Ethics and Internet Research

I attended a workshop on ethics and internet research today where we had an excellent discussion. It was one of the first workshops or sessions that I’ve attended where the presenters said this is informal and you can interrupt us if you have questions and people actually did, to good effect. Hopefully this will not be the last time. Attendance was the seven presenters and five participants which grew to perhaps 8-10 participants in the end. The international attendees (there were at least 6) added very welcome perspectives. I among many possibilities I just want to mention a couple points.

Annette Markham gave a good presentation about how, in research, ethics and method are one. Method is the context for ethics in research and ongoing reflexivity and a focus on “problem solving or world-fixing” is a way to get to a contextual & ethical project. (slides here, pdf).

Another interesting point was during a discussion of the technical limitations of data security and privacy (i.e. you have very little if any privacy online due to both technical limitations and under U.S. law) an issue came up from another researcher who is studying young bloggers. Many give out quite a bit of information about themselves, and the question was if this is due to ignorance about the nature of the medium or rather to the age and outlook of young people. So while it’s true that many don’t know about the finer points of textual analysis or even the facts about the internet archive, I think that most have the exact same perspective as many researchers which is that while it’s technically possible to get at this information I’m not narcissistic enough to think that anyone would actually bother to do it. The point of the presentation is that this is an erroneous assumption and these things happen much more often than we think, but I wouldn’t say that young bloggers who do disclose information that could harm them in the present (my route to school, my parent’s aren’t home this weekend, etc.) or information that is not intended for their parents or employer’s eyes are particularly ignorant, just particularly at risk.