[Air-l] ethics of recording publicly observed interactions

Jennifer Stromer-Galley jstromer at albany.edu
Tue May 11 06:15:24 PDT 2004


A letter to the editor in the NYTimes, a post on Newsgroup, and a loud
cell phone conversation are not analogous. 

A person writing a letter to the NYTimes knows that his or her letter,
if it gets printed will be part of the public record, open for public
comment and public scrutiny. Culturally, we understand that a newspaper
is a public document; and, if one writes a letter to be placed in it, we
recognize that it may be read, analyzed, and commented upon privately
and publicly. 

A person posting to a Newsgroup may or may not share the same cultural
understanding of publicness. Some participants in this discussion on
AoIR have assumed that all participants of the Internet understand the
public nature of the Internet, but I challenge that assumption. Late
adopters of the Internet and technologically unsavvy users (just to name
two groups) may not full understand or appreciate how public their posts
are. It's one thing for a techie to declare all communication online
public, and another thing entirely for a user of the Internet to
perceive his or her communication online as public. To compare back to a
letter to the NYTimes. There is a culturally-shared understanding of the
newspaper's publicness. There is not a culturally-shared understanding
that all communcation online is public. 

A person talking loudly on a cellphone on a train may experience his or
her phone conversation as a private act, even though the people in the
immediate vicinity hear one side of the conversation. Unlike a letter to
the NYTimes, there is not a culturally-shared agreement, nor is their an
individual-level perception, that such cell phone talk is public. How
many of you have started a cell phone conversation while walking or
driving (eek!) have ended the conversation and realized that you're
surprised at where you're located? We pay less attention to the external
world when we engage in cell phone conversation than when we're not
having that conversation. Although some cell phone users may be
conscientious to the fact that others can hear their conversation, I
challenge an assumption that they know and feel that their conversations
are public, and therefore open to structiny and public comment. 

So, before we academics start declaring that "those people" should know
that their communication is public because we can hear it need to
recognize the difference between academic "objective" observations of
public communication (i.e. "Newsgroup posts ARE public") and the
observeds own perceptions of publicness. 

As academics, we have a moral obligation to respect the boundaries our
potential research participants establish. As academics, we are held to
a higher standard of research approaches than, say, our journalist
colleagues (although, I wish journalists were held to a higher
standard). We ought not record and analyze for research purposes online
communication unless we are certain that the participants engaged in the
communication recognize the publicness of their communication, or unless
we acquire some level of informed consent from those participants.

Best wishes,
~Jenny Stromer-Galley





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