Weekly Topics - Week 15: IT and Ethics

 

source: pixabay

This week’s topic is about ethical theories. I’m picking the cultural relativism theory and apply an IT-related example to that.

The cultural relativism theory sees that there is no right and wrong in the different cultures. “Cultural relativism refers to the idea that the values, knowledge, and behavior of people must be understood within their own cultural context.” [1] When someone judges another cultures food it is an example for ethnocentrism. It means, that this person is using their own culture as the center of the world and evaluate other cultures based on that [2].

I found it hard to research a good example for its IT-related application, since most examples about cultural differences are about the different cuisines (eating bugs, eating pigs, etc.) and about their clothing style. The only, at least sort of, IT-related example I could think of is the cash-culture in Germany. Germans often pay for services and purchases with cash, which can annoy foreigners and tourists. In many countries (like the US or Estonia) card payment has long been the standard. The German cash culture is also part of the German mentality [3]. But why are the Germans loving their cash money so bad?
“A key factor is control," says business psychologist Erich Kirchler, who has been studying the cash passion and its causes in German-speaking countries for years. "We don't want to be patronized. We want autonomy, we want the freedom and practicality that cash offers." [3] Erich Kirchler explains the reason for the fear of losing control. The reason could be German history. 

"We have a relatively high level of trust in our authorities. But at the same time, we know how quickly the situation could change. That's probably not only - and here I'm being very speculative - experienced in history, but also learned and in consciousness." [3].

According to the cultural relativism theory it would be unfair to judge the German cash culture from another cultures point of view. Both cash and card payments have their (dis)advantages. Although I, as a German, am a bit annoyed by the cash culture at times.


Sources:

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/cultural-relativism-definition-3026122

[2] https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/society-and-culture/culture/a/cultural-relativism-article

[3] https://www.dw.com/de/das-bargeld-eine-deutsche-leidenschaft/a-50985805

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Topics - Week 8: Professionalism

Image
source: pixabay This week’s topic is about Professionalism. I'm going to write a short depiction about the IT sector in my home country. I’ll describe how it changed during the last 20 years. My home country is Germany, so we’ll have a look on the IT sector there. 20 years ago, the society for the German language chose the word “multimedia” as the word for the year [1]. A big change in the IT sector is, that nowadays the customers have all the IT equipment at home. The customers turned into users. That caused IT systems so to be more efficient, but also easier to use and cheaper. Sensitivity to data protection has declined significantly over the past 20 years. While Germans are still concerned about their personal data (especially in an EU comparison), they are now much more open with their data. The vice president of the society of informatics Andreas Oberweis said, that “Today, there is more of a serenity about data protection issues that almost borders on carelessness." The
Read more

Weekly Topics - Week 1: IT solutions in history

Image
This week I am going to talk about interesting IT inventions in history. Of course there are many, many interesting inventions. The three I picked interested me the most. The sources for my information are listed down below.  Let’s start with the first IT Invention:  The Black Box (1953) David Warren and his Black Box Prototype [3]  (imagesource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dave_Warren_with_BlackBox_Prototype.jpg) Did you know, that the Black Box did a huge contribution to the international airline safety? The Black Box is a Flight Recorder, invented in 1953 by David Warren [1]. Warren was a aeronautical research scientist and invented this device, because a lot of high-profile airplane crashes went unsolved. Interesting fact: Contrary to popular belief, the black box is mostly bright orange , not black (like the name suggests). The Black Box Flight Recorder is able to record flight data, cockpit sounds and instruments during a flight. The recorder can storage speech data
Read more