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

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

> \
>
> The main problem here is often that people who blog don't think
> through that they have a public private issue to deal with.

aye, but then neither to car drivers, nor people posting yard sale  
posters, but both do.

> 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.

i do not think the transitional boundary period goes away, boundaries  
are constantly renegotiated and pretty darn fluid.    I think that to  
limit your research based on the idea that 'oh we will have a stable  
system where people care to define things, and learn how things are  
defined' is very much the wrong way to go, because there are no  
stable systems, there is just the appearance of them, people tend not  
to care enough to make privacy clear in their everyday life,  why  
will they do it online....  no, i don't see waiting as an option.

> 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.

I do think that we should try to do the right and good thing.
>
> 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.

no, it is not.  it seems like it is because you are making  
assumptions about the relationship between text and author that may  
or may not be warranted.   if all you have though, is the published  
text, there is no intervention with a human subject.   the author may  
be a real person, she may not, she may be a collective, she may not,  
she may be alive, or dead.   you treat the text as the text, you can  
use it to make inferences about the author, but there is not any  
intervention.

jeremy hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

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