[Air-l] ethical issues in chat room research

[Thomas Koenig]

Charles Ess wrote:

>The ethics document is linked from the home page of
>AoIR, and can be directly accessed at
>www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf
>  
>

BTW, recently we had a discussion on this list, where a point was made 
that political issues are off-topic to AoIR (with respect to the AUT 
boycott of Israeli universities, which, thankfully, has now been 
overturned ), How do these guidelines, which clearly have a normative, 
read: political, intent, square with the professed apolitical nature of 
AoIR?

>Please also note that the following contains copyrighted material from
>forthcoming articles, and should thus not be cited, copied, or distributed
>without permission.
>  
>

While I don't intend to cite this particular post, I am still wondering, 
how you can ask us *not* to quote material you just made public? 
(Registration to this list is, after all, thankfully, automatic). Any 
citation -- provided that it would meet "fair use," "Urheberrecht," or 
[put your favorite national laws here] -- would certainly be covered by 
the national/regional laws I am aware of (not many). Surely, copyright 
laws (US/EU) would thus not prevent us to quote you. Professional 
courtesy still might (and indeed will in my case), but I was always 
curious, why one would publish material that should be off-limits for 
quoting. In the academic world, I have a certain sympathy for that, 
because, I'd rather not be quoted saying something really stupid. But, 
then again, this violates Cohen's/Habermas' rules for deliberation, 
which I actually find quite appealing. If we were less concerned about 
our reputation and more about deliberations, (social) sciences might 
actually progress faster. Maybe an ethic that would discount the damage 
done to professional reputation based on publication medium would help?

Thomas

-- 
thomas koenig, ph.d.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/