Virtue in Virtual Spaces: Catholic Social Teaching and Technology

Explore new modes of creation to bring virtue back into virtual spaces.

At its best, the internet channels the world into a global village of sorts, where digital citizens learn from each other, explore new modes of creation, and help others work through dilemmas in both physical and virtual spaces. Virtue in Virtual Spaces argues that the internet doesn't have to be the cultural wasteland of click-bait, partisan politics, and vulgar content that we see too often today.

Technology has tremendous potential for good because of the inherent goodness of human creation and creativity which can be achieved through the development and use of technology. The authors draw from writing on virtue ethics and Catholic Social Teaching to demonstrate this potential goodness of technology. Eight of the main themes of Catholic Social Teaching are used to build a framework for designing technology to promote human flourishing. In this book, readers will engage with the philosophies behind their favorite social media platforms, examine how the design features in these platforms shape habits and imagination, and gain dialogue-based skills to bring virtue back into virtual spaces.

Author: Louisa Conwill, Megan Levis, Walter J. Scheirer
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 09/15/2024
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9798400800269

About the Author
Louisa Conwill is a PhD student in computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses include computer vision, human-computer interaction, and technology ethics, and she has a particular interest in how the teachings of the Catholic Church can inform technology ethics. A graduate of Brown University, Louisa worked as a software engineer for Amazon Alexa and served as a campus missionary with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) before starting her graduate studies at Notre Dame.

Megan Levis is an assistant professor of the practice with the University of Notre Dame's Center for Social Concerns and College of Engineering. She holds a PhD in bioengineering and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Notre Dame's Technology Ethics Center and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research interests relate to questions concerning how technology shapes the cultural understanding of what it means to be human and how technology can be designed to encourage virtue and the common good. Levis is also working to bring character formation into engineering curricula.

Walter J. Scheirer is the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Associate Professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is a global technology leader, serving as the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and as a board member of the Computer Vision Foundation. Scheirer is also a cultural critic and historian, commenting on the social context of emerging technologies from the realistic perspective of a technologist, and promoting technology development informed by Catholic Social Teaching that upholds the common good.