A few cents on ethics from me -- 1. As Charles Ess has indicated, the AoIR guidelines are not meant to be RULES but a means of helping researchers and review boards think through ethical issues in order to make their own wise decisions. This was a point which was written into that group's charge. 2. Not all online interaction, even within one mode (e.g. newsgroups) is the same. Making ethical decisions requires sensitivity to the context created BY the interaction as well as the technological features that enable the interaction. Despite the technological similarities, the ethics of quoting a newsgroup of people who are talking about their favorite soap operas are different from the ethics of quoting a newsgroup of people trying to sort through their recent rape because the consequences of discovering that one has been a research subject are very different for the two sets of people. Where the former may be mildly miffed (though my subjects were generally delighted to be studied as it lent some legitimacy to what they viewed as a guilty pleasure), the latter may well feel violated all over again. 3. I am very uncomfortable with the idea that ALL research studying online interaction requires consent of those studied. As I've said before on this list, for me, this becomes most troubling in cases where people are studying hate groups. Personally, I have no ethical qualms about covert infiltration of hate groups or covert observational research on them because I believe they are evil, and I hope that researchers will be able to raise awareness of their activities and help those who would fight against hate do so effectively. Most practitioners and advocates of hate are not eager to help those who would fight against them gain access to their inner workings. If researchers can only study people and phenomena that consent to the researcher's gaze, we may as well give up on understanding most of the ugliest of humam behavior. 4. I have long maintained that scholars should spend more efforts helping people understand the public nature of their online interactions (though I'm not sure how to do that). I believe we must take into account peoples' perceptions about the privacy of their interactions (even if others don't) as we calculate the ethics of our specific research projects, but I also think we have a duty to help them understand that their interactions are not, in fact, private if they can be revealed with a quick google search. Though I think it's good in general to seek consent, I worry about well-intentioned researchers nurturing the delusion that people who contribute discourse to publically available sites can continue to control the use of their words after they have been sent. Finally, journalists keep coming up as those with lower standards, but the people who concern me the most are not the journalists, but people like pharmaceutical sales representatives who might search health support groups to compile lists of potential consumers, potential bosses who might do searches to see if potential or current employees might be discussing health conditions that might make them more expensive to insure (or to assess their religion, politics, etc), and so on. Nancy -- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org