Frankel - nothing new under the sun

One of the themes discussed in this report is the tension between an online community member's real vs. online identity. There are tensions here, but not in the way described in the paper:

Since many Internet users invest in the
development of their online personas,
there should be consideration of whether
these pseudonyms should be treated as
real identities and hence, afforded the
same types of confidentiality
protection.

Online identities are portrayed as disjunct from "real" identity -- scare quotes because it's not clear to me what makes one kind of expression more real than the other; there are plenty of distinctions, but online vs. real is not the terminology I would have adopted. Within this framework, one of the major risk areas is the possibility of accidental linkage of an individual's online identity with their real identity.

A main conclusion of the paper is that people take online identity seriously, and so much researchers. Examples are given of semi-private online spaces (MUDs, forums with sensitive topics, etc.), but there is relatively little attention paid to the kinds of routines and norms that lead to such a space. We have a general correlation between public vs. private spaces and real vs. online identity, and notions of public distribution vs. public access.

But in my reading, it does really seem to be a problem of education. If, as individuals invest in online communities, they do so without really understanding the implications or possible consequences of their actions, I certainly don't think it's the job of the researcher to try to deal with it through education, system design, etc.; but it is up to the researcher to make sure that boundaries aren't crossed. I don't envy someone in that position.

When reading this, I thought that much of the stress might come from the fact that the contradictions or dysfunctions that are a part of "real" (vs. online, to use the paper's terminology) research are simply easier to overlook due to custom, and that once we try to apply the same practices in a slightly different kind of context, these open issues in research design simply seem more noticeable. This idea is related to the statements several students have made on this page stressing the personal responsibility of the online community member.