The impact of the Internet on our moral lives in academia

When I was in college, now some thirty odd years ago, I remember one of my professors remarking in passing that he remembered a time when there was no Scotch tape. Hard to imagine, although I can now remember when Xerox machines first began to be widely used by students. My students, I am sure, would be equally astounded to hear me talk about a time before the Internet – indeed, a time before desktop computing. I got my first Osborne computer (“portable” in the same way in which sewing machines were said to be portable) in 1984, a year in which many of my current students were in diapers. I started my first web site in 1994, hand coding html late into the night – a year in which many of my students were just becoming official teenagers. Now the Internet is ubiquitous. My parentsin-law, now in their mid-seventies, bought their first computer last month and already send email daily to friends and family around the globe. My daughter, now nine years old, was logging on with her username and password at the age of four. Now it is not unusual for my web site to receive eight thousand visits a day, often from more than forty countries in a given day. The changes that the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web have brought to our lives are stunning. Here I would like to concentrate on the ways in which the Internet has changed our moral lives, especially our moral lives as lived in universities. I will begin by talking about the impact that the web has had on academic integrity, and this will provide a useful springboard for discussing others ways in which the web has reshaped our moral lives within academia.