Caveat web surfer! social responsibility and internet resources

摘要

Caveat emptor is a commercial principle that without a warranty the buyer takes upon himself or herself the risk of the quality of the product. On the Internet many of the resources are non-commercial, but does that mean that there is no responsibility to Internet surfers regarding the nature and quality of the information that they find? And if they are commercial, what is the producer's responsibility, if any? There are several ethical issues regawrding the access to informaiton on the Internet, ethical issues of which both producers and users may be unaware. This presentation will address several of these; the typical assumptions that end-users may make and why these are problematic; the problematic nature of the search engines that are used to find information on the Internet; the lack of collection development policies and controlled indexing; the trend toward making all intellectual work both comodity and property, the devaluation or ignorance of public interest concerns, the troubling implications of national and international treates and policies on the Internet, etc. This paper argues that Caveat Web Surfer! is a simplistic view and devoid of any sense of social responsibility, and that institutions and structures must be put in place to contravene these assumptions and trends. For example, there should be an extension of netiquette, a sort of code of ethics for webpage creation and access, and informaiton professionals should command and promote sites to extend their traditional role of intermediaries in filtering, ranking, evaluating and referencing information.