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22/11/2010
Exploring Ethical Behaviour Online
Behaviour and morals online will be one of the topics discussed at a workshop on Ethics and the World Wide Web, which will be held in London next week.
The workshop, which is co-sponsored by The Web Science Trust, will be held at the British Library on Thursday 2 December. This workshop has come about because of the Library’s Growing Knowledge exhibition - www.bl.uk/growingknowledge.
The Web Science Trust was established last year to advance education and research in Web Science for the public benefit.
The workshop will focus on the fact that although the World Wide Web is the most complex piece of technology ever engineered and has transformed almost every aspect of everyday life, little is known about appropriate ethical behaviour online. The workshop will try to improve our understanding of what that stronger ethic will need to be.
Dr Kieron O’Hara from the Web Science Trust, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and keynote speaker at the event said: "The Web is a new space and we don't know yet what is right and wrong online. At the workshop, we will question what rights and responsibilities we bring with us to the Web. Does the Web make new moral demands of us? What responsibilities do we undertake when we put information online, whether it is uploading a photo onto Flickr or creating a complex website? Do we have a duty to make the Web accessible to all (as for example we have with buildings and employment)?”
To explore these issues, the workshop has invited keynote speeches, panel discussions and debate with an invited audience of practising engineers, academic researchers and philosophers.
The keynote speakers, as well as Kieron O’Hara, are Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford) and Jeroen van den Hoven (Delft University of Technology).
The panellists include:
• Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust)
• Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
• Yorick Wilks (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition/University of Oxford)
• David Wright (Trilateral Research)
Professor Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire, who holds the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, said: "We know that at the moment people are less ethical online than in real life. This has a lot to do with self-understanding and the fact that people feel invisible online. Future generations will have stronger ethics online as they grow up in that environment."
Journalists are welcome to attend and take part in the debate. To register, for a copy of the programme and/or to arrange interviews with any of the speakers, please contact Hèlène Murphy, Media Relations Consultant to the University of Southampton, Tel: 07944 847 570, email: hmurphy@murphycommunciations.co.uk
ENDS
Notes to Editors:
1. For further information about the Web Science Trust, please visit: http://webscience.org/home.html
2. For further information about Dr Kieron O’Hara, please visit:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/kmo
3. With around 500 researchers, and 900 undergraduate students, the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton is one of the world's largest and most successful integrated research groupings, covering Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics, Electrical Engineering, and IT in Organisations. ECS has unrivalled depth and breadth of expertise in world-leading research, new developments and their applications.
4. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research institution with a global reputation for research and scholarship across a wide range of subjects in engineering, science, social sciences, health, arts and humanities.
With over 22,000 students, around 5000 staff, and an annual turnover well in excess of £400 million, the University of Southampton is one of the country's top institutions for engineering, computer science and medicine. We combine academic excellence with an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to research, supporting a culture that engages and challenges students and staff in their pursuit of learning.
The University is also home to a number of world-leading research centres, including the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, the Optoelectronics Research Centre, the Centre for the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute and is a partner of the National Oceanography Centre at the Southampton waterfront campus.
For more information contact:
BoilerPlate
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs,
newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Up to 10 million people visit the British Library website - www.bl.uk - every year where they can view up to 4 million digitised collection items and over 40 million pages.