|
AID |
Proposer |
Statement |
Supporters? |
| 1 | Alfonso Reyes | Massive use of ICT may generate forms of social exclusion. Therefore, means must be found to provide and maintain access to ICT's not only for the economically, physically, educationally disadvantaged but to the aging population as well. |  |
| 2 | Keith Pheby | Given the advanced liberal view on the 'sanctity' of the individual (supported by the dominant ethical systems of the West) the notion of 'privacy' emerges as a central concern in the context of the proliferation of ICTs. However, perhaps it is time to fashion a new ethical vocabulary. The decentered institutions of the 21st century and the decentered communities that might support them have the potential (however remote this may seem at present) for increasing an awareness of the importance of mutuality and co-dependancy: the basis of this conception of ethical life. ICTs could help facilitate this process. | |
| 3 | Loet Leydesdorff | The social construction of new technologies reconstructs the natural world as an unintended outcome of the interaction. The new definition of "nature" then emerges as part of the interactive culture, while the old one denotes a previous state of the retention mechanism. | |
| 4 | Loet Leydesdorff | 'Nature' and 'natural selection' are theoretical constructs. Theories are part and parcel of the cultural evolution. | |
| 5 | Loet Leydesdorff | One may expect the ICT revolution to enable us (in the longer run) to use virtual technologies for affecting the relation of a discourse with its coevolving environments. Unintended effects can then be expected to prevail. | |
| 6 | Raul Espejo | Modelling is the effort by the Here and Now to understand itself: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) immensely increase the scope and detail of formal modelling and provide the tools to widen the Here and Now. | |
| 7 | Keith Pheby | Given the concern in our interactions for a definition of notions such as 'desireability' 'coevolution', 'value', etc. I would like to offer the following 'practical apriori' for the production of ICT systems. I am construing the ethical relation in terms of: the production of non-pathological, self-organising intersystemic domains assuring a maximum of social cohesion compatible with the most extensive political and economic freedom open to all. By pathological, I mean the propensity of a system, whether at the level of the individual human subject or at the level of an institution, to negatively effect the autopoiesis of another system within its domain of interaction. | |
| 8 | John Mingers | "ITCs and the approaches by which they are developed can enhance data access and transmission but not interpersonal communications; they don't take account or provide the channel capacity required by the embodied nature of human communication and cognition. In particular they restrict the expression of emotions and thus restrict significantly the scope of virtual conversations in human interactions. | |
| 9 | Alfonso Reyes | Assuming that there are forms emerging from the co-evolution of ICT and a social process, what do we have to do to identify them? [Relates SI No: 16 and 37] | |
| 10 | Chris Atkinson | Organisations and interorganisational networks are constituted out of ecologies of human and machine entanglements (actor-networks). However, current IS and organisational development approaches, the organisations in which they are deployed, the ICT services and applications suppliers along with management consultancies perpetuate the divide between the human and the machine. This leads to failures in achieving added value and often wasted investment. Integrated development approaches are needed to address this [Relates SI No: 92, 93, 94 and 101] | |
| 11 | Chris Atkinson | Interventions in the real world that treat the human and the machine (ICT) as separate and do not focus on the humanchine actor-network are destined to result in limited solutions and possibly failure. Methodologies, like SSM, reduce the machine or artifact to that of a slave. Most current approaches to IS development reduce the human to the technocentric term 'user'. Integrated approaches and a discipline of Actor-Network Development (AND) are therefore required. Relates [SI No: 95, 96 and 98] | |
| 12 | Alfonso Reyes | In order to explore the forms which may emerge from the co-evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social processes we need a better conceptualisation of the nature of society, social processes, and power than we currently have. [Relates SI No: 43 and 59]. | |
| 13 | Roger Harnden | It is easy to confuse an intrinsic issue of technology, with something specific to ICT, overlooking the whole critique of modernity and the technical notably from continental theorists. Need to identify what - if anything - uniquely characterises ICT from a general trend of technological development, rather than assume there is such a distinction. | |
| 14 | Eve Mitleton-Kelly | We need to understand the nature of socio-technical 'change', 'evolution' and 'co-evolution'. How do changes in ICTs and society affect and influence each other? How do they co-evolve? What conditions facilitate or constrain such co-evolution? | |
| 15 | Eve Mitleton-Kelly | We need to understand this co-evolutionary relationship at different 'levels', 'domains' or degrees of resolution, from the individual, to the group, the organisation, society, economy, etc. Not only in dyadic relationships but also across and between the different levels or domains. A change in one domain influences all related domains or elements making up the socio-technical ecosystem, and vice versa. There is a constant movement of 'influence' between the micro and the macro. | |
| 16 | Eve Mitleton-Kelly | What are these multi-level 'feedback' processes? How can we characterise them? They cannot be described simply as positive or negative feedback 'mechanisms', they are much more complex and we do not have the conceptual characterisation or the vocabulary to describe them. | |
| 17 | Costas Tsouvalis | ICTs are an outcome of advanced capitalism and perpetuate the inequalities inherent in this system of production. It seems useful; therefore, to distinguish between private and commercial space and communication to avoid that commercial incursion into one's private communications become a privilege of the wealthy. [Relates SI No: 4 and 34]. | |
| 18 | Allenna Leonard | Our political models were mostlydeveloped in the early industrial revolution when geography was the main if not the only criterian of political jurisdiction. Now decisions with political implications are taken by local and global private enterprises that often dwarf those taken by local or national governments and they are felt across many communities bound by ICT rather than politics. For example, tje internet served as an enabler of distributed consumer boycotts of GM products. This is global governance on the basis of consumer power but there are many issues that cannot be articulated in consumer terms. We do not understand the new boundaries that define social sustems and are therefore not able to use ICT consistently to organize and communicate ablut political issues. Draws on 44,46,107, 112 and 113. | |
| 19 | Allenna Leonard | Virtual spaces are notoriously difficult to maintain. Part of this is due to there being few if any mehtodologies to effect transformation in humanchine networks. We have the capability of moving information (which may or not be accurate or up to date) at lightning speed but the ecologies of human and machine interaction are much slower and are not consistennt due to different levels of technology used by different people t the same time. | |
| 20 | Neil Stewart | Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing the nature and relevance of work with potentially good, but also drastic, social consequences; an aspect that will influence the outcome is the quality of the alignment of our personal values with those constituted by the new emergent organisational forms. [Relates SI No: 55 and 76] | |
| 21 | Tony Gill | A difficulty we have to live with is that the rate of diffusion of ideas and technology can span decades. The consequence of this is that many forms of ICTs will have been abandoned prematurely leaving less effective ICTs to proliferate. This 'consumerisation' of ICTs is often void of values and some ICTs are likely to be fads at best with limited life spans. [relates 30 & 85] | |
| 22 | Tony Gill | The proliferation of ICTs is moving much of the village and town (physical) market places to the virtual market place. Business has not been slow to pick up on this to expand their customer bases. [relates 7, 53, 84, 92, 102 & 71] | |
| 23 | Tony Gill | Changes of a desirable nature are value laden. We need to explore this as evidenced in SIs 87, 99, 107, 1, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 41, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 80, 81. | |
| 24 | Alfonso Reyes | There is no traditional supply and demand model for the Internet. The Internet is about creating needs where they didn’t exist before. In this way e-commerce is expanding on the space of people’s interactions. [Relates SI No: 90 and 7]. | |
| 25 | Rebecca Herron | There is a “reduction of bureaucracy” paradox that governments and other social E-users need to address. The use of ICT to streamline existing information requirements almost inevitably leads to the emergence of new informational possibilities that authorities find hard to resist. The implications of this may be beneficial (or not) but must not be ignored if the initial aim is to be achieved. | |
| 26 | Rebecca Herron | There are emergent changes in language and behavioural norms created by the informational restrictions and freedoms provided by ICT. These include: the impact of email/business usage on communally-used languages such as English; changing skills required from workforces/students; social behaviour, expectations and rituals; story-telling (e.g. through global media). | |
| 27 | Rebecca Herron | What tools do we have for identifying and discussing when social systems are entering periods of change or stability? How could this be measured? When could small perturbations influence the course of development and how could one identify circumstances when this would be possible? What implications do this have for ‘Policy’? | |
| 28 | Rebecca Herron | What plans for future emergent stability can a society have that only seems able to imagine a continuation of the present status quo (i.e. rapid change and adaptation)? What is the role of consolidation (“annealing”?) in producing sustainable forms following innovation? | |
| 29 | Rebecca Herron | How can we identify general patterns (Attractors) in the resulting behaviour of complex social/informational systems. How might identifying such patterns help us to understand (& influence) desirable ‘progress’? Would this reshape our understanding of sustainability, historical repetition or purposeful intervention? | |
| 30 | Rebecca Herron | ‘Survival of the Fittest’ may have been replaced by ‘Survival of the Survivors’ (or survival of the adequate!) What frameworks/language have we got for exploring evolutionary adequacy in Social Systems? | |
| 31 | Raul Espejo | For people desirable is anything that enhances their stability (via-a-vis) others in changing contexts. For organisations desirable is whatever gives them (the people whose interactions produce them) stability in their co-evolution with others in their niches or contexts. However, this desirability to be socially acceptable requires an ethical framework in which people and organisations respect not only the local but also the distant others. This ethical requirement provides criteria to establish the desirability of ICTs. | |
| 32 | Raul Espejo | The development of ICTs is all too often beyond existing social controls. Countries, individually or collectively, need legislation in place to regulate the emerging global enterprises operating against the common good. | |
| 33 | Pete Barnsley | "Social, organisational and information processes are three different types of processes, which are constituted in part by all kinds of technologies and by ICTs in particular. Moreover, the invention and production of these technologies are influenced by those values emerging from people's interactions in these processes." | |