Karen has been made a professor! My supervisory team is getting more distinguished by the minute

I really enjoy my blog, and I’ve been irritated that the damn probationary report has got in the way of my posting to it recently.

It just occurred to me that I spend a lot of time reflecting on the blog s and how we’ll be able to analyse them, and occasionally emailing other researchers and reading their blogs. Maybe I should be researching blogs, not online learning.

Having just struggled though my literature review I have this sense that everyone knows so much about learning and online learning. It’s really difficult to get a handle on it all. There are umpteen journals, so there’s more appearing every day. What I like about thinking about the blogging (and about epistolary interviewing, which I’m also thinking about at the moment) is that it’s fresh and new and untheorised and seems to open up so many possibilities.

Give me a choice on reading a book on blogging or a book on e-learning and I’d go for the blogging one straight away.

Well, I was booked to spend all day at Denise’s research day on e-assessment. I went this morning and, I must say, it was ver interesting.

But having been stressed out with deadlines all week, and expecting to be stressed out agin tomorrow when my supervisors have had a chance to pull to pieces my probationary report, what do I do? Do I get on with the mountains of work I’ve accumulated? No. I go and change the theme on my blog, watch a videocast and idly flick through my emails.

There seem to be a very few high-profile cases around which the discourse of Internet research ethics has been based. There’s ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ which Julian Dibbell wrote up in Village Voice in 1993. This has all sorts of ramifications but, from the point of view of research ethics, the message is – these are real people in cyberspace, and they can be harmed.

Then there’s the case of JennyMUSH, a form of MUD populated by survivors of sexual abuse. From a research ethics point of view, it’s not so much what happened in JennyMUSH, as the way that it then became a honeypot for researchers, with the result that it then became a much less safe place for participants to be. 

The Carnegie-Mellon cyberporn study became a big issue because of all the publicity it got – it was originally an unethical piece of research carried out by an undergraduate. He used deception to access private data to study usage of pornography on the Internet. Any ethical monitoring whatsoever would have knocked this study on the head – I’m not sure that it needed any new Internet rules to be introduced.

So, on the back of these three cases, we have a proliferation of ethical rules and codes and musings. I think it’s significant that the cases have connections to rape, to abuse and to (child and other) pornography. The bigger crimes – which have nothing to do with research ethics – are used to flavour the research ethics debate which leads, perhaps, to overkill. 

Otherwise, we have anecdotal evidence of people getting annoyed by researchers, but that’s about it. Some people began to feel less secure and more overlooked in their online world – but it could be argued that that’s a good thing, they now have a more accurate perspective on how cyberspace operates.

I’m struggling with the ethics of Internet research at the moment, which is more complicated than you might think. Depending on how you conceptualise the Internet, you need to apply different forms of ethical thinking.

If you view the Internet as a virtual space populated by human actors, then you need a human subject approach to ethics, with informed consent a big issue. If, on the other hand, you see the Internet as an accumulation of texts, then your concern is with data protection, copyright and intellectual property rights.

Blogs and newspapers may highlight this dilemma. A newspaper is in the public domain – you can research it as much as you like, unless you appropriate so much of it for yourself that you breach copyright. A blog, on the other hand, can be viewed as an online persona. It’s in the public domain, but it may have been written primarily for family or friends.

On the other hand, a blog may have been written to publicise a version of the news. To treat it as a person means limiting your study of it, and thus privileging the version of the news put out by a large or multinational company. Thus, ethically speaking, some blogs should be treated as manifestations of online identity and others should be treated as public-domain texts. But which blogs are which?

Reading: Identity and deception in the virtual community
Judith S Donath
in ‘Communities in Cyberspace’, eds Marc A Smith and Peter Kollock pp 29-59

I’m interested in the part on how environment influences what you know and what is knowable of others identities. It affects how you create that identity, and what sort of first impression you can make. Maybe I need to look at how identities can be established in First Class.

I’m interested in the ideas that first impressions are lasting impressions – that you tend to hang on to your first impression even in the face of other evidence. I need to get Aronson’s book ‘The Social Animal’ out of the library.