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micro-ethnography

I’m almost too embarrassed to post this. It’s been such a trying day. Owing to my hard disk going down, I’ve been trying to work off a really rubbish DELL laptop. Only.. I don’t have any of the applications I need installed, can’t install them because I’m not an administrator, and beyond that I just don’t really know my way around Windows as well as OSX. Hitch after hitch.. in the end I realised that I could (kind of) use the mac I poured 750 millilitres of water into four and a half years ago. Its screen doesn’t work (repair costs more than a new PowerBook, despite the piece that is broken costing less than a pound. Note to self- must learn to micro solder) and I haven’t updated anything in ‘a while’.. but it was easier to attempt this on my TV screen than continue with the DELL. I’ll try to upload a still visual tomorrow, with some notes, to connect what I have said to some theory.

Thanks for watching/listening.

 

Update – I’ve re-recorded the audio. Not ‘amazing’ quality still, but best I could do under the circumstances.

Update 2 – I’ve put together a text-based version with discussion of the findings using sway.com.

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Lifestream, Tweets

More on the ethics of netnography. In this slide presentation, Kozinets highlights the difficulty of separating text and data from the person who generated it and asserts that, therefore, online research has to be considered research of human subjects rather than research of social space, and relevant ethical standards applied. Such considerations include attending to the possibility of ‘decloaking’ or ‘cracking’ anonymised data.

In conversation with my brother, who works in digital health research, over the last week, he suggested that a core problem is that many of the people involved in collecting data are unaware of how to crack anonymised data, and therefore underestimate the risk of this. Protecting privacy is complicated.