Call for Papers: Intercultural Information Ethics

Call for Papers for Vol. 13 (01/2010)

• Deadline for extended abstracts: April 16, 2010
• Notification of acceptance to authors: May 15, 2010
• Deadline for full articles: June 30, 2010
• Deadline for revised articles: July 31, 2010
• Publication: August, 2010

It is well known that information and communication technologies have permeated all corners of the world. Images of farmers in Bangladesh or members of a native tribe in Africa wielding mobile phones have become common place. Moreover, the Internet has continued to penetrate deeper and deeper into the everyday world of ordinary people, so much so that it is fast becoming a ubiquitous medium where its presence is assumed and taken for granted. It is true, however, that a significant portion of the world is still without either the Internet or the mobile phone, but the fact is that the penetration ratio of either technologies is increasing. 

In this call, we would like to invite research and scholarly papers that investigate ethical issues that arise from the interplay that information and communication technologies are having on the world’s cultures. An inevitable result of the global penetration of the Internet and the mobile phone (in fact the two technologies are fast merging into one device only) is that presuppositions of the world’s cultures could clash with those accompanying these technologies. This has given rise to an emerging field called “intercultural information ethics,” where the cultural presuppositions of the world’s cultures are seen as an important factor in consideration of ethical theorization and the search for ethical guide-lines.