INST 301
Introduction to Information Science
Spring 2016
Assignment P3 - Social Issues

As with all project assignments, this assignment is not separately graded.

In assignment P2, you identified technical issues that have consequences for the ways in technology gets built, adopted, employed, and controlled, all of which are ultimately social issues. Here in assignment P3 our focus is now on articulating those social issues.

Step one of that process is to focus on those four words: built, adopted, employed, controlled. For example, if I want to protect users with cognitive disabilities from being exploited by telemarketers, I can prevent autodialers from being used by marketers (thus controlling what gets built) or I can alter the way they get adopted (e.g, by requiring a licensing regime, with a requirement for keeping certain records that can be audited on request by some agency) or I can alter the way the technology gets employed (e.g., by allowing it for political campaigns, but not by hospitals), or I can alter the way it gets controlled (e.g., by creating a voluntary opt-out "do not call" list). Each of these examples are only one example of a category, and the boundaries between categories are not always sharp. Nonetheless, these categories are useful ways for organizing your thinking.

One benefit of thinking in this way is that you don't spend a lot of time on issues that have no technical nexus. For example, telemarketing is an activity engaged in by businesses, businesses thrive in capitalist economies, capitalist economies necessarily result in an inequitable division of wealth, inequitable division of wealth has implications for lifespan, and having some people living much longer than others may have implications for medical spending. But we got off the rails there for an information science class pretty fast -- we care about the nexus between society and information technology, not about the nexus between one part of society and another. So there's no problem with long reasoning chains, but don't muse about social issues for their own sake -- the key is to look at the technology/society nexus. To be sure you are doing this, for each social issue you write down, you should make a note of what technical issues(s) it is bound up with.

Note that we are interested here in P3 in the social issues, not in the choices you will make (in P4) about how to address those issues. For example, if you are studying the effect on human society on the first contact with an alien civilization, some of the issues that might arise are the potential for public panic, who will control the advanced technology that we learn of from the aliens, and whether the aliens would violate US patent law if they choose to republish some of our books on their planet (surely you can think of more issues than this -- these are just examples). You have identified an issue when you have described what needs to be considered (e.g., copyright law) and why (e.g., so that people will be incentivized to produce new works). But the idea that we might agree to a new copyright treaty with our new alien friends is an issue for P4, not P3. P3 is about realizing that communicating with people who live in a different legal regime is likely to raise intellectual property issues, and that copyright is one of them (patents are another; we would not want them making iPhones without a license!).

Okay, now you have a list of social issues, generated through brainstorming around the four words (built, adopted, employed, controlled), and may be around some other words that you could think of (shared?, refined?, ...), and each is connected to one or more technical issues in some way. Now its time to tell that story. You could start with the four words. Or the technologies. Or the social issues. Or something else (e.g., which people will care about each issue). There is no right way to organize your story -- storytelling is an art, and the key is to be artful in the telling -- tell it in a way that you think will convey what you have to say well to your audience (me!). But don't fail to highlight social issues that have some form of interplay with technical issues -- be clear about what those social issues are, why the are important, and what the technical nexus of each is.

As before, four pages single spaced would be a fine length. This is not a magic number -- this simply an estimate of how much writing it would take you to do this well. Your mileage may vary.

One member of your team should submit your P3 to ELMS before class on the date indicated in the schedule. Its fine if both of you want to submit just to be sure, but if you do you must submit the same thing (because we will read only one of them!).