[Air-l] ethics of recording publicly observed interactions

[Nancy Baym]

A few cents on ethics from me --

1. As Charles Ess has indicated, the AoIR guidelines are not meant to 
be RULES but a means of helping researchers and review boards think 
through ethical issues in order to make their own wise decisions. 
This was a point which was written into that group's charge.

2. Not all online interaction, even within one mode (e.g. newsgroups) 
is the same. Making ethical decisions requires sensitivity to the 
context created BY the interaction as well as the technological 
features that enable the interaction. Despite the technological 
similarities, the ethics of quoting a newsgroup of people who are 
talking about their favorite soap operas are different from the 
ethics of quoting a newsgroup of people trying to sort through their 
recent rape because the consequences of discovering that one has been 
a research subject are very different for the two sets of people. 
Where the former may be mildly miffed (though my subjects were 
generally delighted to be studied as it lent some legitimacy to what 
they viewed as a guilty pleasure), the latter may well feel violated 
all over again.

3. I am very uncomfortable with the idea that ALL research studying 
online interaction requires consent of those studied. As I've said 
before on this list, for me, this becomes most troubling in cases 
where people are studying hate groups. Personally, I have no ethical 
qualms about covert infiltration of hate groups or covert 
observational research on them because I believe they are evil, and I 
hope that researchers will be able to raise awareness of their 
activities and help those who would fight against hate do so 
effectively. Most practitioners and advocates of hate are not eager 
to help those who would fight against them gain access to their inner 
workings. If researchers can only study people and phenomena that 
consent to the researcher's gaze, we may as well give up on 
understanding most of the ugliest of humam behavior.

4. I have long maintained that scholars should spend more efforts 
helping people understand the public nature of their online 
interactions (though I'm not sure how to do that). I believe we must 
take into account peoples' perceptions about the privacy of their 
interactions (even if others don't) as we calculate the ethics of our 
specific research projects, but I also think we have a duty to help 
them understand that their interactions are not, in fact, private if 
they can be revealed with a quick google search. Though I think it's 
good in general to seek consent, I worry about well-intentioned 
researchers nurturing the delusion that people who contribute 
discourse to publically available sites can continue to control the 
use of their words after they have been sent.

Finally, journalists keep coming up as those with lower standards, 
but the people who concern me the most are not the journalists, but 
people like pharmaceutical sales representatives who might search 
health support groups to compile lists of potential consumers, 
potential bosses who might do searches to see if potential or current 
employees might be discussing health conditions that might make them 
more expensive to insure (or to assess their religion, politics, 
etc), and so on.

Nancy

-- 
Nancy Baym 	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org