Cybersins and Digital Good Deeds: A Book about Technology and Ethics

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Cybersins and Digital Good Deeds: A Book about Technology and Ethics", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 7, pp. 622-624. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710776015

Anyone learning of this title would be excused from thinking that it was another book about library and information ethics. With sins and good deeds in the title, this would be very understandable. Someone else might put two and two together and make five by concluding that it was a study of technology and ethics (you know, stuff about social determinism and the like), and that too would be understandable. In fact, it is neither, even though a clear ethical strand weaves its way through the book, and even though some of the dilemmas (such as surveillance and privacy, children and censorship, online etiquette) point up the implications of having technology.

This is an alphabetical list of terms and concepts to be met with in the field of internet and online and cyberspace. It is presented in a glossary format, with short entries to terms like cyberbullying and disinformation, firewall and Google book search, phishing and spam and wiki. The authors are all teachers at the Sam Houston State University in Texas. This is a book most likely to be used by and useful in school and college libraries, and as a support for user education classes in them. Each entry contains references to further readings, and it is clear that everything here will be most useful in a US context.

This intended readership becomes clear from the core of quite sensible advice provided in entries like identity theft, internet user agreement, logging as an administrator, marketing to children, monitoring employees’ internet use, phishing and spoofing, spyware and sympathy hoaxes and typosquatting (linked with domain name deception). The authors are on home ground with these and speak directly to the reader (who is clearly expected to be a school or college library or intranet or web manager). Sections on relevant (US) law (like COPA or the Child Online Protection Act 1998) will be of interest to practitioners who have missed them.

Another body of material in the book is equally sensible: that centred around computer security. So we find entries on viruses and Trojan horses and worms, spam and identity theft, hackers and crackers, encryption and creating an identity in chat rooms. For practitioners and their clients and students who lack easy access to ready definitions, these two sets of entries will make the book attractive to purchase. Do consider, however, just how necessary such entries are and, in this case, how really original they are. There is a transient hit‐and‐miss quality about the entries, and some beg questions as to their inclusion (such as modern Luddites, technolust, virtual offices and warchalking).

One of the decisions made by the authors and the publisher here has clearly been to try to capture fashionable (and even faddish) entries in the ever‐changing field of library and internet practice. As a result, we find cell phone rage, computer addiction, cyberchondriacs, flash mobs and Google‐stalking, hacktivism and scare chains, some of which (like hacktivism in online protest politics) are useful but many of which are mere media‐speak and will be gone tomorrow. Another key decision made by the authors and the publisher here is to take a moral position. This comes through in questionable (and even banal) contentions that distributed computing is a good deed, that global positioning systems (GPS) present a double‐edged sword for personal privacy, that there are pluses and minuses to online gambling, that technology can help the disabled (erratically developed this), and that the electronic waste arising from the computer age is presenting an environmental hazard.

Just who needs to know this and to be reminded of the ethical implications of it is hard to imagine, apart perhaps from students attending information skills in schools and colleges (and even there topics like this are more likely to be discussed than researched). This is also a book that does not know its own boundaries, drifting off into disinformation, privacy, digital rights management and copyright, file‐swapping and online music, plagiarism, and filtering – all great topics – but in an entirely unsystematic way. Not even the index can help much with its spasmodic coverage of terms and concepts.

This is a book likely to excite in prospect but disappoint in actuality. There is also a hardback version at US$39.95. Where I believe it succeeds most of all – in the core advice it gives and in alerting practitioners (above all those in user education) to what terms should not be missed out – it does quite well, but it trips up all the time – not knowing its boundaries, being merely fashionable, touching on important topics but just doing that, attempting to suggest that sins and good deeds really is a way to see the world, and providing a poor index – and so would not be for me.

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