Search results

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to provide an overview of three papers included in a Special Issue of the Journal of Information Communication Ethics and Society, entitled Ethics in the Virtual World.

The papers were chosen because they reflect three key themes in computing, ethics and society. These are: the explosion in the number of opportunities for accessing sensitive data in the health sector; the risks inherent in designing information systems through technical procedures that fail to address the human character of the environments they are intended to serve; and the need to teach computing ethics to students of computing. All three articles draw on philosophical approaches to ethics and well as technical aspects of system use, system design and pedagogy, respectively.

The papers demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of computing ethics and the contested political issues at stake in using and designing information systems.

This editorial viewpoint paper presents the hypothesis that the ethical issues once embodied in socio‐technical systems theory have a particular salience for the contemporary ethical debates concerning computing ethics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people communicate in organisations.

The approach in doing this is based on two pillars. One being a philosophical phenomenological approach dealing mainly ethical questions concerning communication and interaction in designing and implementing electronic health records (EHR). The other is videoobservation of work procedures in hospitals because appropriate for unveiling tacit knowledge in an organisation.

The paper discusses the inappropriate design and implementation of actual EHR's in the Danish hospital system. Where the technology is based on hierarchical and economic structured managerialist thinking and doing, that eliminates the everyday knowledge of nursing staff and the patient.

The value of this paper that it lays forward the inappropriate paradigmatic thinking of hospital systems concerning communication and interaction in designing and implementing EHRs.