Nancy Baym wrote:
This raises for me an interesting aspect to the ethics struggle, which is that if something is copyrighted, we OWE it to the author to give full credit, which comes up against research ethic traditions of hiding identities of subjects when studying online discussion. I struggled with this with some of the more creative posts I quoted in my work and erred on the side of anonymity over credit. Nancy.
I wonder to what extent any anonymity can be provided anything on the Net, at least anything that has words which a researcher quotes at all accurately. All anyone has to do is plug quoted material into a search engine and, voila, there's the E-mail, or the home page, or whatever. To throw in yet another wrench, do we need to worry about maintaining anonymity when it is always entirely possible that the "John Smith" we are quoting could be any one of a thousand John Smith's out in the cybergalaxy. This kinda reminds me of when Paula Jones claimed that she was forced to come forward with her allegations because her "name" came up in an article regarding Clinton's sexual escapades as Arkansas's governor. As you may recall, the article only referred to a Paula in Little Rock. For pete's sake, isn't there more than one Paula in Arkansas? How could she claim that her anonymity had been breached? In the same way, how could we breach a subject's anonymity by citing even their full name when it is (usually) not attached to any locale, etc. and therefore could apply to thousands of persons? Along these same lines, one of the things that has been noted about the Internet is that it allows people to hide their true identities and take on new ones--even other peoples' real identities. How can we breach someone's anonymity by simply citing their name when anyone can sign any name to an E-mail with complete impunity--i.e., when someone can deny they were a researcher's subject by simply claiming that the researcher quoted an E-mail by someone who illegitimately used the name in question? I don't mean these questions to be taken as rhetorical--I'm not sure that they have obvious answers, nor do I think I have the answers, but I think these things are worth considering in the discussions so far. --Christian