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The Seven Digital Sins

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By Michael J. Bugeja

One day I was running late for my ethics class and realized I was missing a few pieces of information for a lecture I was about to give on social mores. On the way to the auditorium I visited a colleague's office to ask if he could do a quick Internet search for me on Puritanical influences on mass media. With a printout or two, I figured, I could refresh my memory and wing it in class.

"Sure," he said. At the time he was working on a text document. He minimized that screen only to reveal thumbnail images of naked women in sexual poses. I was looking for a Bay Colony and got a nudist one.

In all honesty the images might have popped up unintentionally. It happens. Porn operators routinely purchase domains whose registration has lapsed, boosting traffic on their sites. Then they offer to resell the URLs to former owners, a practice known as "porn napping." (For more information on the subject, visit the Online Internet Institute.)

I myself have been a victim of porn napping. One of my publishers allowed his domain to expire without notifying authors that the address had been napped. I had linked to the site via my home page, blithely directing students, teachers, and visitors to the link to read about family values.

In any case my colleague and I gawked at the women on his monitor. He seemed genuinely puzzled. He exited the site and another X-rated seductress popped up on his monitor. "What's she doing there?" he said and then navigated finally to the search engine. He turned and faced me. "What was it again that you wanted to know?"

"Puritanical influences on media," I repeated hurriedly.

My colleague frowned, uncertain whether my remark was a genuine query or a snide quip.

We live in interesting Internet times. Each day is an "ad" adventure. Only a few years ago professors rarely encountered marketing in the Ivory Tower. When we did, the marketing had substance -- book dealers with free review copies of books, office-supply vendors with reorder requests, discounts on scientific or literary publications, and the like.

Now we're deluged with ploys that have little to do with our academic interests or lifestyles, simply because we visited an Internet site or ill-advisedly clicked. We're list-served, spammed, flamed, taunted and, occasionally, tempted. But mostly we're desensitized by hundreds of unsolicited pop-up offers transmitted daily via dozens of gadgets at home and at work.

The literati saw this coming. The poet Hayden Carruth, writing in The Georgia Review, noted:

Constantly we are told that this or that commercial product or service, or even this or that candidate for office, is "better," when we know it cannot be true. ... Children today are taught, in lessons compounded every five minutes, that untruth may be uttered with impunity, even with approval. Lying has become a way of life, very nearly now the way of life, in our society. The average adult American of average intelligence and average education believes almost nothing communicated to him in language, and the disbelief has become so ingrained that he or she does not even notice it.

That passage, by the way, was published in the winter issue of 1981. Since then, television has consumed much of the leisure time that technology provided. Teachers and students alike are watching monitors and screens most of the day rather than each other. So it's no surprise that sin has gone digital, too.

The seven deadly ones -- pride, greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, wrath, and lust -- are electronic now because we are. See if you don't recognize yourself or someone you know in any of these:

Home Page Pride: At its worst, this could mean the fabrication or embellishment of scholarly achievements in your online biography. But it also could be the belief that you have published a manuscript because you posted it on a home page, or the inclusion of a mug shot of yourself taken 10 or more years earlier.

Techno Greed: An example of this would be the institutional ploy of raising tuition along with tech fees, but then using such fees to purchase office supplies only marginally associated with technology. There's also a more obvious one: The solicitation of review books with intent to auction online.

Computer Envy: This is the feeling experienced by librarians in empty libraries providing 24-hour Internet access, or by adjuncts who inherit hand-me-down computers.

Dot.com Gluttony: Here is the thrill of creative achievement when you register a dot.com domain that you feel sure someone will covet and buy.

Plagiarism Sloth: You're guilty of this when you believe that you own what you have copied and pasted into "my documents" or when you assume that faculty members over 40 do not know how to use search engines.

E-mail Wrath: This one is easy. It's the conviction that you must have the last electronic word. It's the use of the "reply to all" function in response to policy announcements that you don't like.

Streaming Lust: An example of this is porn napping -- the scam of using lapsed scholarly domains to peddle porn -- and it is the latest digital sin to infect academe.

You may be an unwitting victim of that last sin if you use Internet sites in your scholarship -- especially in convention papers posted regularly online.

In one of my manuscripts, I had inserted a footnote with a link to Marshall McLuhan's famous 1969 Playboy interview. McLuhan, of course, believed that the medium was the message -- or the "massage," as he wryly wrote -- prophesying a global electronic village (rather than our modern-day digital mall). The topic of my manuscript was lack of privacy in the computer era. Before submitting the piece, I tested the URLs in my footnotes only to witness, when I checked the McLuhan one, a nude woman pop up on my monitor.

I high-tailed to the empty campus library and overcame digital sloth, fetching the original article the old-fashioned way -- on microfiche. A few months later I tested the suspect link again to see whether the woman was still there. She had moved on. Apparently the domain has been resold again to a vendor offering Internet eraser software, the advertisement for which is illustrated with a ripped-out newspaper headline: "Professor Arrested After Computer Hard Drive Was Examined." A cookie was inserted into my computer, warning: "Privacy Protection Software NOT DETECTED. Your Internet habits are being recorded."

Indeed. We had all better develop new Internet habits, chief among them discretion. The Internet can be volatile and vile as well as dynamic and data-driven. To offset that duality, practice these digital virtues:

Home Page Prudence: A professor's public Web site tells more about his or her personality than Pick-A-Prof.com. So think twice before posting photos of you as a chaperon on that Amsterdam exchange trip.

Techno Diligence: Campus administrators should audit use of technology fees as thoroughly as the IRS audits itemized deductions. Otherwise we're increasing tuition, not access.

Computer Gratitude: Any PC that can load Word is worth keeping. The older the computer, the longer it takes to download cookies, spam, pop-ups, and viruses. Free MP3s and game demos won't download at all, resulting in effective time-management strategies.

Dot.com Realism: Nobody will buy your domain name; operators will wait until you let it lapse ... and nap it.

Plagiarism Vigilance: Become versed in the art of dissecting sophomoric excuses, such as "I didn't know stealing stuff from the Internet was wrong!"

E-mail Abstinence: Use the medium to praise colleagues, schedule meetings, and distribute agendas, along with other mundane tasks. Never correct, set the record straight, or criticize anyone via e-mail or attachment. Still unconvinced? Visit your campus ombudsman office -- a busy place these days -- and discern how caseloads have spiked because of e-mail.

Streaming Zeal: Come to class prepared, excited about the content of your lecture rather than the tools used to deliver it. Check and recheck Internet addresses in your scholarship. Cite books in print on stacks rather than in files on computers.

Seek moderation in all things digital. Otherwise, venial sins may become viral, infecting all of us on the way to the wired auditorium.