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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief Rob Kling
12(2) 1996

In the last two decades, social scientists have developed fundamental canons against deceptive data gathering, informed consent, and revelation of potentially harmful information. Some of these are embodied in Federal guidelines that are required for "human subjects research" at US universities. But the conditions of research and the tailoring of such guidelines vary from one field to another. For example, clinical psychologists often study people who can be manipulated by researchers, while political scientists who study elite national leaders face the complementary risk of being coopted by the subjects of their studies. Further, the ethical guidelines to for face-to-face studies may not make sense for social studies of electronic forums without some alteration. 

Research ethics are normally a specialty topic with relatively little public interest. But the question of what kinds of consent are required for social research in Cyberspace suddenly became quite public in the Spring of 1995 when Carnegie-Mellon undergraduate Martin Rimm released a controversial study about the exent to which computer bulletin board systems and the Internet wee used to exchange pornographic pictures. Rimm's study was to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal, and it briefly became the centerpiece of national debate in the U.S. It was the foca point of a July 1995 Tim Magazine cover story about "cyberporn," and was the subject of speeches in the U.S. Congress. Rimm's study was also attacked by scholars and civil liertrians for deep methodological flaws and potential violations of human subjects guidelines by analysts writing in Harper's Magazine an the New Republic, as well as popular computer magazines, and -- of course -- diverse Internet newsgroups. 

Rimm's study is a bit of a red herring because it is methodologically flawed and not conducted as part of a serious research program. But social analysts who want to investigate questions about social behavior in Cyberspace -- such as changes in the distribution and use of power in on- line groups, the nature of gender relations, how groups define and shift or maintain their identities -- face serious questions about what kind of consent they must obtain from people who post messages in various forums, especially those that are nationally accessible. 

The seed paper for this forum is Storm King's "Researching Internet Communities: Proposed Ethical Guidelines for the Reporting of Results." King was concerned by episodes like this: 

The journal Social Work With Groups ... includes an article [about sexual abuse survivors with ] ... a thorough analysis of a nationally accessible cyberspace support group ... the results are potentially of great interest to anyone researching grou p dynamics or sexual abuse survivors. However, for the members of the group studied ... this report is a potential nightmare. The authors downloaded, analyzed and reprinted notes, with no request to the group for permission .... The exact date and times that sample notes were posted, as well as the name of the group, appear in the published results. ... The authors state that since "messages posted on a BBs (bulletin board systems) are public information", that changing the names on the sample messag es they reprinted would insure the privacy of the BBs users. 

The debates helped the participants see how their positions reflected different ethical theories, as well as different disciplinary and paradigmatic preferences. In his introduction to the special section, Jim observes: 

The offerings here illustrate how diverse ethical theories can lead to different views over which, or even whether, formal guidelines are needed for online research. King and Waskul, grounded in a deontological theories, argue that formal rules are needed . Boehlefeld, Herring, Reid, and Thomas, preferring a teleological approach, judge that broad principles of social good rather than invariant precepts are better. Allen, flirting with postmodernism, would privilege neither rules nor broad guidelines. Ins tead, she sees ethics as embedded within, and emerging out of dialogue with, the specific group under study. 

 

SUB CYBETH-L firstname lastname 

We believe that these issues are critical and that members of the social science and information processing commmunities that do such reserach should play a key role in helping to define the issues and recommend guidelines that respect the rights of participants/informants and also facilitate high quality research on important social issues and theories. Please contact us with short notes, specific proposals, and articles of varying length. 

TIS 12(2) concludes with reviews of four books: 

• American Technological Sublime, by David Nye (reviewed by Geoff Bowker); 
• Software by Design, by Harold Salzman and Stephen Rosenthal (reviewed by Stuart Shapiro); 
• Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access, by Ann Wells Branscomb (reviewed by Sheizaf Rafaeli); and 
• The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work, by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio (reviewed by Rebecca Grant). 

A description of TIS 12(3) is posted on TIS' new Indiana University-based home page (see http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS). 

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