[Air-L] IRB and blogs

[Jeremy hunsinger]

Mostly Daren is right, but.... in the U.S. we have the classes of 'protected
individuals' for which it doesn't necessarily matter if they published it,
because as a 'protected individual' they may not have been publishing it
even if they did.  The classes of protected are generally as best as i am
aware(and there are likely others): children/minors, people undergoing
healthcare that may impinge their mental competence, people of diminished
mental capacity, and military personnel. In those cases, people could
publish, and actually not be publishing because they either don't have the
capacity to understand or the right, so we just need to be careful.
However, this has nothing to do with the expectation of privacy or being
very personal, in those cases, if the person is not in a protected class,
published is published.

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham at email.unc.edu>wrote:

> I would even respectfully disagree about this line:
>
> "Sometimes even when a blog is technically public, if it is about a very
> personal matter (like illness, or family) there is an expectation of
> privacy/anonymity even when the blog is publicly accessible. In those cases
> I could understand going with pseudonyms, but not with blogs about indie
> music."
>
> The act of publication is to make public a set of ideas, and at that point
> it becomes an artifact--a text--game for analysis without the concern of
> human subject research ethics (in my opinion). Again, if the authors attempt
> to password-protect their work, that's an IRB-worthy issue, but otherwise,
> even if it's about a "personal matter," the act of publication is a public
> thing...thus no IRB needed.
>
> db
>
> ---
> Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> School of Journalism & Mass Communication
> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
> Carroll Hall, CB 3365
> Chapel Hill, NC 27599
> (919) 962-0676 (office)
> (801) 633-4796 (cell)
> daren.brabham at unc.edu
> www.darenbrabham.com
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-- 
jeremy hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com

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