Ethical Behaviour in Technology-Mediated Communication

Abstract

In this information age, serious concerns with unethical behaviour in information technology (e.g., software piracy, deception, plagiarism, etc.) have cast doubts on the claims of the unmitigated success of rapid adoption of information technology. Surprisingly, there have been very few studies in information systems (IS) that have tried to understand the general rise in such unethical behaviours with respect to information technology. Especially, the question that remains to be understood is: Are these problems of unethical behaviour representative of the human nature at large, or are they related to characteristics of technology in any way? This article tries to partly answer this question. It looks at dyadic communicative behaviour using technology-mediated communication and proposes a conceptual model of unethical communicative behaviour.