I'm going to argue that using, and researching the use of Web 2.0 tools is a difficult prospect to try to work through with many grey areas. There are a number of reasons. I'm going to raise a few issues: For example, users do not always behave consistently in different contexts. Students change their identities as they move from site to site, and the student behave differently depending on the communities within which they are members. Facebookers for example, generally use their real names and images. Flickrites on the other hand are often anonymised, using psuedonyms and images to represent themselves. It is often the same person, but they represent themselves differently. Is being a member of so many virtual clans confusing? Do they perceive themselves as acting differently in different environments, or simply complying with different digital sub-cultures? Such shifting digital identities can be subtle, but with the result that researchers have a problem trying ascertain whether students are presenting themselves truthfully online.
Another issue is whether participants modify their behaviour when they know they are being watched. In conventional research environments, we know this happens. Do such demand characteristics alter the results of Web 2.0 studies? That behaviour has a persistence in online environments. It's not as though the research has observed it once and then it's gone. It's there, archived for all to see and keep coming back to. Do we need a new set of methods to cut through these issues, or is it new wine in old bottles?
Another ethical issue is where students who are creating their own content may wish to keep that content to themselves. When placed within a shared, collaborative environment, such as a wiki, some students may not wish to have their work subsumed into a larger corpus of work. I have published several of my own papers on this topic. Students in my sample groups reported that they wanted to be awarded credit for the work they had done. They argued that they didn't want their work deleted, diluted, extended or otherwise modified by other students. Is it therefore fair to ask them to participate in any study involving openly editable websites, where collaboration was mandatory? Do researchers offer participants in such scenarios the right to withdraw without penalty?
Another ethical problem arises when researchers 'eavesdrop' on Web 2.0 users. In such situations, should researchers have total access to all a user's content? Should they see all a student's Facebook photos for example? Or have access to all their discussion posts, private messages etc? If they don't have access, can a full picture of life online be obtained? When students sign up for this kind of research, are they fully apprised about what they are letting themselves in for? A comment from a recent conference in Spain was about a camera that had been set up to capture and live stream a keynote speech. The camera was open for a long time before the speech began, picking up off the cuff remarks, and broadcasting on the web as the speaker set up his slides. One viewer remarked that they felt a little like a 'voyeur'. How does this kind of event amplification reconcile itself with ethical research? Upon whom is the onus for the maintenance of correct ethical behaviour in such cases? And if it's not research, is it still covered by ethical protocols?
Finally, I want to raise the issue of Twitter as a conference amplification tool and back channel. The tweckling or harsh tagging of keynote speakers has been discussed previously by a number of commentators. My blogpost Weapons of Mass Detraction cited some notable cases where the wisdom of crowds can very quickly descend to the stupidity of mobs, if a few harsh remarks are allowed to take hold. Before they know it, conference organisers have a car crash keynote on their hands. Again, are there any ethical guidelines for this kind of eventuality? It's a new problem, so again, I ask - is it new wine in old bottles? Do the new environments require new guidance, or are the old protocols sufficient?
New wine in old bottles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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