Undoing Ethics

Over the past ten years, scholars from several academic fields have turned their attention to how online settings produce activity and value. The ethics of studying those settings, however, is still disputed and often contentious. Older arguments have resurfaced because technology-mediated environments raise new questions about morality, law and regulation. A growing body of work favors ethics that are local and context-specific, where the choices a researcher makes depend on the character of the setting being studied and on what the people within it expect.

Still, the links between the empirical, theoretical and methodological dimensions of Internet research ethics have received little systematic attention. Drawing on the author's ongoing sociological research into online media cultures, this book addresses that gap. It examines two parallel cases: how members of online media-fan communities handle ethical questions, and how the author, working as an Internet researcher, makes ethical decisions within the academic community.

From these cases the book proposes a reflexive framework for analysing research ethics at three levels: the empirical settings of the research, the theoretical perspectives that shape how the researcher understands those settings, and the methodological issues and practical decisions that turn the activity into research. Across these levels, ethical practice is described as a series of stabilizing and destabilizing moves within and between research communities and the communities being researched.

The analysis highlights where research practice, fan activity and social life both online and offline overlap, and where they diverge.