[Air-L] online research ethics

[Emma Duke-Williams]

On 11/03/2008, David Brake <d.r.brake at lse.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>  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.

>From my own point of view, I didn't start blogging to have an
audience. Granted, I did do it through work, so I hoped that my
students *might* read it; but I didn't put any compulsion on them *to*
read it. I'd certainly never imagined that I'd have as many readers as
I do from as wide a range of places ...

I wonder if many personal bloggers start with a (very) limited
audience initially, and may be somewhat uncomfortable to discover
they're read by a wider audience.


-- 
Emma Duke-Williams:
School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator.
Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/