Culture as Suture: on the Use of “Culture” in Cross-Cultural Studies in and Beyond Intercultural Information Ethics

Intercultural information ethics (IIE), a field which draws on the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information and communication technology, has been argued to lack an adequate theoretical understanding of culture. In this paper, we take a non-essentialist view of culture as a point of departure and discuss not what culture is, but what we (both in our everyday lives, and as researchers) do when we use the concept of culture. To do so, we look for inspiration in the concept of suture, a concept which means the thread which stitches, or the act of stitching, a wound, but has had a long and intricate journey within psychoanalysis and film studies concerning the issue of identification. Three understandings of the use of culture emerge: suture as cultural misidentification, the evil in the cultural suture, and multiple, repeated cultural sutures. We use these categories to diagnose the use of culture in IIE and beyond, and suggest that the use of culture as multiple, repeated sutures—in other words, a recognition that we constantly fail in describing culture or cultural differences, and that each suture is coloured by its conditions of production, and that we cannot but suture with culture anyway—might be a way forward for cross-cultural research.

Language and Intercultural Information Ethics Concepts: A Preliminary Discussion of Privacy

This paper introduces the perspective to understand privacy via language as an intercultural information ethics (IIE) concept. This research perspective carries two goals: to understand privacy as an IIE concept and to do so via natural language. The paper suggests that studying privacy through language answers the challenge faced by IIE work; in addition, studying privacy as an information ethics concept through language seems most appropriate considering that language both embodies and shapes meaning. Specifically, this paper briefly discusses privacy and some of its language expressions in the Chinese and English languages, through which it hopes to reveal the richness and possibilities of using natural language as a research instrument to understand privacy in intercultural settings, which is an area of researching privacy that has attracted little discussion so far.

Viewpoint: at the intersections of information, computing and internet research

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new collaboration between the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES). Design/methodology/approach The paper uses historical, comparative and ethics-based approaches. Findings The collaboration is catalyzed by central interests shared between AoIR and JICES, namely, in the ethical and social impacts of the internet. The collaboration accordingly aims to bring research and reflection developed for the AoIR conferences to the JICES’ readership. Originality/value The value of this collaboration is considerable, as it promises extensive new cross-fertilization between the two communities. The viewpoint begins with a brief overview of the collaboration’s initiation by Prof Simon Rogerson and its logistics over the next two years. Following a general review of Information and Computing Ethics and Intercultural Information Ethics, an overview of ethical considerations fostered by AoIR is offered, focusing on the development of internet research ethics (IRE), especially its most recent expression in an IRE 3.0.

Information Ethics in a Different Voice, Or: Back to the Drawing Board of Intercultural Information Ethics.

Within the information ethics community one can observe a mainstream discussion including some fundamental presuppositions which appear to be something like dogmas. The most important of these dogmas seems to be that we must create a new kind of intercultural information ethics. It is often argued that (comparative) studies have shown that different cultures, according to culturally determined norms and values, react in different ways to the impacts of ICT; it is stressed that an intercultural information ethics must take these cultural particularities into account. But in the paper at hand it shall be argued that taking cultural differences into consideration does not create a necessity to invent a new intercultural information ethics. On the contrary it shall be claimed that we already know several intercultural ethics which only have to be applied to ICT and its impact to societies.