[Air-L] public/private and imagined blog audiences (I just couldn't stop myself from posting)

[David Brake]

I have been fascinated and a little dismayed at the way this argument  
has developed and polarised in the last few days. It seems to me that  
part of the problem is a lack of clarity about what is being argued  
about. It is important to be clear whether in discussion you are  
talking about:

1) What is legal to do (and in what country?)
2) What an IRB will allow
3) What is or should be considered ethical.

Similarly, and based on my own research, I feel it is important to  
distinguish between

a) What the 'technical' publicness of speech is (ie can the public  
actually read it)
b) The attitudes people 'should' have to what they have written given  
the technical nature of the medium and
c) The attitudes people *actually* have to the publicness of what  
they have written (which may or may not correspond to the technical  
characteristics of the actual choice of medium).

I don't have enough specialist knowledge to address 1 or 2 but do  
have a view on 3.

To put it more simply and in response to this particular circumstance:

In my view, what is important, ethically, in deciding whether asking  
for permission to use a weblog text is necessary is not whether a web  
page is actually publicly readable or whether its author is  
reasonable to expect privacy given their choice of medium, but  
whether a broader exposure of the text to additional readers (if it  
is then connectable to its author) is likely to cause the authors  
significant harm, whether immediate or future, which is likely to be  
connected to the question whether it seems likely its author  
envisioned the audience for that page as a private one.

I am particularly vexed with the attitude exemplified by Charlie  
Balch's comment:

> As a bottom line, if you post it on the net, it is public. The  
> publisher
> might regret their post but that does not make it private. Yes,  
> additional
> exposure might bring some greater harm to the poster but the poster  
> has
> brought it upon themselves.

Also by Jeremy's:

> i expect your mom, like my mom, to be able to become comfortable
> with blogging over a period of time, to be able to master what skills
> they desire to have, and from there to make decisions.

The main problem here is often that people who blog don't think  
through that they have a public private issue to deal with. We have  
developed rules about what we can and can't use in research based on  
offline situations that have arisen over centuries and are well  
understood by all.  My feeling (based on my research to date as well  
as some 20 years of experience online) is that we should be cautious  
about our use of material that has been posted during this  
transitional period where the boundaries of public and private online  
are not widely understood by many participants. In a decade or so  
when most Internet users are practiced enough to have reached a real  
understanding of the consequences of expressing one's self online in  
spaces that are widely accessible and indefinitely archived, we could  
then consider re-examining our ethical stances.

People sometimes make dumb decisions it is true, but as researchers  
we are bound not to exploit those bad decisions for our own benefit  
if this is likely to cause them significant harm. Bringing a 'public'  
text which in practice is very unlikely to be read by significant  
numbers of people to the attention of a larger or more influential  
group through publishing it - particularly when such publication  
comes with a judgement attached - *is* effectively an intervention.

Of course you could argue as Charlie does that academic journal  
readers represent a quite small number of people, and that they are  
unlikely to have any connection to the research subjects or reason to  
act on what they have learned about them. This is an argument I have  
some sympathy with but historically this doesn't seem to weigh  
strongly in academic decision making. And of course academic research  
can leak into the broader public discussion - some of us might end up  
writing newspaper articles that point people to our research (which  
we might make publicly available on our web pages these days) or we  
might end up writing 'cross-over' books which talk about our academic  
work but are aimed at a more general audience.

On the other hand if there is significant potential harm to an  
individual it might be more than compensated for if research gives us  
important new insights. (Yes I'm a utilitarian).

PS
Intellagirl wrote:

> Has there
> been any research on what audiences bloggers etc really think they are
> reaching, want to reach etc? The rift between the the ideal  
> audience and the
> actual audience?

One of the core aspects of my thesis on personal webloggers will be  
an examination of just this issue. An early exposition of it is in  
print but alas only in Norwegian! Here is a selection of other  
literature on this topic. It is not exhaustive and I would be  
interested to hear of others' work in this area:

Gumbrecht, M. (2004) "Blogs as 'Protected Space'". in World Wide Web  
Conference, New York, p. 5, http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/ 
www2004gumbrecht.pdf
Nardi, B., D. Schiano and M. Gumbrecht (2004) "Blogging as Social  
Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?" in  
CSCW,  p. 11, http://home.comcast.net/~diane.schiano/CSCW04.Blog.pdf
boyd, d. (2004) Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice  Last  
accessed: 13 Dec 2004   Last updated: 12 Dec 2004  Address:  http:// 
www.danah.org/papers/BrokenMetaphors.pdf.
Viegas, F. (2005) "Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and  
Accountability: An Initial Survey ", Journal of Computer-Mediated  
Communication, 10 (3).  http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html
Lenhart, A. and S. Fox (2006) "Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s  
New Storytellers" Pew Internet & American Life Project http:// 
www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp

Norwegian speakers might want to look at:
Brake, D. (2007) 'Personlige webloggere og deres publikum: Hvem tror  
de egentlig at de snakker med?' i Lüders, M., Pritz, L. & Rasmussen,  
T. (Red.) Personlige medier: Livet mellom skjermene, 141-163. Oslo:  
Gyldendal.

I have (the original) English language version, "Personal webloggers  
and their audiences: Who do they think they are talking to?" and will  
share it on request (though there is much I would change with it now).


---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London  
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ 
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/  
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ 
dealingwithemail/>
callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)


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