[Air-L] online research ethics

[David Brake]

On 7 Mar 2008, at 15:25, Charles Ess wrote:

> bloggers by definition want their material to be read

Coming in on this one a bit late and perhaps I am making too much of  
what was probably just a passing comment, but I have to take issue  
with this. It is true that (non-friend/password protected) bloggers  
are making their material available to be read. But in my own  
interviews (with 22 personal webloggers) their imagined and desired  
relationships with readers varied widely and a few of them said they  
had no intention to be read by anyone else when they started. We need  
to leave room for the people we study to fool themselves on issues  
like this (one of the central points of my upcoming thesis in fact!)

---
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)
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