Biography

My research has been focused on how technology has an impact on non-western culture, a complex phenomenon that contains many dimensions. For one thing, I have investigated how non-western cultures adopt new technologies in such a way that they co-opt and include the technologies in such a way that the latter become part of their daily lives. This phenomenon is interesting because there have many cases where such integration does not occur effectively, and when cultures feel that the technologies are alien to them it will create friction, causing disruptions within that culture. For example, I have studied how the Internet is adopted by Thai culture. When it was first introduced, the Internet was seen as something remote, technically demanding, hence not useful for general use. But nowadays even villagers in the countryside are engaging intensively with their peer on the Internet on a large variety of issues. What I looked at is how this came about in such a way that the villagers or an average Thai retains their cultural identity even though they are deeply involved with the Net.
Another area I have been involved with is concerned with a more directly philosophical question of how issues in information ethics are justified according to the philosophical system of the East. For example, I have undertaken a project on how privacy is to be justified in Buddhism. This is important because in order for concepts such as information privacy to be fully integrated into the lives of the cultures (issue related to in the above paragraph), a way needs to be found to base the concept on the philosophical system that belongs to that culture. This project is also relevant to others as it shows how an issue in information ethics could be couched also in other philosophical system, which is very deeply different from the usual Western one.
A longer term significance of my projects concerns our more complete understanding of how ethical issues and cultures are related. Ethical guidelines are usually formed through deliberation only among those in the West, while participants from other cultures or from non-western countries apparently have to adopt the Western philosophical system in order to participate. I have tried to show that this is too parochial, since the world is much more extensive than only the West. Inclusion at the deeper level of philosophical system itself--not only around the issues themselves but also around the question how those issues should be justified or even whether they should be included as ethical at all--appears to be in order if we are to build a more inclusive world.
Dr. Hongladarom is a finalist for the World Technology Award in 2011 in the ethics category; the award is organized by the World Technology Network (http://wtn.net).