Critical Analysis of Language Use in Computer-Mediated Contexts:
Some Ethical and Scholarly Considerations
Susan Herring
Program in Linguistics
University of Texas
Arlington, TX 76019
THE PROBLEM
In the early years of CMC research (which is to say up until
very recently), those of us researching CMC had no choice but to
make up rules and procedures as we went along. Quite simply, the
phenomena we were investigating hadn't been in existence long
enough yet for others to have paved the way with methodologies,
ethical guidelines, and the like. Being among the first brought
with it a sense of power and exhilaration, but at the same time
uncertainty at times on how best to proceed. Thus it was with a
vague sense of relief that I welcomed the first suggestions of
how to cite e-mail messages in scholarly publications, how to
cite electronic journal publications on one's curriculum vitae,
and other such practical matters. And I especially looked
forward to the day when sound advice would become available as to
whether (and when) one should use participants' real names when
citing electronic messages as data. This is a matter of special
concern to me as a linguist, since my research focuses on the
language used in electronic interactions, and involves quoting
portions of actual messages verbatim. The decision I made in my
first CMC publications was to use pseudonyms or avoid mention of
names rather than revealing the actual identities of my data
sources, in part because the theoretical orientation of my
research is critical of the language patterns used by some
participants. My intention has been to respect the privacy of
individual participants, while preserving the academic freedom to
criticize. But is this defensible on ethical grounds? Now, at
last, two sets of proposals related to this issue have been
publicly advanced. Unfortunately, however, the two proposals aim
to establish guidelines that are mutually contradictory in
crucial respects. Further, neither appears to have envisioned
the possibility of CMC research that is linguistic in focus or
critical in nature.
TWO PROPOSALS
The first proposal comes from legal scholars, most notably
Edward Cavazos in a recent book entitled Cyberspace and the Law:
Your Rights and Duties in the On-line World. It asserts, in
essence, that all messages posted via computer networks are
published works and hence protected by copyright law. Quoting a
message or part of a message in another published work without
giving full credit to the source (naming the message writer, the
group it was posted to, the time and date, etc.) is a violation
of copyright and legally actionable. According to this view, one
should use only participants' real names, and indeed provide
further identifying particulars, whenever an electronic message
is quoted.
The second proposal is presented by Storm King in his essay
in this volume. It asserts that all messages posted to computer
discussion groups are potentially private in terms of how they
are intended and perceived by participants within the groups. In
order to protect the "perceived privacy" of participants in
electronic interactions, no potentially identifying
characteristics of the data should be reproduced in scholarly
work, including participants' names, the time or date of the
message, or the real name of the group itself. According to this
view, one should paraphrase rather than quote messages verbatim,
or if messages are quoted, they should be carefully expunged of
all group- and author-specific information.
The contradiction between these two views is obvious --one
says to reveal one's sources, the other to hide them, regardless,
in both cases, of the particular circumstances of the
communication. On the one hand, such absolutist positions might
hardly seem worth serious discussion. It is untenable to claim
that all CMC is copyrightable (some is trivial; consider, for
example, the one-word message "Hi" posted by a participant on a
chat channel), just as it is untenable to maintain that all CMC
is intended as private (consider an advertisement broadcast
simultaneously -- "spammed" -- to thousands of newsgroups on the
Usenet). Each of these views appears to assume one particular
type of CMC (e.g. open debate of academic issues vs.
self-revelation of sensitive information in self-help groups) and
to generalize recommendations based on that type to all of
cyberspace. However, cyberspace is a vast and varied domain, and
rules that seek to generalize indiscriminately across all
varieties of CMC do not "fit" the nature of the phenomenon.
Less obvious but equally misguided, each of the proposed
guidelines assumes a particular model of scholarship and extends
it to all CMC research. The idea that the source of all
electronic messages should be credited assumes that 1) the
messages are cited by the researcher for their content, rather
than to illustrate some other feature of electronic messages that
is largely out of the (conscious) control of the author (e.g. the
configuration of mailer headings or the linguistic means of
expression), and 2) the researcher is using the message in a way
that its author would approve of and wish to be associated with.
Similarly, the view that no identifying characteristics of
participants should be revealed assumes that 1) researchers are
interested in general patterns of participant behavior rather
than specific patterns of e.g. language use (and thus that
paraphrases are adequate for the purposes of the investigation),
and 2) the interests of researchers and participants are
potentially in conflict, with researchers motivated to "exploit"
the self-revelations of participants for personal gain (although
it is ethically wrong for them to do so).
Clearly the proponents of neither of the two proposals had
language scholars in mind (Cavazos is a lawyer, and King, a
student of psychology); if they had, they would have made
different assumptions about what researchers are "interested" in
with respect to computer-mediated messages. Moreover, neither
proposal allows for the possibility of legitimate critical
research; rather, both assume that there is (or should be) a
consensus between investigator and investigated. More
problematic yet, both assume a consensus model of interaction
among participants, whose needs and interests are represented as
essentially homogeneous, albeit different in the two proposals.
Such assumptions ignore the insight of social theorists -- of
whom Michel Foucault is perhaps the best-known representative
--that power relations are contested in and through discourse, as
well as the readily observable fact that conflict is a salient
characteristic of much CMC. Thus on the level of these
assumptions as well, the two proposals do not reflect the complex
reality of cyberspace and cyberspace scholarship.
My purpose in this essay is to argue for the legitimacy of
both language study and critical study in computer-mediated
contexts, and to fill a gap in the discourse about CMC ethics by
focusing consideration on ethical issues raised specifically by
each. I do this by considering each separately (there is no
necessary relationship between the two), with theoretical
background drawn from various disciplinary practices in the
social sciences, especially the field of linguistics, and
illustrations drawn from my own research into gendered language
use in Listserv discussion groups on the Internet.
ISSUES RAISED BY LANGUAGE-FOCUSED CMC RESEARCH
If any group of scholars ought to be interested in CMC, it
is linguists. Indeed, CMC is arguably the greatest boon to the
study of language use since the invention of the portable tape
recorder in the 1950's. Like the tape recorder, it makes
possible the analysis of naturally-occurring communication on a
scale that was previously unimaginable. Before the tape
recorder, linguists had to write down speech they had heard from
memory, a fact which seriously limited the amount of verbatim
material that could be transcribed and analyzed. With the advent
of the tape recorder, entire discourses (conversations, stories,
speeches, etc.) could be recorded and transcribed by the analyst
at leisure, resulting in larger corpora and enabling
discourse-level patterns of usage to emerge that were previously
invisible. Thus the field of discourse analysis was born in the
1960's and 1970's (van Dijk 1985).
However, transcription is tedious and time consuming, and
these practical constraints limit the amout of material that can
be analyzed by any one linguist. In contrast, CMC is
pre-transcribed -- participants have typed the "data" in
themselves. And CMC is plentiful, a fact which, in combination
with advances in computer-assisted corpus analysis, enables the
construction and analysis of much larger and more diverse corpora
than were previously possible (see, e.g., Collot & Belmore 1992;
Yates 1993). Last but not least, CMC is socially situated in
"virtual communities" (Rheingold 1993), the workings of which are
rendered explicit through users negotiating new norms of behavior
in virtual environments -- all of which necessarily takes place
through language. Thus computer network technology makes
possible more and better (including more socially-contextualized)
language research than was previously possible. To be sure, not
many linguists have realized this yet. But then, it took more
than 10 years after the invention of the tape recorder for the
implications of that technology to begin to be realized in a new
field of study -- discourse analysis -- so there is hope that the
enormous potential of computer-mediated language analysis will
yet be realized.
A comparison between CMC and the tape recorder is
instructive with respect to research ethics as well. The
availability of tape recorded data in the early days of discourse
analysis research raised ethical questions for language
researchers similar to those being debated for CMC today. Could
speakers be recorded without their knowledge, i.e. to obtain more
natural data? Could transcripts of recorded speech be used in
research publication if the speakers were no longer available to
be asked for their permission, e.g. because they had moved away,
or because the recording had been made by someone not personally
known to the researcher? If transcripts were quoted verbatim,
should speakers be identified by name? In response to these
questions, a rough and ready set of conventions has come into use
in spoken language research, conventions which arise out of
specific ideological commitments characteristic of linguistics
and related disciplines. I briefly discuss two of the most
important of these conventions below.
The first concerns the collection of naturalistic spoken
language data. The field of linguistics has long been concerned
with the "Observer's Paradox", that is, the problem of how to
collect authentic data without the collection process interfering
with the phenomena observed (especially articulate statements of
this problem and some possible solutions were voiced by
sociolinguist William Labov as early as 1966). Covert
tape-recording has obvious advantages in this respect, since if
people are unaware that a researcher is recording their speech,
they are less likely to become self-conscious, correct (or
overcorrect) in the direction of prescribed norms of usage, or
otherwise produce unnatural speech. Ethically, covert
tape-recording is considered acceptable in public contexts; a
well-known example is Don Zimmerman and Candace West's 1975 study
of cross-sex interruptions, in which the researchers recorded
conversations between couples overheard in drugstores, coffee
shops, airports, and other places to which "any member of the
public" could have "normal access". In private contexts, in
contrast, ethical considerations dictate that researchers should
inform speakers beforehand that they are being recorded, and the
tape recorder should ideally be visible; at least, this is the
advice I give students before sending them out to collect data
for discourse analysis classes. However, covert tape recording
may also be justified in private contexts, e.g. if the knowledge
that they are being recorded could make speakers self-conscious
to the point of not producing the linguistic phenomena under
investigation at all. A justification of this sort is given by
Penelope Harvey (1992) for recording the drunken speech of
Quechua-speaking Indians in a small mountain community in Peru;
the informal and often irreverent drunken speech would be
self-censored in the "official" presence of the tape recorder,
although not in the presence of the participant observer,
especially if she too were drinking.
Although they have been widely accepted, neither of the
research practices described in the previous paragraph is
entirely unproblematic, especially in light of the considerations
raised by King in this volume with respect to CMC research. The
conversations overheard by Zimmerman and West were never intended
as public; they were private conversations between couples which
happened to take place in public settings. And the Peruvian
Indians clearly intended their drunken speech to be off-record
and ephemeral, as Harvey herself notes. What renders such
practices more-or-less acceptable in spoken language research is
that there is a convention of representation (e.g. in writing up
the research for publication in a journal), according to which
the actual identity of the speakers is disguised. Speakers are
almost never identified by name in research papers as being the
source of data presented; pseudonyms may be used, or generic
labels such as 'a fifteen year old boy, 'a female associate
professor', etc., or (most commonly) the example may be
unattributed, beyond a general description of the data corpus in
the methodology section of the paper.1 Thus any given speaker
could plausibly deny that she was the source of any examples
used, and no one could "prove" otherwise. Admittedly, in some
cases the disguise is rather transparent, especially to people
with insider knowledge of the speech situation being described.
An example of this from my personal experience is a 1974 article
by Charles Fillmore, (now) professor emeritus of linguistics at
the University of California at Berkeley, in which he describes a
hand-written message posted on the door of one of a colleague's
two offices. As a graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley at
the time I read the article, I immediately recognized -- with
some amusement -- which faculty member he was referring to,
although he had used a pseudonym: the professor's initials.
However, the majority of readers (presumably) would not have
access to this information, and thus the identity of the source
was masked for most audiences.
One might wonder why, in a situation such as the one just
described, the actual identity of the source could not have been
revealed. After all, the message was posted on an office door in
a public university for any and all to read, and the professor's
name was also displayed on that door (it is clear from the
context given in Fillmore's example that the message was written
by the professor). One reason academic linguists are so little
concerned to link sources with their words (aside from
professional delicacy, perhaps, when a colleague is involved) is
that the focus of linguistic investigation is generally on the
form rather than the content of the utterances. Linguistic form
is considered something speakers do not consciously produce, so
much as it reflects a general competence they possess as speakers
of their language. Correspondingly, their individual identities
and linguistic quirks are generally of less interest than their
membership in the group of speakers whose language is being
studied. This is true for the couples recorded by Zimmerman and
West (what was most relevant in that study was whether speakers
were male or female) and for the Peruvian Indians recorded by
Harvey (who were being studied as Spanish-Quechua bilinguals).
If the researcher were to give detailed information about
individual speakers in writing up such research, it would most
likely be perceived as irrelevant and distracting. Similarly in
Fillmore's article, although it was amusing to me to recognize a
covert reference to someone I knew, the identity of the professor
who posted the message on his door was of minor importance
compared with what the linguistic form of the message was
intended to illustrate about the English language.
A further practical consequence of focusing on form is that
the content of examples quoted in linguistics scholarship is
often banal, fragmented, or both. This provides speakers with a
certain protection as well. A speaker is unlikely to feel
concern at being represented (anonymously and out of context) as
having said, "I was there for about uh six .. six years";2 for
one thing, she can deny it was she who said it, and for another,
who would care if she had? Admittedly, the situation becomes
more complicated when someone is quoted as interrupting or being
drunkenly challenging of another; these are language behaviors
that carry social stigma, at least in western middle-class
society. Nonetheless, I have never heard of a case where a
speaker complained of how she was represented in example
sentences in a linguistics publication,3 nor of harm befalling
any individual as a result of such representation. The credit
for this is probably due to the fact that in representation,
regardless of what has gone before in the research process, the
anonymity of speakers is invariably preserved, not just in how
they are referred to, but also in terms of the content of
examples selected for representation.
What, then, of CMC? It is not difficult to imagine
computer-mediated situations parallel to those described above
for spoken language research. Much CMC, such as that on Usenet
newsgroups and on open-subscription Listservs, resembles
Zimmerman and West's conversations in public places --researchers
can easily "overhear" it, although they may not have been the
intended audience, strictly speaking. Harvey's drunken
discourse, in contrast, more closely resembles a group with a
restricted membership, where what is said is only intended for
the members of the group, although the researcher may be a
participant observer in the group, and in that role part of the
intended audience. Treating CMC like spoken conversation, one
could argue that as long as the anonymity of participants is
preserved, it should be possible, ethically, to cite fragments of
electronic messages from virtually any source. However, this
view is problematic, precisely because CMC is typed rather than
spoken, and leaves a physical record which can be archived or
otherwise preserved. As a consequence, it is much more difficult,
practically speaking, for a researcher to insure absolute
anonymity -- a determined reader of the published article, armed
with the name of the group, could trace the message and discover
the "real" identity (that is to say the login name) of the e-mail
account that originally sent it, e.g by searching the archives,
if such are available, for keywords contained in the message.
The likelihood that anyone would actually bother to do this may
be negligible for examples published e.g. in an article on
spelling conventions in an Internet Relay Chat session (Werry
Forthcoming) or on the use of pronouns in academic computer
conferencing (Yates Forthcoming), but to insure absolute
anonymity, we could adopt King's suggestion that
computer-mediated groups not be identified by name or any other
distinguishing feature; this, in combination with disguising the
identity of the message poster, would make it exceedingly
difficult for anyone to discover the message source.
But is spoken discourse the best analogy for CMC? CMC is,
after all, typed; it can be edited, and it leaves a (potentially)
enduring record. An alternative is to treat CMC like written
material. In the linguistics literature, examples drawn from
published written sources are given full citations, in accordance
with copyright law, and are subject to 'fair use' requirements.
If all CMC is copyrighted, as Cavazos and others (e.g. Gurak
1995) have claimed, researchers investigating computer-mediated
language should be able to cite any of it they have legitimate
access to, as long as they explicitly credit the source.
The crucial question then becomes: is CMC more like spoken
or written discourse? Linguistic research suggests that it is
intermediate between the two (Collot and Belmore 1993; Yates
1993, Forthcoming), and thus that any direct analogy may be too
simplistic. Indeed, my own research practice treats CMC in
neither of the two ways outlined above. First, I do not use
individual message senders' real names, both for scholarly
reasons -- variation at the level of the individual has not been
the focus of my research -- and ethical reasons -- I wish to
reserve the right to critique the discourse that I analyze (see
below), and in order to do so without harming the individuals who
happen to provide me with examples, I anonymize them. In this,
my practice in citing CMC sources follows that for spoken
language research.
At the same time, I identify (public-access) groups by name,
thereby enabling readers, should they be so inclined, to access
the archives for the groups themselves and identify the real
e-mail addresses of individual contributors cited in my examples
(although to my knowledge no one has ever tried to do this). I
follow this practice (and indeed encourage it in others) for two
reasons. First, it strengthens the quality of the scholarship by
providing concrete detail which not only adds informativity
(those who are familiar with the group can access and apply their
own knowledge of it), but also allows the empirical claims of the
work to be independently assessed. That is, the reader needn't
take my word for it that there are gender differences of the sort
I claim in group X; group X is open to any interested party; in
principle, they can subscribe and observe for themselves.
Whether or not anyone actually does this is immaterial; what is
important for empirical research is that its results be
potentially reproduceable by others. If I were to mask the
identity of the group, my claims could not be directly evaluated;
they would have to be accepted (or not) on the basis of other
qualities of the work, e.g. its rhetorical persuasiveness. The
second reason has to do with the type of CMC I analyze, which is
primarily that of open-access Listserv discussion groups, many of
which have an academic focus (see e.g. Herring 1993, 1996). This
discourse has a flavor which is strongly public, even
exhibitionistic at times -- many people post as though with an
audience in mind, aiming to persuade and impress others with
their eloquence and reason. While we might not wish to claim
that all messages posted to such groups are "publications", that
is, intended to endure through time, it seems entirely
appropriate to compare them to public broadcasts, which are
designed to reach a wide audience at a particular point in time.
(This comparison holds even more strongly for Usenet, where the
extent and nature of the audience is unknowable.) As broadcast
material, the content of electronic posts is in the public
domain, and there is thus no reason not to indicate the group
they were broadcast to and through. In this respect, my practice
more closely resembles that for written language research.
It may seem that there is an inconsistency in this stance --
group names are public information, but individuals' names are
not. In fact, individuals' names are also public information, to
the extent that individuals choose to broadcast their messages to
public fora. It is a matter of courtesy, not an ethical or legal
requirement, that their real names not be used in research that
represents their messages unflatteringly. Thus for ethical
purposes, group names and individual names have the same (public)
status. The practice of not mentioning names also fits with a
broader ideological preoccupation in linguistics research, that
what is important are patterns across groups of speakers, rather
than individual linguistic variation. Masking a participant's
identity, even if it does not actually "protect" him or her from
being recognized by some, is a conventional way of signalling,
"the identity of the person who posted this message is secondary
to his or her membership in a larger social grouping which uses
language in characteristic ways".4
Astute readers may have noticed a general positivist bias
pervading this discussion of language research, including in
statements of my own scholarly values. Positivism, which Cameron
et al. (1992:6) define as "a commitment to the study of the
frequency, distribution, and patterning of observable phenomena",
is concerned with producing testable claims and procuring
value-free observations in a scientific manner. Correspondingly,
underlying much linguistic methodology is a fundamental mistrust
of the "subjective", which includes speakers' self-reports of
their language activity, as well as data "contaminated" by the
involvement of the linguist herself (hence the "Observer's
Paradox"). Positivist assumptions have produced much valuable
research, including some which identifies patterns in
computer-mediated language and addresses the important question
of how CMC compares with other modalities of human communication
(see e.g. Ferrara et al. 1991; Herring (ed.), Forthcoming).
Moreover, such research poses relatively little threat to the
well-being of the researched subjects or their communities, since
the researchers observe from a distance, preserve the anonymity
of subjects, and often focus in rather narrowly on linguistic
phenomena such that even when examples are directly quoted,
little or no personal information is revealed about the sources.
I submit that such research is legitimate, and that its
requirements should be taken into consideration along with those
of other research types when discussion of ethical guidelines for
CMC research arises. Researchers working within linguistic
traditions must be allowed to cite examples verbatim in order to
identify and illustrate the phenomena under investigation, contra
King's proposal that paraphrases be used instead. At the same
time, it is inappropriate to require such researchers to provide
full citations for all sources, as Cavazos proposes, just as it
would be to require linguists in studies of spoken language to
identify the individual source of each example sentence. Not
only is such information generally irrelevant in research focused
on linguistic form, but the requirement could have a chilling
effect on the variety of linguistic research that is carried out,
in that researchers would tend to avoid research topics that have
any potential at all to make their sources feel self-conscious
when the results are published. All in all, research in the
tradition of linguistic positivism appears to pose minimal
ethical problems as long as subjects are represented anonymously.
It only becomes problematic in that the possibility of such
research is not forseen by either the proposed "copyright" or
"perceived privacy" guidelines.
ISSUES RAISED BY CRITICAL CMC RESEARCH
The linguistic research described in the previous section
illustrates one model of social science research that is being
extended to communication in computer-mediated contexts.
However, not all social science research assumes that it is
possible or desirable to produce "objective" knowledge by
maintaining a distance between researcher and researched. Nor do
all research paradigms share the view that researched individuals
and communities must remain untouched by the research; some allow
for active researcher intervention on behalf of the researched
population, or for giving the researched a say in the
(co-)construction of the research itself (Cameron et al. 1992).
This latter view is argued for with respect to CMC research by
Christina Allen in this volume. Allen calls for increased
interaction between researcher and researched in the CMC research
process, not just in obtaining advance informed consent, but in
letting the researched speak for themselves through interviews,
and in giving them opportunities to "correct" or change what the
researcher is writing about them before it goes to press.
However, this set of recommendations too is problematic if
generalized broadly. Like the other proposed guidelines
discussed thus far, it presupposes a consensus view of the
researcher-researched relationship and of CMC more generally
which is incompatible in key respects with the goals of critical
analysis.
One of the most striking characteristics of CMC, in my
experience, is the extent to which it is a locus of conflict.
Groups conflict with groups (misogynists with feminists, white
supremacists with liberals, expatriot Turks with expatriot
Afghanis, personal users with commercial advertisers, civil
libertarians with advocates of regulation, etc.) and individuals
regularly enter into conflict with other individuals on Usenet
newsgroups, chat channels, and academic Listservs alike. Various
explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon, ranging from
'disinhibition' caused by the depersonalizing nature of the
medium (e.g. Kiesler et al. 1985; Kim and Raja 1991), to a
positive valuing of conflict as a form of gendered social
interaction (Herring 1994, 1996). Whatever its explanation, the
prevalence of conflict has as a consequence that users, even
those subscribed to special-interest discussion groups, cannot
reasonably be considered homogeneous populations with respect to
their interests and social/political agendas.
This raises problems for many of the ethical recommendations
proposed in this volume. For example, Waskul and Douglass in
their article recommend that CMC researchers obtain informed
consent and work only with key informations. But, informed
consent from whom? Getting all participants in an electronic
forum to consent to any research project, no matter how
unintrusive, is a difficult task. If the project is at all
controversial, the chances that everyone will agree are virtually
nil. Should the researcher then abandon his or her project?
Some of the most interesting research questions that can be asked
about CMC involve areas of controversy.5 The notion of 'key
informants' is problematic as well. Allen in her dissertation
research on LambdaMOO ended up working closely with only four out
of 9,000 group members. How representative were the views of
those four individuals of that complex community as a whole?
Methodological choices of this sort essentially limit the kinds
of research questions that can be addressed to case studies,
valid in and of themselves, but surely not the only kind of CMC
research worth doing.
Suppose for the sake of argument, however, that permission is
granted by group consensus for a researcher to observe and
analyze the discourse of a "virtual community". Is the
researcher then obliged to insure that whatever he or she writes
meets with the approval of every member of the group, or is at
least inoffensive to them? What if the project reveals a
political division within the group, or patterns of dominance of
some members by others? Under such circumstances, the research
findings, if honestly represented, will likely make some members
of the group uncomfortable. Should results of this sort then not
be written up, or be represented less than honestly? Such
suggestions are clearly unpalatable on scholarly grounds.
In short, requiring cooperation and collaboration between
researchers and researched in computer-mediated settings is
problematic. However, this does not invalidate the possibility
of adopting a non-positivist approach in CMC research. In what
follows, I discuss an alternative approach, philosophically
grounded in social realism, which most closely approximates my
own CMC research practice.
Social realism holds that different social groups, as defined
e.g. by gender, race, and class, are characterized by an unequal
distribution of power, such that some groups dominate and others
are dominated by them. Power is negotiated primarily through
discourse, especially in the kinds of "official" discourse that
create what comes to be defined as knowledge in a culture
(Foucault 1980). As researchers, we participate in creating
knowledge of this type, especially when the researched are
members of less powerful groups such as crime victims, the
mentally ill, children, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, etc., and
our research contributes to labelling their behaviors in various
ways (Cameron et al. 1992). In research of this sort, it is
naive to claim that we can be "objective" or "neutral";
researchers as well as researched subjects are socially-situated
actors with their own personal and political agendas.
Some scholars, including many feminists (for example, Steiner
1989), have responded to the ethical challenges posed by social
realism by directly acknowledging their biases and potential
biases when presenting their research. This may include, if one
is a feminist, acknowledging an activist agenda to "critique and
to eliminate women's oppression and the oppression of others"
(Steiner 1989:158). It may also include incorporating practices
into the research process which are designed to empower or
otherwise benefit the researched group. Thus Deborah Cameron
(1992) describes a project in which she worked with
Afro-Caribbeans in a London youth club to produce an
anti-stereotypical video about racist language. On the basis of
this experience, she proposes a number of guidelines for carrying
out "empowering" research; these include soliciting the views of
the researched group about the phenomena under investigation,
sharing knowledge and research tools with the researched, and
presenting the results of the research in a way that the
researched will find accessible (128).
Somewhat different ethical considerations are necessarily raised
by research on members of oppressive groups. A recent example of
a study of this sort carried out within a social realist
framework is that of Peter Adams, Alison Towns, and Nicola Gavey
(Adams et al. 1995). (Male) researchers orally interviewed men
who had been arrested for violence against women concerning their
attitudes about male dominance. The authors indicate their
personal interest (the project was triggered by an incident
within their profession (clinical psychology) which disturbed
them), and they explictly acknowledge having a pro-feminist
theoretical stance. Moreover, although they do not mention in
their article how the results of the research will be used to
benefit women, they note that they deemed it necessary, at the
end of each interview, to explicitly question attitudes which
supported violence against women, lest the interview process
itself be seen to encourage further violent behavior. Similarly,
Cameron (1992:120, quoting Harvey 1992) underscores the
importance of directing empowering research "as much at the
political consciousness of the powerful as at the powerless".
There are numerous ways in which CMC warrants research in a
social realist paradigm. The high incidence of conflict in
cyberspace makes it an ideal setting in which to analyze the
discursive construction of power, and to seek answers to such
questions as "whose interests are worthy of debate, who gets to
talk, and who is regarded as an effective communicator to whom
others must listen?" (Steiner 1989:158). Moreover, the answers
to these questions have important real-world implications, in
that they potentially limit access by some groups to
computer-mediated information and interaction. One issue which
has attracted considerable attention in the popular media is
sexual harassment online (see e.g. Van Gelder 1990; Dibbell
1993); the evidence is mounting that cyberspace is no less sexist
than the "real world". There is a need for such issues to be
treated seriously and responsibly by social scientists.
My own research on gender patterns in computer-mediated discourse
illustrates some of the ethical issues associated with social
realism, although I did not start out with the idea of
undertaking social realist research. Quite on the contrary,
prior to doing my first study, I had no training in social
realism, had never read Foucault, had not previously worked on
gender issues, and did not call myself a feminist. I believed,
however, that positivist methods of linguistic analysis could be
used to address issues of wider social importance, and thus I set
out to "solve" a problem that was troubling me, namely: why did
women participate so little (and so differently) from men on
mixed-sex academic Listserv discussion lists? As a female
academician who also subscribed to such lists, I obviously could
not claim a "neutral" stance with respect to the topic. I did,
however, employ empirical methods, including electronic
questionnaires and quantitative text analysis of
computer-mediated discussions. I also added generous doses of
qualitative interpretation (the data do not speak for
themselves), drawing heavily on the comments made by anonymous
respondents (both female and male) to my questionnaire studies,
each of which included open-ended questions. Thus, I solicited
and incorporated the views of the researched group, as Allen and
Cameron recommend.
However, in other respects, my practice deviated significantly
from that for consensus-based research. I did not ask the
group's permission in advance to observe or analyze their
interactions, nor did I consult with members regarding what I was
planning to write. With regard to the first choice, it did not
seem necessary to obtain permission to analyze what was
self-evidently public discourse; anyone could join the group and
read the messages posted to it by sending a "subscribe" message
to the Listserv, and the topics of discussion were exclusively
academic. As for the second choice, I strongly suspected I would
not get the approval of all involved, and I did not want to be
constrained to write only what (the more vocal, dominant) members
of the group would approve. For what I had discovered --
reinforced by the comments of the questionnaire respondents --
was that lengthy and often adversarial messages posted by a
minority of male subscribers effectively set the terms of the
discourse for the group as a whole, and intimidated others into
silence.
When I began presenting this research publicly, it provoked
strikingly different reactions from women and men. Women
reported feeling empowered by it; it validated experiences they
had had online but could not previously name, and they took the
results and discussed them in other electronic groups, using them
in some cases to draw attention to and subvert male discursive
domination as it was taking place (as I was later to find out).
Men, in contrast, tended to respond to my research as though
intimidated -- they would remain conspicuously silent while women
asked questions and made comments after my conference
presentations.
The nature of the response engendered by this research has shaped
my research practice in subtle ways, bringing it increasingly in
line with social realist practice. I did not start out with the
intention of empowering women in cyberspace, but when it became
apparent that the work was having that effect, I began to feel
increasingly responsible to make it acessible. I have
distributed some of the work on the Internet through publication
in electronic journals and ftp sites, even though such
publications are viewed as less statusful by university tenure
and promotion committees. I announce the availability of my
papers to the electronic groups I have studied, following up by
sending copies (including prepublication copies) to any and all
who request them. It has also seemed important to address
audiences outside my academic discipline -- librarians,
philosophers, computer scientists, public school teachers -- and
to participate in formative discourses about CMC such as the
present debate. These practices are consistent with Cameron's
recommendation that "empowering" researchers share knowledge with
the researched and present the results in ways they and others
who can benefit from them will find accessible.
Critical research places a different burden of ethical
responsibility on the researcher than positivist research in
which the researcher maintains an illusion of objectivity and
distance. A particular danger associated with researching and
writing about disadvantaged groups is that the researcher herself
may contribute unwittingly to the oppression of the group by
making statements which could be interpeted to support popular
prejudices. Accordingly, I have become increasingly careful to
avoid facile generalizations that could contribute to the popular
stereotypes about men, women, and computers that have begun to
surface in the mainstream media, such as the view that women send
e-mail to socialize with friends while men send e-mail to
exchange information (see e.g. Kantrowitz 1994). I even recently
wrote an article debunking this stereotype (based on empirical
linguistic evidence; Herring Forthcoming), something I would not
have done several years ago. In short, critical research may
call for considerably more follow-up than positivist research,
and may actually lead one to take up an activist social agenda.
Critical CMC research is legitimate and necessary given the
diverse and often conflicting needs of groups of users in
cyberspace. However, the approach is incompatible with the
suggestion that all CMC researchers seek consensus and approval
from the researched as part of the research process. Requiring
consensus would seriously limit and compromise the integrity of
what critical research could be done, and thus is problematic on
scholarly grounds. It is also theoretically naive, in that it
ignores the existence of multiple voices, multiple agendas, and
struggle among the researched themselves. Finally, it risks
reinforcing the hegemony of dominant groups, since theirs are the
voices most likely to determine the form that any "consensus"
will take. Thus although giving more of a voice to the
researched may ease ethical concerns in the context of some
research agendas, it is ethically problematic in others.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
I began this essay by comparing two sets of proposals regarding
ethical conduct in CMC research, one based on the notion that CMC
is "published" material, and the other on the notion that CMC is
"private" interaction. I pointed out that these proposals,
although they make contradictory assumptions about the nature of
CMC, make similar assumptions about what constitutes research.
In the previous two sections, I argued that these assumptions are
inappropriately narrow; specifically, they exclude research
practices in the linguistic and the critical traditions (and no
doubt other traditions as well), each of which raises different
ethical and scholarly considerations.
In this section, I return to consider (briefly) the nature of
CMC. It is by now a truism that cyberspace is vast and diverse.
The obvious answer to the question of whether multi-participant
CMC is more like published text or ephemeral private
communication is that it is both, at different times and in
different places, and other things besides -- it is also soapbox
rhetoric, cocktail party conversation, idle chat around the copy
machine, a stag party, group therapy, playing Dungeons and
Dragons, attending an academic conference, etc. How could any
single set of guidelines hope to appropriately reflect the nature
of the interaction in all of these different genres?
Fortunately, there is a simple solution, at least to ethical
questions associated with the public/private debate. That is to
recognize the de facto public nature of most multi-site CMC
(based on the fact that anyone with access to an e-mail account
and other commonly-available software can subscribe to Listserv
groups, read Usenet messages, join chat channels and participate
in MUDs and MOOs), and openly declare such varieties public as
the default. In contrast, private arrangements must be
explicitly set up and managed; on the Internet, these might
include Listserv groups that require approval of the listowner to
join, invitation-only chat channels, and "private rooms" in MUDs
and MOOs.
The ethical prescription would then be straightforward, and it
would apply not only to researchers, but to any group wishing to
observe and report on electronic interaction: public interaction
is repeatable for any reasonable and non-malicious use (with
citations of the source where credit for ideas is due), but
private interaction should not be repeated outside the group
without explicit permission from the source. The advantage of
this system is that the technology is already available such that
any group that so wishes may restrict access and designate itself
as private (it is important to do both --simply declaring a group
"private" without any means of controlling access is not likely
to be credited). Thus there would be no excuse for not doing so,
once the distinction becomes sufficiently conventionalized.6 In
the meantime, considerate researchers will avoid exposing to the
public gaze interaction on sensitive topics such as that of the
sexual abuse survivors described by King (who clearly should
convert their group to a private format, unless the publicness of
their existing arrangement is therapeutic to them for other
reasons --in which case, they must decide whether they can live
with the risk of exposure).
By way of analogy, I note that when individuals broadcast by
appearing on television or talking on the radio, they cannot see
their audience nor do they know everyone who is in that audience.
Indeed, they may only be interacting with a small number of
people (e.g. a talk show host and other guests, perhaps in the
presence of a small studio audience), which might in principle
give them the illusion of carrying on a private or contained
conversation. This kind of argument has been advanced to justify
the need to respect the "perceived privacy" of individuals
posting messages on open-access Usenet and Listserv groups.
However, no one would attempt to make such an argument for
television or radio broadcasts, because their public nature and
the conventions of broadcasting are well understood by most
adults in modern society. Such a widespread understanding of the
public nature of CMC has not yet been achieved, yet the two
phenomena are parallel in many ways. Thus if it is agreed that
ethical guidelines are necessary, I propose that they be arrived
at by clarifying and codifying understandings that are plausibly
in the process of emerging; the default public nature of CMC is
one such plausible understanding.
Underlying this proposal is an assumption that participants and
listowners have a responsibility to themselves to protect their
privacy. Researchers share in this responsibility, of course,
given their more powerful position in the relationship, but
researchers also have a responsibility to themselves and to their
research. To expect them to be solely responsible for the
interests of the researched invites paternalism and does not
guarantee that the best interests of the researched will
necessarily be served.
In conclusion, researchers should be actively concerned to
protect researched populations from harm as a result of their
research, in cyberspace as elsewhere. However, means for
protecting the researched in cyberspace are already available and
can be developed further, e.g. by exploiting the technical
distinction between public (open-access) and private
(restricted-access) groups. It is unnecessary to implement
invariant guidelines which severely limit the range of legitimate
research practices to those with which some subset of scholars
are most personally familiar. Cyberspace is a complex
phenomenon, and to understand it fully will require a diversity
of research practices. This essay constitutes a call to balance
ethical considerations with a broader conceptualization of CMC
research, by recognizing its current diversity and its potential
to contribute further to our understanding of computer-mediated
interaction in years to come.
Notes
1. Two exceptions to the non-use of source names are 1) when the
source is a well-known public figure (e.g. Rush Limbaugh), and
2) when the researcher has asked and obtained permission from the
sources to use their real names (usually in situations where
there is a small number of sources, and where the researcher
wishes to give a more personal flavor to the research). However
it is not considered necessary or even especially desirable to do
this. A third situation in which real names may be used is when
language consultants and research assistants who have provided
data are named and thanked in a footnote; this is especially
common in analyses of lesser-studied languages.
2. This example is given in Chafe (1994:205).
3. This doesn't of course rule out complaints about the
correctness/appropriateness of the examples in terms of the
linguistic analysis, or complaints about how groups of people
(such as women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, etc.) are
represented in linguistic example sentences more generally.
4. I understand Fillmore's motives (in his 1974 paper) to be
similar. He could very well have named the professor who posted
(broadcast) the message on his office door. However this
individual identity was not important to the linguistic point he
was trying to make, and the example additionally made the
professor look vaguely ridiculous. Hence the superficial
disguise.
5. Approaching the listowner for permission is a possible
alternative that is often proposed. However, this does not solve
the problem of representativeness, nor the ethical problem of
"giving the researched a say". If anything, to the extent that
the researcher feels responsible or beholden to the listowner for
granting his or her permission, the practice may create a bias in
the research in favor of the listowner's agendas.
6. Conventionalization is the key to the success of such a
proposal in ensuring the privacy of those who legitimately claim
it. It may ultimately not be practical or possible to enforce
absolute privacy in any computer-mediated environment; any time a
message is sent to an unseen recipient, the potential is there
for its content to "leak" to other audiences, accidentally or
maliciously, no matter what technical or social means of
enforcement are employed. However, most people who wish to be
considered respectable by their peers live according to the
social contract, and thus would tend to honor clearly signalled
conventions of privacy in a computer-mediated context. To
further insure compliance, malicious failure to do so would need
to carry professional and social stigma, and perhaps be legally
actionable as well.
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