Bassett, Elizabeth H., and Kate O’Riordan. “Ethics of Internet Research: Contesting the Human Subjects Research Model.” Ethics and Information Technology 4 3 (2002): 233-47. Print.

• The authors in this piece argue that the spatial metaphors used in descriptions of the Internet has shaped the adoption of the human subjects research model.  This model is appropriate in some areas of internet research like email; however, the authors feel that researchers need to consider the Internet as cultural production of texts.
• Some interesting aspects of internet research: virtual ethnography, linguistic and discoursed based analyses of computer-mediated communication, research into the internet as culture.
• Herring is a major source – “social realism”
• Human subjects research ethics considers the rights of the human subject as primary and the aims of the researcher as secondary.
• Sherry Turkle’s work has been referred to throughout these readings.  – Life on the Screen – ur text
• Human subjects research model has two lines of thought backing it: 1) the dominant metaphor of spatiality.  This is a problem because this view supports the idea that the activity carried out through this medium is the same as the action of human actors in social space.  This view also supports the argument that “any manifestation of Internet activity should be regarded as a virtual person.
• The authors argue against this contending that the internet is also a medium through which a wide variety of statements are produced.
• The second line of thought backing the human subjects research model is the acceptance of virtuality – or the idea that the expressions of the self and simulations of persons made through the internet and computing technologies can be translated as the self or person who authored them – in other words, the virtual has a direct analog in the real.
• By invoking the internet as a “site” of research, invokes space as the paradigm through which to study the subjects; hence, these virtual spaces must be inhabited by human research subjects. . . hence the model.
• The internet as a site of cultural production – one paradigm shift the authors would like to achieve – states that the internet and it’s attendant textualities exists as a form of cultural production.
• By treating parts of the Internet as public space, the IRB wouldn’t need to get involved because the research subjects are already producing public knowledge.  These sorts of sites – like a clearinghouse for global justice organizations wherein some members risk punishment for participation  – need to be public for exposure but private for protection.  This is the main argument in the piece.
• Three models of what a text is:  text as reflection of author, text as object, text as reader-response.
• Text as object underlies copyright law.
• Sources for text as reader-response – Ricouer / Barthes / Foucault – Death of an Author, etc.
• When you have a dialogue from a chat room, is it a dialogue as people’s positions (hence needing human research subject designation), or a text like in literary studies?
• In essence, some contexts should be used as textual productions of the internet instead of spaces where human research subjects must be recognized.
• The human research subjects model is appropriate if the folks being researched could be hurt because of the research; however, this does not mean that all internet research should follow this method.
• Because the internet is a complex intersection “of technologies, form, genre, and content” it must sometimes be taken as a “text” instead of a “space.”
• The choice isn’t between internet as text or internet as space; rather, the authors hope that a research method that acknowledges the hybridity of the net is possible.  Using Salazar as a model, the authors hope to undertake “reading a text that includes content, form, history and researchers’ response as part of the relations of production – power is also a central issue”

Important Sources:

• Mark S. Frankel and Sanyin Siang.  Ethical and Legal Aspects of Human Subjects Research on the Internet:  A Report of a Workshop June 10-11, 1999.  American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), November, 1999 – www.aaas.org/ssp/dspp/sfrl/projects/intres/report.pdf – Done
• Herring, Susan C. Linguistic and Critical Analysis of Computer Mediated Communication:  Some Ethical and Scholarly Considerations.  The Information Society 12 (2): 153-168, 1996 - Acquired
  
• Robert Jones.  The Ethics of Research in Cyberspace.  Internet Research, 4(3): 30-35, 1994 – ILL
• Salazar, C.  A Third World Women’s Text:  Between the Politics of Criticism and Cultural Politics.  In S.B. Gluck and D. Patai, editors, Women’s Word:  The Feminist Practice of Oral History.  Routledge, NY and London, 1991. – Done