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     Several MIS courses have touched on the social impacts of librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and other information professionals, including Information and Society and Ethical Values and Information Dilemmas. Lessons from these courses will ensure that I enter my future role as a librarian able to understand some theories behind the profession and conduct research ethically and with good values in mind. 

 

How Information Affects Population

 

Information and Society (ISI 5301) taught by Heather Morrison helped to demonstrate societal impacts of information, and how information professionals were expected to benefit society by promoting intellectual freedom and implementing overall ethical practices in their work. This course helped to instil a particular respect for how information can affect a population, and my final project reflected some of the course objectives that I obtained, such as analysing socio-cultural aspects of information and assessing the relationships between information and social trends. This final project was a paper assessing the correlation between hate speech and hate crime in America after the 2016 Presidential election. My paper drew upon controversial online platforms made by hate groups, statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center that demonstrated these platforms’ societal impacts, and the intellectual freedom guidelines that protects this online hate speech. This paper aimed not only to discuss the impacts of hate speech, but also how it can be handled in a way that still aligned with the ethical values promoted by the course. While I noted that simply censoring these hate groups is not a viable or ethical solution, and utilizing transparency between information sources and consumers in order to establish more trust and awareness could run the risk of creating anxiety from overexposure to troubling content, a solution I did suggest that aligned with the moral teachings of this course is to find a happy medium between these two extremes – and how information professionals can help. I suggested that implementing online tools that do not restrict distressing content but merely provide a disclosure before displaying it. I also suggested that this disclosure could supply information consumers with further trusted resources on this topic in order to optimize understanding on a certain subject and minimize the spread of misinformation (or ‘fake news’). I also provided some instances where tactics like these are already being implemented and advocated for utilizing the help of information professionals to create disclosures that are appropriate, informative, and protective while still complying with intellectual freedom guidelines. Another solution I promoted was simply an increase and promotion of educational resources with the help of information professionals, as these resources will ideally help to disprove bigoted messages online and provide the public with more reliable information to help them form opinions based in fact and not in hate. 

 

 

Ethics

 

Similarly, Ethical Values and Information Dillemas (ISI 5310) promoted the implementation of ethical protocols in the endeavours of information professionals. While this course discussed the importance of maintaining an ethical standard in all facets of information sharing, retrieval and management, the morals that were especially emphasized in this course were freedom of speech, intellectual freedom, privacy, and accessibility to resources, and often concepts included more philosophical elements such as consequentialism and non-consequentialism. I used both the morals promoted in this class and the more philosophical components to complete assignments such as an analysis on DeepFake videos and my final paper on copyright. My analysis on DeepFake technology largely called upon my understanding of ethical values to denounce it, as the emergence of DeepFakes allows users to digitally edit anyone’s face onto a different body, or even digitally steal an identity to promote their own messages – a tool that can be especially dangerous in the current fragile political climate. I connected the negative impact DeepFakes can have on information to philosophical standpoints like consequentialism, and attempted to show why DeepFake videos are an ethical issues and potentially a threat not only to the information science field but also to the public as well. My final paper, which discussed the 2015 case of Authors Guild, Inc. vs. Google Inc., a conflict over Google Books’ free distribution of copyrighted material, also called upon my knowledge of ethical concepts like equitable accessibility and more philosophical concepts like utilitarianism and nonconsequentialism to discuss a recent topic and a real-world example of how ethics can be present in many instances.

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