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Online Symposium: The Ethics of Research in Virtual Communities
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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 97 12:34:46 -0500
From: Amy Bruckman
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The Ethics of Research in Virtual Communities
An Online Symposium in honor of MediaMOO's Fourth Birthday
Monday, January 20th Symposium: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM ET Followed by The Fourth MediaMOO Anniversary Ball: 4:30 - 6:00 PM ET
To connect to MediaMOO: telnet mediamoo.media.mit.edu 8888 Or see http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/MediaMOO/
THE SYMPOSIUM
Electronic communications media pose new ethical dilemmas for researchers. Can a post from a mailing list be quoted without permission? Should the character names of participants in a MUD be changed before publication? Under what circumstances does the researcher need to announce his or her presence to the community? Is logging a conversation in a chat room more like overhearing something in the park, or going to someone's home with a concealed tape recorder? To complicate matters, the answers to these sorts of questions are often contingent on the profession of the researcher--anthropologists, journalists, and political scientists are all subject to different professional ethics standards. It's no wonder that participants in such communities lack shared expectations about when they can expect privacy and when they are subject to observation. In this online discussion, attendees will discuss these issues, and evaluate several proposed statements of professional ethics for research online.
FEATURED PANELISTS (in alphabetical order):
Amy Bruckman is a doctoral candidate at the Media Lab at MIT, where she does research on virtual communities. She is the founder of MediaMOO (a text-based virtual reality environment or "MUD" designed to be a professional community for media researchers), and MOOSE Crossing (A MUD designed to be a constructionist learning environment for kids.) MOOSE Crossing includes a new programming language, MOOSE, designed to make it easier for kids to learn to program. Amy received her master's degree from the Media Lab's Interactive Cinema Group in 1991, and her bachelors in physics from Harvard University in 1987. More information about her work is available at http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/
Lynn Cherny is a researcher at AT&T Labs--Research studying electronic communities. She has an M.Phil. from Cambridge University in Computer Speech and Language Processing and a Ph.D. from Stanford in Linguistics. Her dissertation, forthcoming from CSLI Publications, was an ethnolinguistic study of conversation and community in a social MOO. She is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Reba Weise) of Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, a collection of essays about gender and women's experiences in different Internet communities (Seal Press, 1996). More of her work can be found at http://akpublic.research.att.com/~cherny/.
David Jacobson is a professor of social anthropology at Brandeis University with an interest in virtual ethnography. He is the author of Reading Ethnography (and other books about urban Africans and nuclear espionage) and, more recently, a paper about mooing, "Contexts and Cues in Cyberspace."
Lee-Ellen Marvin is a graduate student in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. She brings to her studies of narrative and creative speech events, many years of experience as a professional storyteller and radio producer. She's published one study of MOO culture, available on-line at: http://shum.huji.ac.il/jcmc/vol1/issue2/marvin.html, and is working on a second paper to be presented at the Western Communication Conference in February of this year.
Malcolm (Mac) Parks is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Washington. His primary research line is concerned with the development of personal relationships and social networks. His recent work on relationships in computer-mediated settings includes a study of relationships formed through Usenet newsgroups and an on-going study of relationships development in MOOs. ... and other members of the MediaMOO community.
Please join us after the symposium for the annual MediaMOO Anniversary Ball!
ABOUT MEDIAMOO
MediaMOO is a MUD designed to be a professional community for media researchers. MediaMOO first opened to the public with The MediaMOO Inaugural Ball on January 20th, 1993. New members are welcome. More information is available at http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/MediaMOO/
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