Computers 'R' Us

The primary reason I had for beginning this blog was to comment and raise questions about the effect computing power has had and continues to have on all of us, both as individuals and as a society.  But, I have strayed from that path into other topics, and I believe I should get back to my original purpose.  So, starting today, I will periodically address these issues. 

Computing power has an enormous potential for both good and bad, and it is up to us, the informed citizenry, to decide the difference.  It is said that the most influential invention of the last 1000 years was the printing press because of how much it eased the distribution of information.  Now, think how much easier the distribution of information has become because of the Internet, and you will begin to see how much of an impact computing will have on our lives. 

There will be times in this blog in which I will look at computer related ethics in both the narrow sense and the broad sense.  By “broad sense”, I mean that we can examine a particular use of computer technology and think in terms of “is this a good idea?” rather than just narrowly right or wrong, or legal/illegal.  You can probably think of many things that are both legal and morally ok, but a bad idea overall.  An example would be to play golf in a thunderstorm.  This is not forbidden by any law or ethical code that I know of, only the laws of good sense.  There may be computer technology related issues that fall in this same category, but since computer power is so new, this may not be something we have thought about. 

Computer power raises new issues for all of us.  These fall into 3 big areas:

1.     Old problems may become worse because of the speed and pervasiveness of computers.  An example of this are the privacy issues raised because of the wide use of databases by companies and other organizations.  Since computer storage is cheap, and file sharing is easy, some of our formerly “private” information is now very public.  Because saving data on a computer is cheap and easy, organizations tend to keep much more information than they did in the pre-computer era.  They can also process that data much more quickly now. 

2.     Old problems get a new slant.  An example of this is the copyright laws, and how difficult it is to interpret their meaning as it applies to digital media.  We will be discussing this in more detail.

3.     New problems are created that never existed before, such as computer viruses.