The social aspect of human computer activities: An investigation of information technology ethics

With high speed broadband connection and new technological breakthrough, there are increasing trend of information technology abuse amongst users. Users seem to neglect laws and guidelines with their intentionally or not committing to the unethical actions. This article presents the understanding of Actions with regards to social and ethical use of Information Technology (IT) within the area of Human Computer Interaction. Initially, 215 literatures were analyzed. From these, fifty literatures that were identified to be highly significant to the social and ethical use of IT were synthesized to develop the conceptual understanding of Actions. From the conceptual understanding, ten Actions that were recommended by the literature to be the most commonly practiced by target user was chosen for the evaluation procedure. In the evaluation procedure, the Actions were organized in a ranking table, and participants were required to rank the Actions according to their common practice. The outcome to this procedure has resulted social networking, piracy and violent computer games being the most popular unethical Actions conducted by the Computer Science students and inappropriate use of camera-phone, digital forgery and on-line gambling being the least conducted. The results provide insights for further research to investigate why the students committed the Actions and how to combat the matter. Other research involving investigation of unethical action in the aspect of social issues in human and computer related activity could also benefit the findings.