AUTHOR
Elin Palm

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT. Monitoring has always been a part of the employment conditions but the escalation of inexpensive and often easy to use devices enables employers to expand the range and scope of monitoring of employees’ activities. The increased sophistication and accessibility of workplace surveillance have given raise to moral as well as legal assessment. A rich plethora of international and national privacy protection codes and laws mirror this development.

Still, there seems to be reason to worry that only limited aspects of privacy are sufficiently well protected by the prevailing legislation and coding. The main thrust of this paper is that, by and large, prevailing privacy protection laws and codes are based on a too narrow view on privacy. In consequence, only a limited part of that which should be considered reasonable privacy claims at work is satisfactorily protected.

The theoretical underpinnings of this claim stem from the analysis of privacy by Beate Roessler in “The Value of Privacy” (2005). In this book, convincing arguments are given to the effect that privacy, in liberal societies, is valued for the sake of individual liberty and autonomy. Unless privacy is secured, individuals will not be able to develop themselves in accordance with their own chosen life-plans towards a life that is personally rewarding (Roessler, 2005:44). A most significant feature of privacy, it is argued, is that of the individual’s chances of controlling certain aspects about herself. The case is made that individuals should be able to control both “direct physical admission to spaces” and “a metaphorical access to their personhood”. Moreover, that which should be protected as private is separated in three different aspects: (1) local privacy, (2) decisional privacy and (3) informational privacy. And more precisely, privacy is the spatial and intellectual sphere that enables individuals to decide over matters that concern them, to control who has access over information about themselves (both direct sensory access and stored data) and to establish and develop different types of relations (Roessler, 2005:44). A central aim of the analysis is that of broadening the scope of the notion of privacy from the dominant and rather narrow focus on informational privacy to include decisional and local privacy as well (Roessler, 2005:7).

Roughly, privacy is either defined in terms of “control” or as “seclusion” (Inness, 1992, Palm, 2005). Roessler however, brings these aspects together and explicates their internal relations, showing how they all are significant parts of a more nuanced privacy concept. The combined grip contributes to amplify the richness of “privacy” and to resolve conflicts in the prevailing privacy debate.

A brief assessment of the prevailing privacy protection indicates that the privacy laws and codes, almost exclusively, are based on one of Roessler’s three aspects of privacy. Traditionally, the main focus of privacy protection has been that of personal data. In countries with strict privacy regulation such as Austria, Germany, Norway and Sweden, legislation primarily regulates the usage of personal data (Bennett in: Hansson and Palm, eds. 2005:76), leaving workers in a weak position to secure privacy interests that exceed certain types of personal information. Although an essential feature, person specific data is only one of the dimensions of privacy that ought to be recognized. Certainly, decisional privacy has been emphasized in some European countries (Bennett in: Hansson and Palm, eds. 2005:76) but then primarily in terms of a right to decide over personal data of the kind secured by data protection laws.

At the end of the day, prevailing workplace privacy coding and legislation seems to secure one single aspect of privacy. While privacy sensitive data has received a lot of attention dimensions such as decisional and local privacy have, unfortunately, been left aside.

In order to improve existing workplace privacy protection, a more adequate conceptual basis is needed. Arguably, a better foundation can be obtained by means of incorporating the three aspects of privacy previously mentioned. The main contribution of this paper will be that of (1) introducing the triptyche model of privacy into the employment context and of (2) explicating the meaning and implications of this model for workplace privacy. In order to exemplify, the employment relation restricts the extent to which employees may act as autonomous individuals. When entering an employment contract the prospective employee typically abstains parts of her discretionary power to the employer. Such and other characteristics of the workplace will be taken into consideration when interpreting the three aspects of privacy in the particular setting of work. In this way, essential characteristics of workplace privacy will be revealed.

The conclusion reached will be that the way in which privacy is understood is crucial for the quality of privacy protection. And, in order to reach a satisfactorily workplace privacy protection the view on privacy must come to include, not only informational privacy, but also decisional and local privacy. A broader privacy concept would expand the coverage of privacy protection and a stronger emphasis on decisional privacy could come to reduce the need for additional principles like the Fair Bargaining codes that serve to secure employees’ interests in employment negotiations.

REFERENCES

Inness, J.C “Privacy, Intimacy and Isolation”, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Roessler, B. “The Value of Privacy”, Polity Press, 2005.

Bennett, C. in:. Hansson and Palm (eds) “The Ethics of Workplace Privacy”, P.I.E. Lang, 2005.

Palm, E “Ethical Aspects of Workplace Surveillance”, Licentiate Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2005.

AUTHOR
Ugo Pagallo

ABSTRACT

Since the idea of small worlds first appeared in the pioneering work of Stanley Milgram and later with the sociological research of Mark Granovetter, it has grown to become one of the central figures of interdisciplinary research involved with understanding the evolution of social systems in the digital age. It is sufficient to refer to the mathematical model of the small world offered by Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz, published on «Nature» in 1998, not to mention the development of the theory in Linked. The New Sciences of Networks by Albert-László Barabási (2002) which proved how and why the small world-phenomenon needs to be read at the light of “free scale” laws. Recently, the small world paradigm has found interesting applications within fields such as law. In 2005, the noteworthy study of Seth Chandler outlined a network of links between the United States Supreme Court cases where the result was a complicated web resembling a map of cities linked by dozens of airlines where you could see which nodes were likeliest to fall on the shortest paths between two other nodes. Significant results have also been obtained in the related work by James Fowler and Sangick Jeon on the historical development of American jurisprudence from a small world-perspective.

The aim of my paper would be to widen and refine such a small world-model by taking into account and allowing for the algorithmic theory of information developed by the American mathematician Gregory Chaitin with whom I have been collaborating over the last years. Such an enriched model would, in fact, be adequate to analyze changing features in social interaction which are outstandingly increasing in the digital age. The area of application of the model would hence be in legal and social sciences, but might also have some encouraging effect on interdisciplinary work. Whereas I have already presented some important empirical and theoretical results of the new perspective in fields such as EU legal system and/or P2P networks, it is also relevant to stress some interesting results concerning glocalization.

First and foremost, the small world-paradigm on the background of Chaitin’s mathematical conclusions has some interesting consequences on the social level, as far as reducing complexity of the environment is considered. In deed, the phenomenon we get is all the more complex as the quantity of information grows and its theoretical compression decreases. This circumstance opens new perspectives for the analysis of the evolution of such complex systems as political and legal ones. These latter systems have been evolving in innovative ways because of the well-known paradigm-crisis of State Sovereignty and International Law in connection with the E-revolution in Technology. By using a small world-paradigm instead of more traditional political and legal models we can comprehend and interpret the ongoing glocalization in Roland Robertson’s phrase, for it seems possible to determine how centers or main-cores of the old world do work in the complex web of contemporary political and legal decisions.

Such nodes, in effect, appear to be quite similar to hubs as far as their functioning is considered. Accordingly to its mathematical model, a hub’s effectiveness depends on its grade of complexity, so the more information a hub is capable of handling on the basis of its own composite linked structure, the greater its impact on the whole. The model I am proposing could therefore give a significant contribution to the understanding of glocalization, since reducing exponentially grades of separation between nodes via hubs – treated as channels of globalization – places local and often antithetical nodes-worlds in a nearer connection. More over, these legal and political hubs cannot be adequately understood as part of the same communicative level: related to the algorithmic theory of information, the small world-model consequently offers a normative criteria on which ground it becomes possible to charter and arrange the hubs. Actually, social systems seem to be all the more capable of reducing environmental complexity and hence optimizing their functioning via hubs, as they involve a greater and more complex structure within each node of the system.

What seems to be of major importance about the small world-model, from a ICT-perspective, is not only the objective shortage of applied scholarly work in traditional legal and political science, nor the possibility to develop a well-grounded model for future case studies and reports, but mostly that it gives the opportunity to experimental assessment of the new world order both in legal and social terms. Whereas it is possible to decide as a matter of fact what have been (and are) the semantic hubs within a particular context, i.e., within a legal and political culture, such a viewpoint also necessitates a discussion about which are, practically speaking, the significant hubs in Today’s world and what centers of traditional decision-making may be filtered out as less-connected cases in the network as a whole.

AUTHOR
Yohko Orito, Kiyoshi Murata

ABSTRACT

As we move on into the twenty-first century, it has become clearer that development and deployment of information and communication technology (ICT) is likely to threaten information privacy of individuals as data subjects. In developed countries, the importance of information privacy is acknowledged and laws and regulations to protect it have been enforced. On the other hand, it is often alleged that the concept of privacy is subjectively understood and interpreted in a specific context, i.e., privacy is a subjective, time-serving concept. In other words, understanding and interpretation of the concept of privacy correlates with the socio-cultural background including the circumstances of development and spread of ICT and enactment of the legislation. These characteristics of privacy are reflected in people’s behaviour related to protection of information privacy.

In Japan, the laws which cover the public sector were enforced in 1988 whereas personal data protection within the private sector was remained to be entrusted by self-regulation. However, due to external pressure put by the international community such as Directive 95/46/EC on the processing of personal data, the Act for protection of personal data which covered both the public and private sectors was enforced in April 2005.This act regulates individuals and organisations that collect and store personal data and obligate them to undertake measures to ensure the proper handling of personal data. The introduction of the Act raised the public sector’s and corporate awareness of necessity to address personal data protection and the spread of knowledge of the enforcement of the Act among society in general, mainly because the Act entailed penalty clauses.

This has led to mixed results; one area has been excessive response to the Act. This was highlighted in the JR FUKUCHIYAMA Train Disaster in April 2005, where in order to abide by the Act the hospitals, in which the casualties were taken, would not disclose information on names and condition of them. Consequently, relatives of the casualties were at a loss how to acquire vital information of them. This case suggests that over-zealous adherence to the Act resulted in losing sight of the original objectives of it; the Act presumes the usefulness of personal data and intends to promote personal data use harmonised with protection.

In addition, many cases in which people tried to apply the Act in such a rigid way that anomalies and muddles were brought about were reported. For example, after the enforcement of the Act, making lists such as community membership lists and student lists is often discouraged, because some of habitants, the students and the parents of them refused provision of personal data. They assumed that they had the right to do this arbitrarily based on the Act. There were even some people who rejected to fill out the census form on the authority of the Act, although it was not applied to the census. Moreover, in order to comply with the Act, several local governments refused to reply the enquiries of defendants from lawyers engaged in the preparation of the lawsuits.

The efforts of personal data protection made by Japanese firms seem to be based on “cold feet-based” compliance; they hesitate to do anything which is questionable whether legal or not in terms of the Act. Indeed, from 1 April 2005, the day of the enforcement of the Act, to date, there has been no firm prosecuted due to violation of the Act. The firms appear to struggle to avoid damage on their reputation suffered by being defendants of the first case of violation of the Act.

In order to get out of the messy situations surrounding protection of personal data and information privacy in Japan, reconsideration of the concept of information privacy responding to the modern information society is necessary. This challenge requires answering the following questions:

(a) Who owns personal data which are collected, stored and used by some organisation?

(b) Is it acceptable to reconsider the concept of information privacy based on a certain socio-cultural context?

The concept of information privacy insists that an individual has the right to control the circulation of his/her own data. However, if a significant number of people try to execute this right and, for example, call on organisations to let the people know whether their personal data are held by the organisations and, if that is the case, whether the data are correct, ordinal activities of the organisations would be disabled and quality of the services provided by the organisations would deteriorate. This suggest that in the modern information society where many organisations collect and use personal data in order to provide their services effectively and efficiently, the concept of information privacy may not respond to the reality. This seems to mean that a certain part of the right to information privacy should be alienated to organisations which use personal data for their business and they have to fulfil their fiduciary responsibility with respect to protection of personal data.

AUTHOR
Bjorn Niehaves

ABSTRACT

Information and communication technologies fundamentally change political decision making in the public sector. Decision making in local public administrations, regarding the example of German public administrations, is often shaped by a significant informational asymmetry. According to the primacy of representative democracy, elected politicians are formally in charge of political decision making. However, often capacity problems occur as being a local council member is an avocational and honorary engagement for most of them. The resulting informational deficit heavily shifts emphasis of practical political power to public administration employees who are full-time engaged in the area of concern. Here, information and communication technology, especially management information systems, can help to improve information transparency and to reduce informational asymmetries in political decision making.

Balanced Scorecards (BSC) are an established conceptual basis for ‘balanced’ management systems (Kaplan & Norton 1996a; Kaplan et al. 1997; Gentia 1998; Olve et al. 1999; Kaplan & Norton 2000; Buytendijk 2001). An empirical study conducted in major US-enterprises (Kaplan & Norton 1996b) has shown, for instance, that there exist significant deficits in actually aligning the business strategy and business operations, that classical financial measures often run too short when it comes to strategic management decisions, or that controlling and reporting systems are often perceived as too complex but insufficient when it comes to ad hoc requests. These and other significant problems in management practice have lead to developing Balanced Scorecards (BSC) as a strategy management and controlling instrument (Horváth 2001). Hence, BSC aims at balancing performance measurement between strategy and operations, taking into account various types of measures, e.g. qualitative and quantitative, and including different stakeholder perspectives, e.g. citizen or employee perspectives (Kaplan & Norton 1996b).

Repeatedly, BSC implementations in public administrations fail in effectively including stakeholder perspectives. First, in many cases of BSC implementation in public administrations, the adaptation of industry-oriented approaches to our specific domain has not been developed to a sufficient extend. The primacy of politics and democracy is often not taken into account adequately. Second, essential prerequisite when “building a balanced scorecard [is to] achieve a consensus on the balanced scorecard that will be used by the organization” (Martinsons et al. 1999, p. 83). What is often seen as ‘just’ one of the things one has to assure when implementing BSC, is a major problem in BSC implementation practice. For instance, what are the stakeholders’ goals, what are effective measures that should be applied, and what would be the best resources to allocate to?

A policy research-based political perspective can support a structured approach to designing management systems in public administration which comply with the primacy of representative democracy. While significant strategic knowledge is needed for achieving a consensus and for an effective BSC implementation (Martinsons et al. 1999), this is often latent, spread over diverse entities and people, and regularly linked to conflictory beliefs and standpoints. A multitude of different goals and beliefs exists among different public administration stakeholders, such as citizens, businesses, or employees. However, at current state, little methodological support for systematically discovering this strategic knowledge within the BSC process is available, especially regarding participative approaches.

Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop a BSC implementation approach which supports the effective inclusion of different public administration stakeholder views. Such an approach is intended to comply with the primacy of representative democracy as it applies stakeholder goal mapping on the basis of a participatory paradigm. Ethical dimensions become especially apparent when defining stakeholder perspectives, strategic stakeholder goals, and in selecting representatives for inclusion in this participatory process. The paper seeks to support these activities by suggesting an approach which increases transparency of stakeholder groups and their distinct goals.

Addressing this research objective, the method chosen is that of conceptual and argumentative research. Our arguments will (where applicable) also refer to empirical research results in terms of a BSC implementation case study from a public organisation. We consider the paper to contribute to and to be part of design science research in information systems (cf., for instance, Simon 1981; Boland 1989; Walls et al. 1992; March & Smith 1995; Rossi & Sein 2003; Hevner et al. 2004; Niehaves & Stahl 2006). We will therefore provide a brief summarising assessment of this research, complying with the guidelines for evaluating design science in IS research (cf. Hevner et al. 2004), within the concluding section.

REFERENCES

Boland, R.D. “The Experience of System Design: A Hermeneutic of Organizational Action,” Scandinavian Journal of Management (5:2) 1989, pp. 87-104.

Buytendijk, F. Balanced Scorecard Tools: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Gartner Group Research Note DF-12-8143, 2001.

Gentia “Automating the Balanced Scorecard,” Management Accounting (76:8) 1998, p. 22.

Hevner, A.R., March, T.S., Park, J., and Sudha, R. “Design Science in Information Systems Research,” MIS Quarterly (28:1) 2004, pp. 75-105.

Horváth, P. Balanced Scorecard umsetzen, Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart, 2001.

Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. The balanced scorecard: translating strategy into action, Harvard Business School Press, Boston/MA, 1996a.

Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. “Using the BSC as a Strategic Management System,” Harvard Business Review (74:1) 1996b, pp. 75-85.

Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance, Harvard Business School Press, Boston/MA, 2000.

Kaplan, R.S., Norton, D.P., and Horváth, P. Balanced Scorecard – Strategien erfolgreich umsetzen, Schaeffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart, 1997.

March, T.S. and Smith, G. “Design and Natural Science Research on Information Technology,” Decision Support Systems (15:4) 1995, pp. 251-266.

Martinsons, M., Davison, R., and Tse, D. “The balanced scorecard: a foundation for the strategic management of information systems,” Decision Support Systems (25:3) 1999, pp. 71-88.

Niehaves, B. and Stahl, B.C. “Criticality, Epistemology, and Behaviour vs. Design – IS Research across different sets of paradigms,” in Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2006), Göteborg, 2006.

Olve, N.G., Roy, J., and Wetter, M. Performance drivers: a practical guide to using the balanced scorecard, Wiley, Chichester, 1999.

Rossi, M. and Sein, M. “Design Research Workshop: A Proactive Research Approach,” in Proceedings of the IRIS 2003, Helsinki, 2003.

Simon, H.A. The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 1981.

Walls, J., Widmeyer, G., and El Sawy, O. “Building an Information System Design Theory for Vigilant EIS,” Information Systems Research (3:1) 1992, pp. 36-59.

AUTHOR
Teruya Nagao, Kiyoshi Murata

ABSTRACT

The rapid development and widespread availability of information and communication technology (ICT) has made various types of information processing possible. A huge amount of data are collected and stored in databases and flexible database management systems and sophisticated software furnishes us with ability to manipulate data as we like. Broadband networks covering nation-wide as well as world-wide transfer any types of data files at light speed. Bulletin board systems, social networking services and blog services provide us with opportunities to publish our opinions casually.

On the other hand, the advent of the ICT-driven information society requires us to carry out our social responsibilities for information behaviour in return for the great convenience of ICT. In particular, people working for organisations such as firms, governments, hospitals, schools, research institutes and NPO/NGOs should develop and establish professional ethics concerning collection, processing, transfer and disclosure of information suitable to the information age in their respective area of work, because the core activity of their work is information behaviour and it affects the quality of life for a broad range of people to some degree or another.

However, it may be a real challenge in Japan to develop professional ethics regarding information behaviour in response to the development and spread of ICT. First of all, even though the importance of controlling influence of development, usage and dissemination of ICT in a socially favourable way has broadly been acknowledged, it is not necessarily the case in Japan. Many Japanese people consider that ICT is just a technological matter and does not relate it with social and ethical issues. Furthermore, in the mature society, ordinal Japanese people tend to consider that discourse on ethics is just for children; adults should internalise the traditionally cultivated values based on which appropriate judgments are made. In fact, the circumstances have caused seemingly farcical, but socially serious, muddles with respect to ICT and information behaviour. In March 2001, IT Strategic Headquarters, the taskforce set up at the prime minister’s office to propose national policies in respect of ICT, submitted “e-Japan Priority Policy Program”. According to this report, “information” was decided to be a mandatory subject at Japanese high schools from 2003 and this got the Japanese field of education into a mess. In order to get a teaching qualification in information, students have to acquire credits of subjects including “Information society and ethics”. At many Japanese engineering colleges, however, the teaching staff were at a loss what educational content to be taught in this subject and who to ask to give a lecture on it.

In addition to these factors, the greatest obstacle to development of professional ethics concerning information behaviour in Japan is the lack of responsibility ethics of individuals, which are necessary components of professional ethics. Japanese ethical and political tradition was built up through the three epoch-making events: (a) the introduction of Tang legal scheme in the eighth century, which enhanced to establish the “Ten’no” (Japanese Emperor) Regime, (b) the adoption of Song Neo-Confucianism as the state thought in the seventeenth century, which ideologically supported the Tokugawa Shogunate system, and (c) the introduction of Western political scheme between the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, which helped establish Meiji nation-state. At each of the events, the original scheme or thought was “Japanised”, i.e. was modified in order to be adapted to Japanese conditions at the time. Unfortunately, at the last event, although responsibility ethics of individuals consistent with Japanese socio-cultural tradition should be established in step with building Meiji modern state, they failed to be and have not yet been developed.

In order to develop a practical code of professional ethics in some society at some time, the code has to be correlated with core ethical thought or fundamental ethics shared among people in the society at the time, because the code can practically work well only if the fundamental ethics endorse it. In other words, the code should be designed through the process of interpreting and rethinking the fundamental ethics. It is obvious that professional ethics are not identical to fundamental ethics. However, in order to make a code of professional ethics efficacious, it is necessary that the code is accepted and supported by ordinal or non-professional people as well as professionals in the society at the time. This means the code developed is inevitably ethnocentric in a certain sense; the code is not universally efficacious because it is developed based on the socio-cultural context.

In Japanese circumstances in which there is no clear conception of responsibility ethics of individuals, to develop and establish reliable and efficacious professional ethics, a code of which is totally endorsed by fundamental ethics, is really a hard task. This is sort of a tragedy to the modern information society, because Japan is one of the leading nations in the field of ICT development and usage. In order to surmount the difficulty, perusing and reflecting the historical circumstances of the formation of Japanese socio-cultural context to compensate the lack of responsibility ethics of individuals is absolutely necessary.

AUTHOR
Makoto Nakada

ABSTRACT

What I’d like to discuss in this paper submitted for ETHICOM 2007 is about something behind Japanese attitudes towards politics as well as interests in other dominant social problems in Japan. I want to call this something ‘Seken’. Seken is a Japanese term and refers to traditional, old, and indigenous aspects of Japanese culture and society. ‘Se’ means ‘this world’ and ‘ken’ means ‘between’, therefore ‘Seken’ means the ‘Between World’, i.e. this world between heaven and the vulgar earth or the world between gods and people or the world between me and the others.

In a different way, Seken is a shared imaginative world of meanings that consists of morals, social ethics, criteria of value judgements, common senses, aims of life, desirable behaviours, shared illusions, shared myths and the like. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Seken is that Seken has its long history in Japanese culture and that parts of Seken-related meanings derive from Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Bushido (moral and ethics of Samurai), traditional views on nature, orientation to solidarity and so on.

I believe that the important points of my discussions on ‘Seken’ mainly lie in the ways of grasping or understanding Seken as a set of meanings and also in the empirical methods used to examine the concrete contents of Seken as a set of meanings.

In fact, through a set of our empirical researches continuously conducted for more than a decade in Japan, I or we, my colleagues in the research groups could find many interesting facts regarding Seken .

First, we found that Seken or Seken-related meanings still remain actively within the minds of Japanese people living in the so-called ‘Information Era’(Table 1).

Second, people’s attitudes towards dominant social problems including political problems are closely related with Seken-related meanings which include old or somewhat irrational values or ethics (Table 2).

Third, while Seken-related meanings are tightly associated with people’s attitudes towards political problems, people’s ways of life or ways of views mainly related with the Internet such as ‘length of usage of the Internet per week’, ‘evaluation of the Internet as sources of information in general’, ‘interests in diffusion of the Internet and information technology’ turned out to have no (statistical) relations with people’s attitudes political problems (Table 2).

Table1. Sympathy with Seken-related meanings

1) Table 1 shows the percentages of the respondents who said “agree or somewhat agree” to Seken -related statements. These statements are such as: “Within our modern lifestyles, people have become too distant from nature”(Distance from nature); “People will become corrupt if they become too rich”(Honest poverty); “People have a certain destiny, no matter what form it takes”(Destiny); “In our world, there are a number of things that cannot be explained by science”(Denial of natural science); “There are too many people in developed countries (or Japan) today who are concerned only with themselves” (Criticism of selfishness ); “In today’s world, people are helpless if they are (individually) themselves” (Powerlessness); “In today’s world, what seems cheerful and enjoyable is really only superficial” (Superficial cheerfulness); “Doing your best for other people is good for you” (Belief in kindness); “The frequent occurrence of natural disasters is due to scourge of heaven” (Scourge of heaven).

2) ‘1995G’, ‘2000G’, ‘2002G’, ‘2003G’,’2005G’, ‘2005S’ and ‘2006G’are the researches conducted by the author and his colleagues.

Table 2. Relations between ‘political attitudes’ and ‘ways of life concerning usage of the Internet or ways of views on the Internet’ as well as ‘Seken-related meanings’ (2005G research)

1) The figures in this table show correlation coefficients between ‘political

attitudes’ and ‘ways of life concerning usage of the Internet or ways of views on the Internet’ as well as ‘Seken-related meanings.’

2) **=p<0.01, *=p<0.05, ns= non (statistically) significant. If we combine these different but at the same time inner-related findings gained through our researches, we can probably surface some crucial conclusions or assumptions which we should depend upon when we try to understand the meanings of the Internet or other major information technologies in our life; The meanings of the Internet, or those of other information technologies as well as those of technologies in general (at least technologies closely related to our daily life, food, energy, environment and so on)can not be separated from a set of meanings called ‘Seken.’(In fact, we could find that the meanings of technologies related with atomic energy plants, safety of food are part of Seken-related meanings.) In spite of the expectancy of the majority of scholars in the modernized minds, the meanings of technologies as well as natural science can’t be divided from our ‘Lebenswelt( life world)’ or ontological ways of our life. ; This is the central point of the presuppositions of discussions by Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer as well. In my( the author’s ) own interpretation, Seken means a sort of ‘Lebenswelt’ for Japanese people in several crucial ways.