My contribution to the discussion will focus on how Web 2.0 tools, environments, and experiences are creating new conceptual gaps in our understanding of privacy, anonymity/identifiability, consent, and harm. My presentation is titled “Research Ethics in the 2.0 Era:Conceptual Gaps for Ethicists, Researchers, IRBs”, and relies heavily on my critique of the Tastes, Ties, and Time research project and subsequent data release (news coming soon about publication of this critique).

The slides are available below (updated with new version).

Scholz’s framing of Web 2.0 as a site for exploitative digital labor is very compelling, and has become the topic for a conference on “The Internet as Playground and Factory“, hosted by Scholz from November 12-14 2009 at The New School in NYC. The list of participants is one of the most impressive I’ve come across, and I regret I will not be able to attend and contribute to this important interrogation of Web 2.0.

The Internet as Playground and Factory – Register Now from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

I’m thrilled to be among the senior personnel on this grant, and look forward to the collaboration and results.

[Note: The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center, and Commons website is now live]

Here is the summary of the research project:

Internet Research and Ethics 2.0:
The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Interactive Resource Center, and Online Ethics Advisory Board

The working knowledge, professional and disciplinary norms and practices, and body of Internet Research ethics literature, is scattered across disciplines and locales, often contributing to uncertainty in ethical and methodological decision making among researchers and ethics boards which review research in academic institutions. This occasionally prevents research from being pursued and unnecessarily lengthens the time and effort that such bodies as Institutional Review Boards put into internet-research based protocols, as Buchanan and Ess have discovered in their current NSF funded research on IRBs and IRE protocol review. This uncertainty also contributes to a growing confusion and frustration among researchers, who see an ethical rigidity imposed from extant ethical review models, as more research is conducted across an array of technological and global boundaries.

This project brings the IRE literature together into a comprehensive database and couples it with it an interactive resource center, thus, centralizing and simplifying the task of developing standards, best practices, and guidelines around IRE. It also develops an Online Ethics Advisory Board, which will provide professional advice and guidance for researchers, ethics boards, and any research participants. The project is an exemplar of a new concept, “research ethics 2.0,” borrowing from web 2.0 to describe the emerging interactivity, user-developed content and resources, and technologies such as social networking and hyper-blogging that are stretching traditional notions of subject-object, creator-created, owner-consumer, and ultimately, researcher-researched. This emergent model of research ethics has the potential to transform the types of research itself that is conducted across universities and beyond.

The intellectual merit of this project lies in its cross-disciplinary breadth and depth that will benefit a range of scholarship in understanding “research ethics 2.0,” or, “transformative research ethics,” its focus on the ever-increasing literature concerned with Internet research ethics and the various discourses in play across disciplines around such relevant issues such as privacy, consent, ownership; and, its transformative nature, contribute to the model of a traditional ethics board with an online advisory board that is highly versed in Internet research ethics problems and scenarios.

The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity stem from the intellectual merits: The project will push the boundaries of traditional research ethics issues, allowing transformative models for managing Internet research. It provides sound resources, a solidified research base, and expert advice as more researchers and more IRBs/ethics boards struggle with the complexities of Internet research ethics. The greatest overall significance lies in the broad impact the project will have for Internet researchers from all disciplines and on the foundations of their research ethics systems and information ethics in general, and on the nature of research itself in an ever-connected, online environment.

Here’s my quick summary, but I encourage you to read the full text:

0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession.

1. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain ‘new’ but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions.

2. Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. …They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

3. Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software.

4. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

5. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy

6. …you will be required to do never-ending maintenance work to manage all your data feeds and updates. That’ll subtract a bit of time from your daily routine.

7. The Network will not be Revolutionized.

8. Web 2.0 is not for free. ‘Free as in free beer’ is not like ‘free as in freedom’. Open does not equal free. These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. …As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay.

9. Soon the Web 2.0 business model will be obsolete. It is based on the endless growth principle, pushed by the endless growth of consumerism.

10 We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system. …One strategy could be to make the one (’real’) identity more complex and, where possible, contradictory. But whatever your identify might be, it will always be harvested. If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.

I find #8 and #10 most prescient, especially in light of my emerging Laws of Social Networking…

Seems the recording industry behemoth Universal Music Group was listening, as they’ve recently joined the multimedia blogging platform Tumblr. Problem is, they don’t seem to know what they’re doing (and are still in the process of hiring someone to “Participate in online social networking environments and develop viral marketing campaigns”).

Countless users are cringing at the notion that UMG is now participating in this social environment and “following” their contributions in this community: see here, here, here, and here, for example.

Perhaps the best account of this “mis-adventure” in social marketing is from convincingindie, who recounts the story here. You can read through the details, but it ends with Universal Music accusing convincingindie of being “scared” and “paranoid.” After they get called out on the ludicrousness of all this, UMG deleted their original posts, and posted their “final word” on the issue.

I’ve asked UMG why they deleted the posts in question, but haven’t received an acknowledgment or reply.

#Buzzkill.

UPDATE (04-19-2009): In the weeks since posting this, I’ve frequently re-visited UMG’s Tumblr site to see if they’d responded regarding the removal of their posts disparaging convincingindie. When I checked the site today, I discovered they had redesigned their Tumblr feed, removing the comments (and presumably all comments on all posts) altogether. Luckily, I grabbed a screenshot of the cache of the original post showing my inquiry.

So, to summarize, UMG has accused a fellow Tumbr user of being “scared” and “paranoid”, then they removed those posts, and then failed to reply to my inquiry as to why they removed the posts without comment, and then redesigned the site removing all comments (and preventing any future comments of any of their postings).

#Buzzkill.

The result of our efforts has just been published in a special issue of the International Review of Information Ethics focusing on the convergence between business and moral intelligence. Here’s the title and abstract:

Values and Pragmatic Action: The Challenges of Introducing Ethical Intelligence in Technical Design Communities
by Noëmi Manders-Huits and Michael Zimmer

Various Value-Conscious Design frameworks have recently emerged to introduce moral and ethical intelligence into business and technical design contexts, with the goal of proactively influencing the design of technologies to account for moral and ethical values during the conception and design process. Two attempts to insert ethical intelligence into technical design communities to influence the design of technologies in ethical- and value-conscious ways are described, revealing discouraging results. Learning from these failed attempts, the article identifies three key challenges of pragmatic engagement with technical design communities: (1) confronting competing values; (2) identifying the role of the values advocate; and (3) the justification of a value framework. Addressing these challenges must become a priority if one is to be successful in pragmatically engaging with real-world business and design contexts to bring moral and ethical intelligence to bear in the design of emerging information and communication technologies.

You can download the entire special issue here (pdf).

Following up on March’s special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,” I was recently interviewed by Joy Austria and A.J. Hannah for the First Monday Podcast series.

You can download the MP3 (5.2MB, 15:16) or read the transcript. Hopefully you can read between the awkward phrasing of my responses (I think I was travel-weary at the time), and find something insightful to complement the special issue.

(Speaking of that special issue, the Washington Post recently quoted Anders Albrechtslund‘s contribution. I’m thrilled folks are finding it useful.)

This special issue was born from a panel I organized at AoIR, and features amazing contributions from Trebor Scholz, Matthew Allen, Kylie Jarrett, Søren Mørk Petersen, myself, Anders Albrechtslund, and David Silver.

My thanks to everyone who helped make this special issue a reality.

First Monday
Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008

Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
edited by Michael Zimmer

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
by Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
by Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
by Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
by Søren Mørk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
by Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward
by David Silver

Information technology plays an increasingly important role in society and in human lives. Identity Management Technologies (e.g. biometrics, profiling, surveillance), in combination with a variety of identification procedures and personalized services are ubiquitous and pervasive. This calls for careful consideration and design of collecting, mining, storing and use of personal information.

Access, rights, responsibilities, benefits, burdens and risks are apportioned on the basis of identities of individuals. These identities are formed on the basis of personal data collected and stored and manipulated in databases. This raises ethical questions, such as obvious privacy issues, but also a host of identity related moral questions concerning (the consequences of) erroneous classifications and the limits of our capacity for self-presentation and self definition.

Which conceptions of identity are used when addressing ethical issues regarding information technology? How can the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ be understood from a philosophical perspective when discussing morally problematic developments in information technology? What are the philosophical semantics pertaining to reference and identification which may help clarify ambiguities and ethical issues? How can we arrive at a normatively sound conception of personal identity as a starting point for the study of the ethical aspects of the (information) technology that is shaping our lives? This conference aims to discuss the theme of ‘identity’ in light of new (information) technology.

The conference website includes this beautiful chart by Fred Cavazza that maps how various aspects of our identity are fragmented (commodified?) online:

Spots are still available, but filling up quickly. You can register here, and we’ve added a new discounted student registration fee of $45.

I hope to see many of you there!