Resumen
Whether in academia or industry, a person's professional identity is increasingly dependent upon network access. When the authors Web site was commandeered, the faculty home pages were copied to a new server with a slightly different file structure, changing all of our Uniform Resource Locators. That meant all references to our URLs-printed references, business cards, bookmark links, search engine links and so forth-were invalidated. During the two months the university took to make the simple technical change to rectify this problem, every attempt to reach the information of faculty in author's school resulted in a "file not found" error message. This reflected poorly on the faculty member and the university. This sort of action has serious professional consequences today since people commonly use networks to find people -searching for information on a topic, then contacting the person who posted it. A person who loses access loses professional visibility. People use the Internet to form their communities of common interest, to define their invisible colleges. If they look to the future, when more professions and a higher percent of people take the Internet for granted, the consequences of the denial of access will become more serious. It is not a great leap from thereto science fiction stories where a person's identity is erased by removing them from the Internet. |