What’s Madonna got to do with the intersection of information technology and ethics?

I’ve got this new instant messenger client that gives me, along with everything else, a news feed. So, last week, instead of doing what I should have been doing I was (I’m so embarassed) looking at the entertainment news and I run across this brief article in which Madonna discusses her young daughter’s newfound interest in who is gay, and who is not gay.

Lourdes, Madonna’s daughter, asked her mom, “If you aren’t gay, why did you kiss Brittney Spears?” and Madonna’s answer was, “I’m the mommy pop star and she’s the baby pop star. I was passing my energy on to her.”

What, you may well ask, does this have to do with technology and ethics? It’s about spin!! Madonna, like Rumpelstiltskin at his finest, spun an answer for her child.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection where new technologies and ethics meet in museums and I’ve been gathering scenarios (all of them real, all of them gathered from colleagues on the ground and at museums) that pose ethical dilemmas for the staff who run up against them. The reason all these scenarios are dilemmas is because they can be argued. And for the purposes of this discussion I am going to assume that they are all taking place in an environment where there are no policies that preclude or allow them to take place. So in absence of policy that says you can or cannot do something how would you respond to the following scenarios.

1) Is it ethical to set up a web cam and film sessions at conferences without telling participants?

2) You have an e-card system on your website. You are the person responsible for maintaining it including seeing if people reply to the e-card site. Is it ethical for you to view e-cards without people knowing? What if you don’t have an official privacy policy?

3) You need an image or a document after hours to complete a project. It is in a private folder, belonging to someone else, but because of your position you have network access to that folder. Is it ethical to go and grab the image?

4) Is it ethical to archive instant messaging conversations without telling the other person?

5) Are your intellectual property rights more important than other people’s intellectual property rights?

6) You live in a country which is wealthy but where the federal authorities are neutral to hostile about education an the arts. You are a grant-writing wizard. Should you use your skills to divert the limited funds available into self-indulgent New Media projects?

I certainly don’t have the “right” answers to these questions. All are real scenarios posted to me by various colleagues. If you have an opinion on one of the topics it would be great to hear from you. More scenarios next week and feel free to send me any scenarios that worry you.

Meanwhile, it’s a big, wide-changing world. If you haven’t read it and you need a book for your summer reading list, try Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” Then go exploring in “Second Life” (www.secondlife.com) more on this in my next post.

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