsumed as a given under principles which more explicitly appear in the codes. While is would appear that enunciation and espousal of ethical principles regarding the use of information technologies would appear to fall into the professional associations' domain, few have chosen to speak directly to this area.

Tomas Lipinski, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Elizabeth Buchanan, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Where Have All the Children Gone? Pernicious Marketing on the Internet How are new forms of technology violating the rights of children? What do such mechanisms as Internet tracking technologies mean in terms of the targeting of children by marketers? Is the Internet merely one more arena where children constitute a captive audience, ready to be indoctrinated as future participants in society? The idea of children as a captive audience is not new, though in the technological age, it is advancing at a dramatic pace. Rather than a positive education tool for childhood empowerment, is the Internet yet one more arena in which children are forced to grow old before their time, subject to the pernicious advertising and marketing campaigns of consumerism? The data mining activities of marketers result in the collection of a personal information from children, not only about themselves but about their families as well. This raises privacy concerns. In addition, there is concern that this information might be purchased and used by more dangerous elements to in fact exploit and abuse children. These and other related questions raise serious implications for the rights of children in the technological age. It is important to identify and discuss the forms of marketing manipulation employed through the use of advanced communication technologies. These technologies contribute ultimately to the loss of childhood autonomy and the destruction of the personhood of the child. One area of exploitation revolves around the recent attempts by marketers to collect personal demographic information from children about themselves and their households, interests and activities, and to market products and services to children using these new interactive communications technologies. The information is gathered through the use of interactive technologies including, e-mail, chat rooms, and primarily the focus of this study, web sites. Product and service marketing is often hidden in the guise of an educational site. Attractively packaged and designed like the promise of the toy inside the cereal box, these virtual technologies engage and entice children to reveal vast amounts of highly personal information through the most invasive and disguised of data mining strategies. Like the young inhabitants of Hamlin, it is difficult for children to do other than to follow. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, the philosophical foundation of childhood autonomy and personhood are discussed. Second, the results of a study of demonstrative web sites designed to either collect marketing information children or to market products and services to children are evaluated. Finally, alternatives for protecting children in the Internet and web context are reviewed with respect to children, and a concept of the personhood of the child is developed for the information age. The philosophical debate centers upon the question of what rights children have in society and who has responsibility for their care. The right of a child to their own condition of privacy may conflict with the parent's right and responsibility in the care and upbringing of the child. Several principles of personal autonomy are discussed with respect to children, and a concept of the personhood of the child is developed for use in a technological age. Second the results of a survey of web sties which target children are discussed. The sites are categorized by the method of data collection or `gimmick' employed (game, contest, web treasure hunt, etc.), the types of information collected, if a promise or enticement is made, and if any notice of information collection and use is present or if a parental consent provision exists. The paper evaluates the reality of the marketing process against available protection mechanisms. Several recent developments in Untied States federal information policy, including the position of the Federal Trade Commission (i.e., whether certain marketing practices to children constitute an unfair trade practice under section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. A745) and Congress, are reviewed. Specifically, the protection mechanisms of H.R. 1972, Children's Privacy and Parental Empowerment Act and H.R. 1964, Communications Privacy and Consumer Empowerment Act are discussed. An evaluation of these alternatives in light of the childhood autonomy concepts and the dangers these uses of information technologies pose to children close the paper. The various policy models include, formal and informal, some technological including monitoring, filtering or blocking, or rating, prohibition through regulations (Congressional or administrative), industry self regulation and parental supervision or custodianship.

Merrill Morris, The University of Memphis Constructing the Web Newspaper Audience: The End of Journalism as We Know It?

Yakov Shraiberg, Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology Electronic Information in Russia and Its Impact upon Culture and Economy Discussed is the current state of electronic products market in Russia, in particular in the field of science, culture, education, library science and practice, and of business. Analyzed are information arrays constituting Russian resource on the Internet, as well as the databases produced in the country, full-text and graphic electronic publications on CD-ROMs. Evaluated are the relations and efficiency of the legislation in force and the industry of electronic products as well as the impact of electronic products upon domestic economy and culture. Given are the examples and samples of electronic products of high user demand.

Thomas Singarella, The University of Tennessee-Memphis The Evolution of Electronic and Information Technology and How It Has Changed Our World How has technology evolved over the last century and resulted in the digital revolution and information explosion affecting our world today? Where did electronic, and specifically digital technology come from, where is it now, and where does it appear to be leading us? What are the emerging ethical dimensions associated with digital technology and is the hyperbole surrounding the growth of the Internet unique to the technology and the age in which we live? This presentation will focus on these questions and present a framework for looking at how electronic technology has evolved resulting in the digital revolution and information age. The discussion will include trends, key issues affecting technology, the reshaping of our educational institutions, economic realities, and societal change. You will see gradual developments in technology, major milestones which will ferment for decades before exploding into the digital revolution and the information era. Numerous examples will be provided to illustrate a pattern of key events in the formation of the information age, and how our world has gradually changed. An overview of key advances that have affected communications technology will provide a perspective on the information age and the effect it is having on society, not only in North America but throughout the world.

Gretchen Whitney, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville Private Lives and Public Spaces: Ethical Issues and Electronic Discussions Consider these questions: (a) As moderator, do you let a prominent figure put forward an ill-formatted message in an electronic discussion, making her look less than competent, or, do you correct it (and this editing is apparent from the format of the message the subscribers receive), confirming that there was something wrong in the first place? (b) Again as moderator, do you let a colleague incite a flamefest, when you suspect that the recipient will not handle it well? Do you support the free speech rights of the poster, or protect the recipient? (c) As a moderator/researcher, youre interested in electronic behavioral issues that you know will upset, incite, or otherwise disturb participants. Do you uphold the principle of informed consent before you examine their public archive of discussions, or, do you treat the archive as a public document and proceed? (d) As a participant, or a moderator, what do you do about a poster who insists on responding, with one-line responses that make no apparent sense, to everything that is posted to the list? How do you balance his free speech rights with the rights of the student (a presumed right) not to be harassed? Electronic discussion groups have grown from a novelty just five years ago to an essential way of doing business and participating in ones electronic life. But this authors recent assumption of moderating a listserv has presented several dilemmas for which there was no easy solution. The moderator of a listserv has a tremendous power for good and for evil: she can in extreme cases deny to an individual the right to be a part of the electronic community, electronically silencing them. The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the ethical issues involved in guiding and moderating the behavior of participants in the use of electronic discussion groups (EDGs). Electronic discussion groups based on software such as listserv, majordomo, listproc and mailbase number about 85,000 (Liszt) and are increasing by five or six each day (New List). They enable people to talk about every subject imaginable, scholarly to frivolous, and are readily accessible by electronic mail. They are used to support conference planning and research projects, exchange the latest news and research reports, supplement (and even take the place of) classroom learning, manage an organization, and any other use to which two people can think of. The technology is quite simple and straightforward: at the heart of the software is a simple mail reflector. A message is sent to an administrative address, copies of which are then sent on to individuals who have signed up to receive such messages. (USENET news groups are not discussed here: they are also EDGs, but have different problems because of the way participants use them, the way they are established, and archived.) The person in charge of an EDG is sometimes known as the owner, administrator, or moderator. While these are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a range of activities involved. At the simplest level, the owner simply has set up the mechanics of the discussion, and may exert no control over who may join, who may post to the group, or what is said. The welcome message may be minimal, non-existent, or the standard one offered by the software. Various controls are possible, such as restricting postings to those who have joined the list, instituting various restrictions on who may join, and governing what is said. Regarding content, we see a continuum from simple approval of messages to a heavily edited document that resembles a scholarly journal. As more controls are placed on the group, more ethical concerns arise. These types of editorial controls are not unknown in the print world: an editor of a journal, for example, will change copy, and must consider when joint-authorship or some other attribution would be appropriate given the amount of effort placed on the article. And, in fact, some EDGs, as do introductions to newspaper Letter to the Editor columns, state up front that messages may be edited for brevity, clarity, and so forth. One key difference is that, depending upon how the software is set up, the fact that editing has been done may be readily apparent (tho not exactly what has changed). And, the participant has a ready forum in which to complain loudly about those changes. Each EDG is different, and has reached different decisions based upon its purpose and its readership. In ADV-HTML, for example, only questions, administrative notes and summaries are permitted, and if an individual posting a question does not post a summary of answers received in a reasonable amount of time, the moderator removes the offending individual from the group. While extreme, this does result in a focused discussion and a very useful archive. In other problem-solving groups, answers to many questions do not go into the archive. The behavioral issues raised in participating in EGDs range in a continuum from violations of etiquette and good manners to unethical and illegal practices. For example, almost every EDG (unless moderated) receives mis-directed administrative messages from time to time, and tends to go off-track on occasion. Further, the practice of forwarding copyrighted information is not uncommon. Privacy is at times violated, inadvertently many times. Privacy however becomes a much larger issue when considering the research use of the archives of these groups. This issue is particularly thorny: Kidder makes a distinction between "right vs. right" decisions (ethical dilemmas) and "right vs. wrong" decisions (moral temptations). According to this distinction, the practice of copyright violation becomes a moral temptation (besides illegal) rather than an unethical practice as it is often presented or interpreted. The nature and degree of punishment for infractions also varies from a polite off-line warning to dismissal from the group, and the punishment for a single infraction will vary across EDGs. Misdirecting a message will yield dismissal in one, for example, and a corrective message off-list in another. Does it make sense to talk about ethical issues regarding EDGs? Applied ethics traditionally is used to interpret and understand broad social issues such as animal rights and abortion (Applied Ethics). Computer ethics, emerging as a discipline of its own and becoming, in its "second generation", information ethics (Rogerson) concerns the analysis and understanding of issues affected by or generated by computing and its practices. Again, broad social issues such as privacy are of primary concern. However, these broad social issues are not only on the social policy agenda, they are on the daily agenda of people simply trying to "do the right thing" in life (Kidder, MacDonald) or in scholarly research (Thomas). Are we dealing with moral issues or ethical ones? Thomas (Introduction), asserts that "Ethics refers to the character or conscience of a person in relation to a group, and morality refers to the value system of a group in relation to the individual." (p108) Because we are dealing with the relationship of a person to a group, we will argue that in part, we are talking about ethical issues. MacDonald (1995) suggests that decisions of moral importance can be indicated by "conflicts between two or more values or ideals." Some of the values that can come into conflict in EDGs include privacy vs. sharing information respect for the individual vs. concern for the archive free speech vs. respect for others respect for bandwidth vs. free speech Thus, we will argue that indeed there are ethical concerns in working in and understanding EDGs. According to informal interviews with list owners (and this authors experience), guidelines for proper list participating are set out either as explicit guides for behavior, or incorporated into welcome messages. They may be accessed on the web or received upon subscribing to the discussion group. This paper will report on the examination of such messages and web pages for the approximately 50 new EDGs (NEWLIST archives) in the biomedical sciences since July 1 of 1997. These EDGs are primarily patient-oriented, a few are physician-oriented. The examination will be a textual analysis of the types of behaviors addressed, classed according to the definitions given above for manners, ethical and illegal behavior. They will also be analyzed for concerns for specific issues such as privacy, defamation and libel, and intellectual property. They will be compared with selected non-biomedical guides which are known to be extensive. When appropriate, interviews will be conducted with the listowners to understand the development of the guide. Particular attention will be paid to the issue of privacy and the degree to which a public list is deemed private information. For example, the new CFS-20s list, which is publicly accessible, is in its Rules deemed a private list for discussion by young people with CFIDS/CFS/ME, and research using the list is prohibited. The new PREMIE-L, for parents of prematurely born children, does not. However, it does advise not posting more than 2-3 messages a day unless absolutely necessary. In the analysis we will discuss the issue of perceived privacy and its relationship t public archives. It is expected that most of the directives will be rule-deontological, that is, specific directions regarding what is to be done or not done, and fewer will be act-deontological, that is, espousing a principle of behavior. It is expected that few will take a consequentialist or teleological position. That is, they are not expected to present a situation in which a decisions is to be made regarding the consequences of the act under discussion. (Thomas, Introduction). References Applied Ethics. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Accessed 22 July 1998) Liszt, the Mailing List Directory. (Accessed 22 July 1998) NEW-LIST@HYPATIA.CS.WISC.EDU. [listserv]. Archive of pre 1 July 1998 postings at (Accessed 22 July 1998) Kidder, Rushworth M. How Good People Make Tough Choices. New York: William Morrow, 1995. (Accessed 22 July 1998) MacDonald, Chris. A Guide to Moral Decision Making. October 19, 1995. (Accessed 22 July 1998) Thomas, Jim. The Ethics of Fair Practices for Collecting Social Science Data in Cyberspace. Special Section. The Information Society 12, no.2 (1996): 103-201. Thomas, Jim. Introduction. The Ethics of Fair Practices for Collecting Social Science Data in Cyberspace. Special Section. The Information Society 12, no.2 (1996): 103-117.

Shinji Yamane, Tohoku University The Ethics of the Internet: Reading RFCs (Requests for Comments) This paper examines a historical overview about the ethical substance that had evolved Internet. This paper refers chiefly on RFC(Request For Comments: worldly-distributed and openly-reviewed documents) that contains not only standards but also nonstandard "informational" documents. In the beginning, there was the hacker ethic. The hacker ethic has been the kind of "ethos" (characteristic state of attitude) on computer environment. To understand the historical uniqueness of the ethics on the Internet, the ethos and status of hacker have a important function. The first Internet statement on ethics was "Ethics and the Internet"(RFC1087) in 1989. In this time, the computer ethics proposed as the future prevention of Internet worm. However, some of this ethical principles conflicts with the local rules. One of the conflicts is the privacy of users, for example, the use of encryption. The Internet statement on the issue is "IAB and IESG Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet"(RFC1984) in 1996. The recent ongoing Internet-Draft on the plinciples of Internet governance is "One Planet, One Net: Principles for the Internet Era" also discuss some ethical issues. The ethics of Internet is still under construction. It had begun with the will to share, claimed abuse of network resource or destroying the information, and conflicted with some governmental policy. Global discussion is also just beginning. The mechanism of Internet is building a large community which share the statements on ethics and creating new possibilities.