an Ess-ian Q: when does the personal becomes public?
Every once in a while, I Google recent and high page-ranking references to me. I was surprised when I did this recently to find my name mentioned in two blogs: -- A purported quotation from me from a dinner table conversation a few years ago. -- A side comment that I purportedly made to the blogger who claims to be sitting next to me at another conference. This has gotten me to thinking. 1. Is it ethical to publish private conversations without the speaker's approval? 2. Or has the nature of networked community become such that just as the public has become personal, the personal has become public? Secret police types would concurr: If you have nothing to hide, why worry? But I have had enough experiences in America, China, Russia and Bulgaria to know I don't want to live that way. And neither do my friends who have lived in these countries. Surely there is a matter of private discourse among friends and colleagues. Or has blogging by scholars merged with gossip columns? My own feeling is that my papers, lectures and perhaps even public conference utterances are publishable. My side comments over dinner and in informal groups are not -- unless I explicitly agree. Or am I just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand the new world of blogs -- even those by scholars? Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
Totally agree. Private convo is private convo. Barry Wellman wrote:
Every once in a while, I Google recent and high page-ranking references to me.
I was surprised when I did this recently to find my name mentioned in two blogs:
-- A purported quotation from me from a dinner table conversation a few years ago.
-- A side comment that I purportedly made to the blogger who claims to be sitting next to me at another conference.
This has gotten me to thinking.
1. Is it ethical to publish private conversations without the speaker's approval?
2. Or has the nature of networked community become such that just as the public has become personal, the personal has become public?
Secret police types would concurr: If you have nothing to hide, why worry?
But I have had enough experiences in America, China, Russia and Bulgaria to know I don't want to live that way. And neither do my friends who have lived in these countries.
Surely there is a matter of private discourse among friends and colleagues. Or has blogging by scholars merged with gossip columns?
My own feeling is that my papers, lectures and perhaps even public conference utterances are publishable. My side comments over dinner and in informal groups are not -- unless I explicitly agree.
Or am I just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand the new world of blogs -- even those by scholars?
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
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Totally agree. Private convo is private convo. Hear, hear ...
It may be helpful to recall that a useful guideline in such matters are the _expectations_ of the authors/speakers. It is certainly true, as Barry pointed out, that the boundaries between the private and the public are often ambiguous and shifting - but one way of drawing at least an ethical line in the sand is to consider these expectations. So - presuming many of us would _expect_
side comments over dinner and in informal groups to be private in the sense that publishing them beyond the immediate circle of conversants would indeed require permission, then a prima facie position would be: indeed!
Another way of getting at it might be a version of the Golden Rule and/or (feminist/Habermasian) perspective-taking: how would I feel if someone did this to me - i.e., published such ostensibly private comments without my permission. Either way, I'm with Barry and Paula. Indeed, I'd be p***ed. And you can quote me (smile). It _is_ interesting that this has come up on the same day that Bernhard Debatin raised exactly the question: is anyone doing anything regarding the ethics of blogs? To my knowledge, no. We had a brief discussion of this on the ethics working group a few months back, but only some preliminary considerations. One of the points was that the AoIR ethical guidelines were oriented towards _research_ ethics - whereas what seems to be going on here are questions about ethical issues within blogging as such. Certainly interesting and important ones! See you in Chicago - -- charles Charles Ess Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230 Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435 Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html Co-chair, CATaC: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac/ Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes Norwegian University of Science and Technology NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23
This though is not private convo. Private convo would be sequestered from the hearing of others in some manner, by some indication or method. To me, this conversation seems to me to have been held at a public event. Recently people asked me whether i thought i should take pictures at an nsf sponsored event indicating that they thought it was improper for me to take pictures without permission. My answer was that for amateur photography at a publicly sponsored event, i don't think that i need to ask permission even if you might want me to ask permission. There is a basic need for some the desire for privacy and what people think is/should be private is remarkably unclear cross-culturally. however, many people do not recognize the same legitimizing or justificatory practices for assumed privacy, therefor, i think people should always tell people when things are meant to be private or held in confidence, otherwise you have to expect people to interpret the situation on their perceptions. Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers
I agree that private conversations should be kept private, but that doesn't mean others will abide by that rule. Similar concerns come up regarding photos. All this means that I do think we have to be more careful when in public, any type of public setting for that matter. I think the issue is related to trust and bloggers who disregard certain expectations about privacy may suffer in the longterm. (Of course, that's hardly consolation for someone whose comment made with the expectation of private communication has been made public already.) That is, if I know about someone who blogs without regard to a person's privacy then I will be much more on guard when talking to that person or in that person's presence. It's similar to some general behavior. If you know about someone who gossips a lot and can't keep a secret then you are less likely to tell them about sensitive information. There is an added twist when the one blogging is anonymous/pseudonymous but the one being blogged about gets named. I consider that especially problematic since the blogger's identity is not known while the one being talked about is outed. By the way, I blogged about all this last year.:) Privacy in the age of blogging http://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/20/privacy-in-the-age-of-blogging/ My personal take on it is that I won't blog (or mention on my mailing list) any comment by anyone else unless I ask for explicit permission or unless the person had posted it publicly first. (I suspect some people I've asked in the past have thought that I was being ridiculously careful, but I'd rather err on that side.) Similarly with photos, I won't post publicly pictures of others until obtaining explicit permission that it's okay to do so. Eszter
Every once in a while, I Google recent and high page-ranking references to me.
I was surprised when I did this recently to find my name mentioned in two blogs:
-- A purported quotation from me from a dinner table conversation a few years ago.
-- A side comment that I purportedly made to the blogger who claims to be sitting next to me at another conference.
This has gotten me to thinking.
1. Is it ethical to publish private conversations without the speaker's approval?
2. Or has the nature of networked community become such that just as the public has become personal, the personal has become public?
Secret police types would concurr: If you have nothing to hide, why worry?
But I have had enough experiences in America, China, Russia and Bulgaria to know I don't want to live that way. And neither do my friends who have lived in these countries.
Surely there is a matter of private discourse among friends and colleagues. Or has blogging by scholars merged with gossip columns?
My own feeling is that my papers, lectures and perhaps even public conference utterances are publishable. My side comments over dinner and in informal groups are not -- unless I explicitly agree.
Or am I just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand the new world of blogs -- even those by scholars?
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
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What constitutes a "private" conversation? Is it the location? The number of people present? The intention of the speaker? Who is the expected audience of the blog? Friends? Google? Barry - what you are running up against is not an issue of "publication." Very few bloggers see their practice as akin to publication. They are writing about their experiences for the people who they think will care. In documenting their lives, they are also documenting the lives of others. Of course, this issue is always at play when you have persistent communications of any sort. This was why i put together that Social Network Fragments piece - it's really disturbing to realize that you hold data about the social networks of hundreds of people in your inbox alone. When you write to any of the Spoke or Visible Path people, they have just given out your data to a company that can use it to analyze your behavior. Who's data is it? When you have spoken in the witness of another, you have just given out data for that other person to use when they are analyzing the world, making sense of patterns. We rely on the data given to us by others all of the time. This is how you can make a living as a sociologist. You're always witnessing others and writing about them, developing an understanding of the world that way. They are a part of your work - do they have the choice to be? The thing about being a sociologist is that there's an ongoing dialogue about "ethics" particularly about revealing sources. We have a desire to protect our sources, partially for moral reasons and partly for selfish reasons (so that we can keep doing what we do). Well, the practices of observation and analysis are not just in the domain of sociology, even if the ethics are. To make sense of your own identity, you are constantly analyzing the world. With blogging, it is taking to a persistent, searchable level. The production of content is not about creating a publication but about creating a mirror for reflection. We put it out to the public in the same way that we adorn ourselves with fashion markers to get a reaction at the local mall. This is all part of getting people to respond so that we can make sense of who we are. We also talk shit about people in order to place ourselves without a social structure. Guess what? This is all moving to the blogs, not because it's about publication, but because it's a space for figuring out who we are and we don't yet know how to negotiate persistent, searchable environments. Not everyone has the same understanding about what constitutes a private conversation. Personally, i avoid naming names of anyone who isn't a blogger unless i'm talking about their work. I figure bloggers are all out there anyhow but why affect someone's Google juice unless it's for the good. But each of us have our own rules about when we name names. Most of the teens i interview copy/paste full AIM conversations to their blogs. These are badges of honor. This is not the practice of most adults. But Barry, if you think you're getting Google raked, imagine what the teens are experiencing. They are doing this because it's about identity development. If you look deep enough, you can find an in-depth analysis of one of my relationships by the best friend of my ex-girlfriend. It drove me out of my mind and i was super frustrated because i thought that the analysis was way off and that she was missing the point. Years later, i asked her about her choice to analyze my relationship online when she knew i could read it. She said it had nothing to do with me; she was simply documenting her experience trying to help her best friend. I said, but it hurt me really bad. And she said it shouldn't because it had nothing to do with me. As much as that analysis hurt, what she said resonated with everything i've heard from younger bloggers - they are documenting their lives and it doesn't matter if others' lives get in the way. danah On Sep 5, 2005, at 10:03 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
Every once in a while, I Google recent and high page-ranking references to me.
I was surprised when I did this recently to find my name mentioned in two blogs:
-- A purported quotation from me from a dinner table conversation a few years ago.
-- A side comment that I purportedly made to the blogger who claims to be sitting next to me at another conference.
This has gotten me to thinking.
1. Is it ethical to publish private conversations without the speaker's approval?
2. Or has the nature of networked community become such that just as the public has become personal, the personal has become public?
Secret police types would concurr: If you have nothing to hide, why worry?
But I have had enough experiences in America, China, Russia and Bulgaria to know I don't want to live that way. And neither do my friends who have lived in these countries.
Surely there is a matter of private discourse among friends and colleagues. Or has blogging by scholars merged with gossip columns?
My own feeling is that my papers, lectures and perhaps even public conference utterances are publishable. My side comments over dinner and in informal groups are not -- unless I explicitly agree.
Or am I just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand the new world of blogs -- even those by scholars?
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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participants (6)
-
Barry Wellman -
Charles Ess -
danah boyd -
Eszter Hargittai -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Paula