Ethical Conduct in a Cruel, Cold Cyberworld

Before entering this class, I had no idea "netnographies" existed. When I we had the process described to us our first day, I felt like it was a total innovation, if not slightly farfetched. When I told my sexagenarian father about the concept of conducting research in a virtual world, he had the same reservations.

"Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me," he said.

He couldn't see how you could study humanity without actually making physical contact with their "person."

After going on second life, I immediately saw room for ethnographic study among the community, and the fears I had about the impersonal nature of net research were mostly dispelled. The Kozinets article on the netnographic method, describing it'sical morays, purpose and general ethical guidelines, showed me me the precedent had certainly been set. The article reminded me the mind-numbing "Intro to Social Research" textbook I hauled out here, because my Sociology professors told me it would help in grad school, except it was interesting. It was so relevant and described the things I did as an online socialite anyway. It was like the moment when I discovered that my obsession for social observation had academic ethos in the field of Sociology, only now my late night online wanderings could also be considered intellectually keen.

After reading Bruckman's guidelines, I felt good about being straight-forward with my first subject in SL, immediately admitting my purpose for being there, and even telling him I was recording the chat for my research notes. Even though our conversation was more of a dry-run, than actual research (mostly it consisted of him telling me how the damn thing works), his helpfulness gave me confidence to be straight forward with anyone else I should chat with. I don't think we're taking these before an IRB, but it's for our own benefit to treat this as if we were. Especially helpful were Brckman's levels of disguise, which I will keep in mind for the duration of my research on SL. The more sensitive the subject, the blurrier they will come out in my papers and blogs. I actually felt fortunate that I got to conduct my research online. Rejection of informed consent is, as dating is, easier to accept when not face-to-face, but avatar to avatar.

Bassett and O'Riordan's "Internet Research Ethics" immediately dispelled one of my assumptions about doing online research in the introduction. They write: "The understanding of the Internet-as-a-space supports a conflation between activity carried out through this medium and the action of human actors in social space. Further, it leads to the argument that any manifestation of Internet activity should be regarded as a virtual person." Remember there's people on the other end of those avatars, and when conducting social research, they should be treated as such, not like robots or guinea pigs.

They describe their research on the message board of a site pseudonymously referred to as gaygirls.com. They described the communicative style of the bored as it related to a sense of space, their space was more like a traditional text. Will the spacial differences in Second Life lead to more difficult ethical quandaries? It seems like the program does a fairly good job of up holding "parochial space," but will the increased visualization and the sense of talking to a person lead to more being accidentally disclosed? I believe the ethical challenges of Second Life will be more adverse than the authors of our ethical guidelines had in mind. On the plus side, this makes me feel like more of an innovator.