Archive for March, 2009
Learning the Ethics of the Internet
In 1994, I was a college junior immersed in my product design studies. One of my classes was Engineering Ethics, and the final project was a group project where each group was assigned a famous ethics case to report and present to the class. These cases each came straight out of the textbook and each was at least 20 years old. These same cases had probably been used in thousands of college classrooms around the country since the cases were front page headlines.
Even the teacher seemed bored by the cases.
As you can imagine, I was having a hard time finding inspiration. On a lark, I pulled up the search engine (probably Alta Vista in those days) and plugged in the title of our assigned case. The results weren’t very interesting until 3 results pages in. I found myself staring at a copy of the very report our group was working on, complete with presentation notes. I immediately hit the print button. I sent an email to the author who promptly returned it with some additional details and thoughts about the report, as well as encouragement to use the report to help our team out. He also offered to answer any questions we might have had.
Later that night, our group stood around a table staring at this report like it was a dead body we weren’t exactly sure what to do with. We start talking about what to do next. This was an ethics class, after all, so we were worried that about space-time continuum issues if we lifted the report outright. Our final agreement seems almost quaint by today’s information infused standards: we would use this document to get us past the base starting point and focus instead on going far deeper than any other team.
My part of this project was to spend time tracking down the actual whistleblower, Kermit Vandivier. After an hour long phone conversation with Mr. Vandivier, I had more information about the case than any other team could have hoped to have gotten. Our presentation was much more polished, and the report we turned in much more in-depth than any other team. We had been able to skip past the basic facts and figures and instead focus on the real story, the impact of the case, and how an industry had changed because of it.
We received a B+ on the project. In our presentation, we’d been very open about the report we’d found and what it had allowed us to do on the project. Unfortunately, our instructor thought that we’d missed the point of the assignment – to regurgitate core facts, not discuss the impact to the industry or on the actual people involved. This project taught me how connected we all already were, whether we realized it or not. It also gave me an insight into the challenges those of us who understood this would have in convincing others it was a wonderful thing.
That instructor threw down the gauntlet that day, and my career and life have benefited significantly from it. Thanks for that ridiculous B+, professor. You helped me discover my desire to change the world.
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Jake McKee blogs at CommunityGuy.com and runs the Connected by Distance project. He has been working to change the internet and our culture for more than 15 years.
