A letter to the editor in the NYTimes, a post on Newsgroup, and a loud cell phone conversation are not analogous. A person writing a letter to the NYTimes knows that his or her letter, if it gets printed will be part of the public record, open for public comment and public scrutiny. Culturally, we understand that a newspaper is a public document; and, if one writes a letter to be placed in it, we recognize that it may be read, analyzed, and commented upon privately and publicly. A person posting to a Newsgroup may or may not share the same cultural understanding of publicness. Some participants in this discussion on AoIR have assumed that all participants of the Internet understand the public nature of the Internet, but I challenge that assumption. Late adopters of the Internet and technologically unsavvy users (just to name two groups) may not full understand or appreciate how public their posts are. It's one thing for a techie to declare all communication online public, and another thing entirely for a user of the Internet to perceive his or her communication online as public. To compare back to a letter to the NYTimes. There is a culturally-shared understanding of the newspaper's publicness. There is not a culturally-shared understanding that all communcation online is public. A person talking loudly on a cellphone on a train may experience his or her phone conversation as a private act, even though the people in the immediate vicinity hear one side of the conversation. Unlike a letter to the NYTimes, there is not a culturally-shared agreement, nor is their an individual-level perception, that such cell phone talk is public. How many of you have started a cell phone conversation while walking or driving (eek!) have ended the conversation and realized that you're surprised at where you're located? We pay less attention to the external world when we engage in cell phone conversation than when we're not having that conversation. Although some cell phone users may be conscientious to the fact that others can hear their conversation, I challenge an assumption that they know and feel that their conversations are public, and therefore open to structiny and public comment. So, before we academics start declaring that "those people" should know that their communication is public because we can hear it need to recognize the difference between academic "objective" observations of public communication (i.e. "Newsgroup posts ARE public") and the observeds own perceptions of publicness. As academics, we have a moral obligation to respect the boundaries our potential research participants establish. As academics, we are held to a higher standard of research approaches than, say, our journalist colleagues (although, I wish journalists were held to a higher standard). We ought not record and analyze for research purposes online communication unless we are certain that the participants engaged in the communication recognize the publicness of their communication, or unless we acquire some level of informed consent from those participants. Best wishes, ~Jenny Stromer-Galley