In conclusion: a sender bears resonsibility for knowing that any expression on the Internet is public and may be widely disseminated and stored forever. A reader bears resonsibility for knowing that the sender may (naïvely) not have intended to see a statement disseminatedas widely and for knowing that the sender may not be the one who is said to be the sender.

This is great rhetoric and possibly a philosophy that people should aim to achieve, but it does not at all reflect the practices or actual assumptions that people hold. I cannot help but shudder every time i hear researchers or technologists trying to configure the masses (see Grint & Woolgar). Espousing that people should get over it or learn completely obfuscates and fails to hold liable the underlying structures that give users the impression that their posts are more contained than they are. People derive social context from the environment. No matter how much you intellectually know that something is public, when you are engaged in a discussion, you respond to the discursive points at hand. You do not consider the abstract notions of persistence and searchability because the cues you are given signal otherwise. Even the basic conception of public that comes from the physical world does not properly reflect the structure of public in a digital world. In other words, you are asking people to simultaneously engage in the present and in the abstract; to assume that people will wake up and realize how is naive at best. Furthermore, while Derrida can argue that writing is only readable when it exists in the absence of a sender, a receiver and a context, people engaged in written communication online do not operate like that. They are purposely constructing their words for a target audience and they are not always aware of the implications of an alternate audience. Try speaking simultaneously to your boss, your child and a stranger about something with a significant emotional value to you. It's really really hard. And it's much harder when the stranger might be posed to criticize anything you say in front of your child and boss. My point in going meta is that even we, who all know that the web is public, fall into the trappings of our own rhetoric. When we construct the texts for this list, we are responding to points, authors and in a context. We are not constructing manuscripts that are meant to be understood outside of that context. We are researchers. If we're talking about the ethics of quoting text, we must also think about the ethics of projecting our values and assumptions onto the masses. While some folks are really keen on education, i'm personally far more interested in understanding why people make the assumptions they do. I do not believe that people should be held responsible for what is truly difficult to conceptualize and does not fit into any set of practices that they know. I actually believe that the responsibility lies far more in the hands of the technology creators. It is they who have the ability to reflect how data is and can be used (transparency) and they who have the ability to enable users to control how data can be spread. New architectures may create new norms, but so long as people are working within the frameworks that they know, it is unreasonable to expect them to suddenly grok a whole new conceptual model. At this level, i have far more faith in the kids than i do in educating current users. danah -- - - - - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - - - taken out of context i must seem so strange (ani difranco | danah.org/ani) .. musings .. (zephoria.org/thoughts) v-season: events.vday.org (misbehaving.net)