Since the last decades of the 20th Century
there has been a widespread view that we are experiencing
a remarkable acceleration in both the development and application
of new technologies. On a daily basis the media breathlessly
announces another ‘technological breakthrough’!
Popular accounts of these developments tend to be polarised
between technological utopian visions of a limitless future
on the one hand, and dystopian nightmares of aberrant technology
on the other. The Australian
Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society (AJETS)
hopes to move beyond caricatures, and contribute towards
building more informed debate about the social dimensions
of new technologies, and the opportunities and risks that
they present.
From its inception, AJETS has been designed as a multi-disciplinary
endeavor. It welcomes contributions from all branches of
the social and behavioural sciences and the humanities. It
also welcomes contributions from those in the physical and
life sciences with a concern for the social dimensions of
science. The different disciplines all have their own specialised
languages, making communication between disciplines all but
impossible. For this reason AJETS insists upon clear and
direct language, facilitating communication between specialists
and the general public.
This first issue of AJETS highlights the advantages of
a multi-disciplinary approach, featuring articles that engage
with new technologies from a variety of perspectives. Our
authors come from Communications and Media, Information Technology,
Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology. Two of them draw upon
their industry experience. They tackle topics as diverse
as artificial life, trust, online surveillance, DNA paternity
testing and Internet publishing. We believe that the first
issue presages well for our future.
As a web-only publication AJETS offers benefits not normally
found in print-based journals. For authors, AJETS provides
a peer-reviewed outlet for scholarly papers, without the
long lag between submission and publication. The pace of
technological development is so rapid that in many cases
pieces published in traditional media often seem outdated
by they time they reach the reader. A web-based journal can
circumvent this to some extent, with the submission-to-publication
timeframes being as short as two months in some cases.
Perhaps more importantly, AJETS is designed as a forum
for informed discussion and debate about the role of technology
in society. In future issues we are keen to build on this
capability, incorporating bulletin board style discussions
to facilitate public discussion.
Mark
Finn
Michael
Gilding
