James Drogan

This morning, by way of Slashdot comes a pointer to UW team researches a future filled with RFID chips from The Seattle Times.  The opening paragraph is:

"Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they've been, and with whom, stored in a database."

This connects to two items.  First, in A Small View of a Possible World I raise the question whether being always on, always connected, always transacting  is a good thing.   I tend to think, in some cases, this is not a good thing.  Even the ubiquity of the cellphone is perhaps not a good thing.

My wife and I noted emerging developments in cellphone technology would allow either of us to know all the time where the other was.  We concluded (I think) that if we did that it would say something troubling about our  relationship.

This also relates to the thinking of Sherry Turkle at MIT.  See Turkle + Technology = Something to Think About.

The second strong connection to The Seattle Times article is to a recent post in cac.ophony, the blog of The Bernard L. Schwartz Communcation Institute at Baruch College.   In How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?, Olga brings up interesting questions that prompt me to ask if there is a link between the demise of privacy and the rise of plagiarism?

If ethics are the norms of behavior in a society, then perhaps technology is fundamentally changing our ethics in ways the succeeding generations are find increasingly acceptable, and preceding generations are finding increasingly unacceptable.  This presents a dilemma to those of us who believe we have a responsibility to instill ethical behavior in those following us.