How do highly developed technologies affect our lives? There are many occasions to see and use machines and robots equipped with artificial intelligence in our daily lives. We achieve great efficiency and get enjoyment by using them. However, they bring us classic and novel ethical issues behind great benefits. In this study, we explore the relationship between parenting and technologies, especially focusing on interaction between children and social robots.

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It is an ongoing trend that the current social platforms are becoming a perfect channel for a real unethical behavior, cyberbullying among digital native youngsters. Human beings are able to think and are capable of discerning the bad and the good; the morality of their acts. On the contrary, machines cannot think, but, could be programmed to detect no morally behaviors or reprehensible code of conducts? This review provides a new classifier that facilitates new methods of detecting cyberbullying patterns in computer-mediated social interactions, by identifying current problem scenarios and defining the set of values, linguistic implications, semantics, and psychological consequences.

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For the utilization of women’s skills to be effectively promoted, women must be allowed to continue employment and to apply their abilities. In order for these measures operate effectively, it is essential to establish complimentary systems and culture. The prerequisite for establishing these systems and culture is an awareness that promoting active participation by women in the workplace is essential to securing a competitive advantage. Moreover the following is required: (1) First of all, recognize that women are composed of a diverse range of different individuals; and (2) Accept the diversity of women, or in other words adopt a stance of inclusion. IT is also a powerful tool for supporting the systems/cultures and measures described above. More effective use of IT facilitates handling of the circumstances of each and every individual in ways that better match their individual needs.

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The purpose of this article is to empirically examine affective reactions of consumers to inter-firm sharing of their use-context data in value co-creation (VCC) settings. Reviewing literatures on VCC based marketing and discussing ethical dimensions of inter-firm data sharing in VCC, empirical data were analyzed to compare degrees of consumer-perceived discomfort in the three data use situations (i.e. internal utilization, inter-firm data sharing for VCC and transfer to third parties outside the VCC). The results indicated that, for reducing the discomfort level of consumers, firms should clarify consumers’ merits of inter-firm sharing of consumer data and communicate them to the consumers.

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This study deals with grassroots informatisation of healthcare through examining an existing case of empathetic and spontaneous formation of an online community of a surgeon and his patients. He is a highly reputable surgeon as a specialist of a rare disease, and was committed to online provision of information about the disease and ways to cure it through setting up and operating a bulletin board system to enhance communication between him and his existing/potential patients. On the other hand, his patients set up bulletin board systems and blogs to share information about the diseases, treatment experiences, burdens, lives and the medical doctor’s treatments among those who suffer the same disease and the surgeon, and an online community of them has spontaneously arisen. This online community based on empathy for other patients and the surgeon is an object of analysis of this study as a case of grassroots informatisation of healthcare. Interviews with a patient of the disease who develops and operates online community sites and with two patients who have been audience (read-only community members) of the sites she and the surgeon set up were conducted.

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This paper discusses the development of Green IT in Japan using Actor Network Theory (ANT). Green IT is a comprehensive concept of ICT related environmental load-reducing activities, but is translated into each context in different ways by different actors. In Japan, the concept was first introduced around 2007. Various actors, such as ministries, promotion councils, electronics companies, and telecommunications services companies, contributed to constructing the concept of Green IT. Green IT initially meant the reduction of carbon emissions through energy saving. After 2011, however, Green IT gradually gave way to the concept of “Smart” as a way to resolve power shortage after the Fukushima disaster. By using ANT, our paper analyses this historical development and situates Green IT as one part in a Japanese energy saving network, which seems to be stable notwithstanding the variety of labels attributed to it.

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Reflecting the recent trend of information and communication technology (ICT) use in organisations centred on “monitor and control”, the participatory surveillance environment has emerged. With the growth of such a socio-technological environment, whereby individuals come under 24/7 monitoring by both human and electronic eyes and real-time control made possible by advanced ICT-based information systems, individuals are treated as dividuals, that is, as a dividable existence in which a set of their personal data is used to represent a specific aspect of them. The nature of dividualisation is associated with dis/re-embodiment of the individual, and leads the alienation and objectification of human beings. Due to the dividualisation, holistic approaches to understanding individuals may be undermined, and this may seriously affect individuals’ ways of thinking, ideas of what an individual is, and paradigms of good societies. In this study, the social risks caused by the dividualisation of human beings in the participatory surveillance environment are discussed.

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