Track 1

Track description

The ongoing diffusion of digital technologies into our private and professional lives has created inestimable possibilities to enhance our existence across a variety of important domains, from homes and cities, to healthcare, education, employment, entertainment, safety, public participation, and transportation. But with great power also comes great responsibility. We have all come to realise that digital technologies have created non-trivial, non-reversible changes to our individual and collective behaviours, our institutions and organizations, and our society and the environment. These changes are neither unequivocally positive nor negative. For example, personal data digitalization can help individuals live longer, healthier lives but it also challenges individual rights, obligations, and our sense of dignity (Leidner and Tona 2022). Our political processes are deeply intertwined with social media both as a means for social change (Oh et al. 2015) and for manipulating public opinion (Kitchen et al. 2020). Emerging technologies such as electric shared vehicles are coining a revolution in the mobility and energy sector (Kahlen et al. 2018) but also increase fear of labour substitution. The datafication of everyday behaviours has led to new healthcare opportunities but also increased surveillance (De Moya and Pallud 2020). Distributed ledger technologies offer novel affordances to organise participation in public sector processes (Rieger et al. 2019) but also come with a higher environmental footprint than other alternatives (Sedlmeier et al. 2020). Artificial intelligence provides entirely unprecedented opportunities for automation and decision-making but also raises thorny ethical issues in terms of accountability, privacy, fairness, discrimination, and further biases (Berente et al. 2021).

As information systems researchers, it is on us to understand, explain, and shape the consequences, both positive and negative, that flow from the ongoing digitalization of our everyday lives. But merely recognizing and accepting our “digital responsibility” is not sufficient – we must embark to analyse, explain, predict, as well as influence the potential costs, duties, and obligations of decisions that relate to the development, implementation, and use of digital information and communication technologies. 

This conference theme track invites researchers to contribute to building cumulative knowledge about “digital responsibility” across all levels (personal, corporate, institutional, and societal) and domains of responsibility (individual, social, ethical, and ethological). We make no constraints in terms of theory, method, paradigm, or context (e.g., in terms of region, organizational form or otherwise). We welcome the entire spectrum of information systems research and invite innovative, rigorous, relevant and exciting research on digital responsibility. We do not want labels and scripts associated with traditional IS paradigms of behavioural, design, economic, and organisational perspectives to constrain how this important and complex phenomenon is investigated. We also welcome interdisciplinary work as long as a substantive engagement with the information system discourse is maintained.