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the search committee. During the process of sifting through applications and finding out more about candidates, the need arose to query something on the candidate's resume. We used the Alta Vista search engine to find the candidate's email address. (Of course, the first thing one really does with Alta Vista is ego surfingchecking one's own name to see how many times it appears on the Webbut we had already done that.) His email address and formal institutional home page appeared in about fifteen seconds on our desktop, but so did his contributions to a discussion on world peace, a feminist bulletin board, and one of the more arcane alt.rec Usenet groups. We found ourselves unable to stop our eyes from roving through the quoted Usenet postscategory boundaries surely never meant to be crossed by a job search committee. Fortunately for us as committee members, we interpreted what we found on the Web as evidence that the applicant was a more well rounded person than his formal CV resume had conveyed. He became a more interesting candidate. |
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But of course, it might have gone badly for him. In less than a minute we had accessed information about him that crossed a social boundary of de facto privacy, access, and awareness context (Glaser and Strauss 1965). The risk of random readership had been there in some sense when he posted to a public space, but who on a search committee in the old days of a couple of years ago could possibly be bothered searching listserv archives? Who would have time? There are many ethical and etiquette-related questions here, of course, with the right to privacy not least among them. The incident also points to the fact that as a culture we have not yet developed conventions of classification for the Web that bear much moral or habitual conviction in daily practice. The label alt.rec does not yet have the reflex power that the label private does on a desk drawer or notebook cover. We would never open someone's desk drawer or diary. We are not usually known to be rude people, but we have not yet developed or absorbed routine similar politeness for things such as powerful Web search engines. We were thus somewhat embarrassed and confused about the morality of mentioning the alt.rec postings to the committee. |
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As we evolve the classifications of habitgrow common fingertips with respect to linkages and networkswe will be faced with some choices. How standardized will our indexes become? What forms of freedom of association (among people, texts and people, and texts) do we want to preserve and which are no longer useful? Who will decide these matters? |
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