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“You're Not Doing Work, You're on
Facebook!”: Ethics of Encountering the
Field Through Social Media
a
Harng Luh Sin
a
The National University of Singapore
Published online: 14 Aug 2015.
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To cite this article: Harng Luh Sin (2015): “You're Not Doing Work, You're on Facebook!”:
Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media, The Professional Geographer, DOI:
10.1080/00330124.2015.1062706
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“You’re Not Doing Work, You’re on Facebook!”: Ethics
of Encountering the Field Through Social Media
Downloaded by [Duke - Nus Graduate Med School Singapore], [Harng Luh Sin] at 20:14 16 August 2015
Harng Luh Sin
The National University of Singapore
This article argues that in a time when respondents and researchers can increasingly be connected through platforms of social
media, our access to and encounters with the field through social media require additional attention beyond our traditional
deliberations with fieldwork. The complex nature (and the uncertainty) in social media portals and the fact that one-to-one
conversations are often posted in spaces highly visible and open to be commented on by third parties radically changes our
notions of relationships between researcher and respondent, what are public or private spaces, and who is considered vulnerable
or not. This article therefore provides a timely and critical discussion of the diverse ways in which one can integrate social media
in research and, in doing so, encourage a much-needed debate on how to better understand the dynamics and ethics behind
including online domains as one site among translocal, multisite research urged by other scholars. Key Words: ethnography,
Facebook, field work, methodology, social media.
本文主张，在受访者和研究者逐渐可透过社群媒体平台进行接触的年代，我们透过社群媒体进入、并参与田野，则需要
超越我们对传统田野工作的考量的额外关注。社群媒体入口的复杂性（与不确定性），以及一对一的对话经常是张贴在高
度可见的空间中、并开放给第三者进行评论的事实，剧烈地改变我们所理解的研究者和受访者之间的关係、何谓公共或
私人空间、以及谁被视为具有脆弱性或不具脆弱性。本文因而对研究中整合社群媒体的多样方式，提供及时且批判性的
讨论，并藉此鼓励对于其他学者所提倡的将互联网域包含作为跨地方、多重场域研究的一个场域，如何更佳地理解其外
的动态和伦理，进行迫切需要的辩论。 关键词: 民族志，脸书，田野工作，方法论，社群媒体。
En este artículo se arguye que en un tiempo cuando cada vez mas entrevistados e investigadores pueden conectarse a traves de las
plataformas de los medios sociales, nuestro acceso al campo y los encuentros a traves de los medios sociales requieren atenci
on
adicional, mas alla de nuestras tradicionales deliberaciones con el trabajo de campo. La naturaleza compleja (y la incertidumbre)
de los portales de los medios sociales y el hecho de que las conversaciones de uno a otro a menudo son colocadas en espacios
altamente visibles y abiertos al comentario de terceros cambia radicalmente nuestras nociones de las relaciones entre el
investigador y el encuestado, lo que se entiende por espacios p
ublicos o privados, y sobre quien es considerado vulnerable o no.
Por eso este artículo ofrece una discusi
on oportuna y crítica de las diversas maneras como uno puede integrar los medios sociales
en la investigaci
on y, al hacerlo, propiciar un debate muy necesario sobre c
omo entender mejor la dinamica y la etica que hay
detras del incluir dominios de internet como como un sitio, dentro de la investigaci
on translocal y de m
ultiples sitios urgida por
otros estudiosos. Palabras clave: etnografía, Facebook, trabajo de campo, metodología, medios sociales.
O
n 25 February 2010, almost three months after
completing a fieldwork stint at a volunteer
tourism elephant camp in Thailand,1 I opened my
Web browser and logged on to Facebook as I would
on any other normal day. I was surprised to find a
photo of a “homeless” Wanchai2 (a domesticated elephant that belongs to one of the Thai mahout families I met and interviewed during fieldwork). The
photo came with a comment posted by Ellie (a British
woman who married a Thai mahout): “I was accused
of setting up a rival ‘volunteer’ business . . . ‘someone’
showed the boss an email, alleged to be from me,
proving this . . . [so] we all got out because we’ve
been threatened and lied [to].” It was a strange
moment for me—I was in the “field” in person not
long before that moment, and although I knew that
there were tensions between Ellie’s family and the
people running the volunteer tourism project, I did
not expect that the issues were serious enough to
warrant an “eviction” (or at least what looked like
one on Facebook).
I had never intended to do so, but unwittingly and
inevitably, information sourced from social media
entered the plethora of mixed methods I used in my
research. From that moment onward, it also became
clear to me that I was no longer “playing” or “not
doing work” when I plow through the numerous feeds
and updates on Facebook. Social media technologies
and platforms provided access to what was happening
in the “field” despite my physical absence, and the
“field” itself became profoundly changed—from what
was in the first instance rather bounded both spatially
(in specific fieldwork sites) and temporally (in a particular timeframe when I conducted participation observation and interviews), to an ongoing relationship I
passively maintained with my respondents—often
The Professional Geographer, 0(0) 2015, pages 1–10 © Copyright 2015 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, February 2014; revised submissions, December 2014, March 2015; final acceptance, March 2015.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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through something as simple and mundane as my
respondents and I reading and responding to each
other’s posts on Facebook.3
This article is thus a reflection of this experience and
also an important intervention on how we approach
fieldwork in geography at a time when Web 2.04 is
rapidly changing the ground rules on where and what
the field is for social science research. In particular,
this article considers social media portals—“forms of
electronic communication . . . through which users
create online communities to share information, ideas,
personal messages and other content” (“Social media”
2014). As of September 2013, the Pew Research Internet Project (2014) estimates that 73 percent of online
adults use social networking sites, with 71 percent
using Facebook, 19 percent using Twitter (as of January 2014), 17 percent using Instagram, and 21 percent
using Pinterest. These estimates highlight the prevalence of social media in the day-to-day lives of regular
people. As we continue to study the realms of society
and relationships within the social sciences, it seems
obvious to include or at least consider communications
on social media as a fundamental part of our research.
And yet, although ethics in fieldwork has long been an
important topic of discussion in academic research,
less attention has been given to how our access to and
encounters through social media require additional
attention. Whereas other disciplines like media and
communication studies and sociology have long
attempted to address these issues,5 in comparison,
geography has paid too little attention to the potentials
and pitfalls in fieldwork using social media.
This article thus calls for us to consider what this
means in our research in geography. The lack of literature in this area suggests that either geographers have
failed to realize the vast potentials of including social
media in their research or social media are used but
left mostly unmentioned. Both of these scenarios present serious problems that need to be dealt with
urgently. This article thus challenges the prevalent
view—where even when social media are featured in
our research, it is often taken as something incidental
or unimportant to highlight—precisely because our
training in research methodologies and ethical reviews
does not incorporate adequate discussion and focus on
the ethical dimensions of using social media in fieldwork. It posits to (re)open important and critical discussions on where and what is the field in
geographical research and addresses the theoretical
gap in geography that has, for too long, neglected the
use and ethics of online spaces in our research methodologies, while highlighting how salient these are
becoming in the day-to-day operations of research
work.
This article is presented in two parts: The first section reviews research in and on the Internet and considers the ethical standards developed in disciplines
outside of geography and where the gaps are in this literature. The second section delves deeper into the
ethics of encounters on social media and details how
traditional ideas of private or public spaces, work or
play, and home or field are increasingly blurred in and
through social media. This article therefore considers
the possibilities and potentials in (re)envisioning
where the field is and provides important suggestions
on how we should do research in an age where the
Internet is increasingly user-interactive and becoming
part and parcel of everyday life.
Fieldwork and the Internet
As a discipline that has long been associated with field
expeditions and exploration, doing fieldwork is often
deemed to be a vital component of research in geography (see Sauer 1956; Stoddart 1986). Going to the
field has been said to “distinguish genuine geographers
from mere interlopers” (Phillips and Johns 2012, 3),
where it is only through having “been there” in the
field (in comparison to simply writing from an armchair) that one becomes a “complete geographer”
(Driver 2000, 268) or a “real geographer” (Powell
2002, 267). Phillips and Johns (2012) pointed out that
although the field has typically been seen as “a tangible—discrete and material—place” (9), today, fieldwork involving the Internet (Dodge and Kitchin 2006)
as both a source of information and an object of
inquiry blurs our notions of what and where the field
is. The increasing awareness that boundaries are
porous or extroverted in the entangled nature of the
globalized world we now live in (see Massey 2005) has
led Bennett (2002) to posit a recognition of the spaces
of “betweenness” or “interworlds” in research (141)
and the necessity of conducting research in multiple
sites to capture the connections and fluidities between
places (Katz 1994; see also Sharp and Dowler 2011).
Crang (2005) further highlighted that places are
simultaneously global, national, and local in contemporary societies, and this means that our “subjects no
longer inhabit coherent bounded social contexts for
which we have a persuasive lexicon” (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2003, 152). This includes not only conducting fieldwork in different places but also taking on pluralism in sources and “doing fieldwork by telephone
and email, collecting data electronically in many different ways from a disparate array of sources” (Hannerz 2003, 212). It is within such changing parameters
of the field and fieldwork that this article is situated—I
argue that online communications and technologies
(especially social media) are an important piece of the
puzzle in considering multisited and plural research.
Existing works within the social sciences have
highlighted how technologically mediated communication is becoming increasingly incorporated into
aspects of our daily life (Hjorth and Kim 2005;
Lammes 2008). Rather than what was initially thought
of as virtual connections replacing and rendering
geography as less important, there is increasing awareness that activities are held and merged in both online
and offline worlds (Carter 2004; Suoranta and
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Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media
Lehtim€aki 2004; Bakardjieva 2005), and “a great deal
of our social world is now enabled by, mediated by,
invested in and bound to various communication technologies” (Crang 2011, 402). Miller and Slater (2000)
suggested that “we need to treat Internet media as
continuous with and embedded in other social spaces,
that they happen within mundane social structures
and relations that they may transform but that they
cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness”
(5). Social media and the Internet are therefore not
taken as a substitute for traditional fieldwork but
instead add a complex layer to what can perhaps be
apparent to a researcher “on the ground.” Crang
(2011), for example, illustrated this point by noting
that “a great deal of our social world is now enabled
by, mediated by, invested in and bound to various
communication technologies [and this] . . . means we
may have to decenter the human within an internet of
things that produce a technological form of life” (402).
Fieldwork as we understand it in geography is thus far
from being rendered obsolete in the age of the Internet; instead, “it may be enriched through them and in
turn it may mobilize and animate these technologies,
exploring and exhibiting their possibilities” (Phillips
and Johns 2012, 13).
It is not common, however, at least in geography, to
include research proposals and protocols on ethnography or participant observation on social media and
ethics of this. Dwyer and Davies (2010), for example,
lamented that research methodologies encompassing
online interactions and observations are still in their
infancy. Although geography has had a strong tradition in looking at the application of neogeography in
web mapping, geographic information systems (GIS),
and spatialized data and code (Dodge and Kitchin
2013; Wilson and Graham 2013), as well as spatial
implications of new digital geographies (Zook et al.
2004; Schwanen and Kwan 2008), what has received
significantly less attention is how online media can be
incorporated into research methodologies. In comparison, important works have emerged in fields such as
sociology and communication studies that look at how
ethnography can be done through or supplemented by
looking at online media (Hine 2000; Slater 2002;
Walstrom 2004; Kozinets 2010). Echoing Coleman’s
(2010) comprehensive review of ethnographic
approaches to digital media, this article takes on the
viewpoint that “[digital] media have become central to
the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices,
and modes of being in the world” (487) and the possibilities and contours of fieldwork have become profoundly transformed. Burrell (2009) argued that the
field site should be seen as a network that incorporates
physical, virtual, and imagined spaces. Wesch (2007),
through an innovative YouTube video presentation,
posited fundamental questions about how Web 2.0
has changed how we view texts, authorship, identities,
and ourselves. Innovative projects in the social sciences
have since found success in using “a blend of traditional skills and concepts with the purposeful
3
application of new technology” (Gerber and Goh
2000, 11) and include research using Internet forums
as an ethnographic source to capture the multiple
layers of social trends and attitudes in varying fields
from health to music to politics (see, e.g., Wittel 2000;
Williams 2006; Seale et al. 2010). For example, in
their study highlighting the prevalence of how the
Internet is used as an alternative space to enact caring
practices for health concerns, Atkinson and Ayers
(2010) suggested that the “opportunities to expand
this kind of internet social engagement that may be
afforded through the next generation of technology,
most immediately web 2.0, beg for in-depth online
ethnographies to further explore the nature of caring
practices online” (83). Woon (2011), on the other
hand, tapped into a vibrant debate and commentary
on political issues in China through looking at discussions on Internet bulletin board systems, where what
might be apparent on the ground and in traditional
media is otherwise “silent” due to tight media and
social control. Indeed, along with a methodological
turn in geography and the social sciences to look
toward “mundane everyday practices, that shape the
conduct of human beings towards others and themselves at particular sites” (Thrift 1997; cited in Nash
2000, 65), the use of social media platforms is so prevalent in the daily lives among certain segments of our
society,6 that the need to incorporate these into our
research practices is perhaps as vital as what once were
humanist calls for geographers to concern themselves
with “complexities of different people’s experiences of
everyday social and cultural processes” (e.g., Ley 1974,
1988; Rowles 1978; Seamon 1979; Western 1981).
Just as how a person’s identity can be reflected in and
understood through looking at mundane aspects of
their lives, such as how they furnish their houses, as
these reflect “how people see, shape and are embedded
in the world around them” (Crang and Cook 2007,
10), the walls of the living rooms can be paralleled in
their “walls” on Facebook (or other forms of social
media), as these equally (if not more importantly)
exhibit how a person thinks about particular issues,
selects what to post or not, and presents himself or
herself for an audience.
Indeed, our lives have become altered with the
emergence of digital media, and although recognizing
that access to the Internet is not uniform across space
and demographics, and therefore using digital media
might or might not be something that is necessarily
relevant to all types of research projects,7 this article
highlights how platforms like Facebook are increasingly used in research spaces and argues that we need
to reopen numerous traditional discussions on the
ethics of fieldwork and consider how these might or
might not apply on social media platforms.
To begin with, in one of the most widely used recommendations, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR 2012), in their revised edition of the report
“Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research”
(the first edition was published in 2002), suggested
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that as researchers we should take on a “dialogic, casebased, inductive, and process approach to ethics” (5)
on Internet-mediated research and in turn highlighted
some of the major tensions and considerations
researchers need to negotiate. These tensions included
what constituted “human subjects,” a consideration of
public versus private spaces in Internet spaces in line
with Nissenbaum’s (2010) concept of “contextual
integrity,” and whether and when we consider what
we see on the Internet as “data(text)” or as “persons.”
Echoing similar concerns, Madge (2007) suggested
that there was a need to develop a “geographers’
agenda for online research ethics” and argued that key
areas of concern included how we can achieve
informed consent in online environments, how to
ensure confidentiality and subject anonymity in largely
searchable and traceable Internet communications,
privacy and the public–private debate, and what constituted appropriate researcher behavior or
“netiquette” in online spaces.
Ethics of Encounters on Social Media
and the Choices We Make
A graduate student is doing fieldwork, and his excitement and passion toward his research area is clearly
apparent—on Facebook. He posts Facebook statuses
about how his research is progressing on the ground
frequently (sometimes daily); he writes long commentaries and has more than once posted word-for-word
interview conversations between him and his respondents. Should we be concerned with the actions of this
particular graduate student? Perhaps not—despite
clauses about anonymity and confidentiality in almost
every institutional review board’s requirements for
fieldwork involving human subjects, it is not uncommon for researchers to talk about their work in personal settings and reveal varying levels of details.
Facebook and other social media platforms can be
argued to be part of the graduate student’s personal
life and hence he has every right to express his opinions and concerns freely. But are social media platforms really private and personal? Are notions of
confidentiality compromised when researchers share
encounters on Facebook? Is “friending” your respondent on Facebook the same as befriending a respondent in traditional fieldwork? This section therefore
highlights the specificities of social media in contrast
to traditional fieldwork in three areas: “friending”
your respondent on social media, informed consent,
and vulnerability.
Is Your Respondent Your “Friend”?
It has long been acknowledged that relationships such
as friendships between researchers and researched are
part and parcel of ethnographic fieldwork—as academics, we have been called to write these relationships into our research and give full recognition that
“the ways in which these relationships (can) develop
have significant effects on the understandings which
emerge from them” (Crang and Cook 2007, 9; Nagar
1997; Cupples 2002). Earlier works have questioned
the ethics of interpersonal relations such as friendships
between researcher and researched (Crick 1992; Hendry 1992; England 1994; Morris-Roberts 2001; Sangtin Writers Collective and Nagar 2006), and in many
instances not only is it likely that friendships will form
during fieldwork but that friends and friendship can
become central to the research process (Bunnell et al.
2012). Browne (2003), for example, highlighted that
the process of research was intricately linked with
gaining friendships with her respondents that
accorded her an “insider” status. But is befriending
your respondents in person—sharing meals, going to
the pub, or meeting their families—the same as
“friending” your respondents on Facebook?
On the first day at the Elephant Camp where I was
to spend a little more than a month doing interviews
and participation observation on volunteer tourism, I
was asked by the coordinator of the Elephant Camp to
join the Facebook group where previous volunteer
tourists, some mahouts, and other interested parties
were members. The group was used as a platform to
both market the Elephant Camp as a worthy and bona
fide tourism destination (much like how tourists’
reviews were presented on platforms like Trip Advisor) and also for volunteer tourists, mahouts, and coordinators to keep in touch, share photos, and so on.
This meant that I was to enter a formal and largely visible “friendship” with the coordinators, mahouts, and
fellow volunteer tourists, before I truly gained such
trust and relationships with them. The process was
expected to be simple and straightforward, and the
coordinators and volunteer tourists behaved like there
should not be any pressing reason why anyone would
reject joining the Facebook group or “friending” each
other. Everyone I encountered that morning in the
Elephant Camp became friends on Facebook—except
one volunteer tourist who did not have a Facebook
account and firmly insisted that he would never create
one, and some of the mahouts who did not have a
Facebook account at that point in time (many would
join Facebook after the time of my fieldwork in late
2009 and have since requested to add me as their
friend). When I shared that I was present in the Elephant Camp in my capacity as a researcher, it was
deemed to be all the more necessary to join the group
and “friend” my respondents. In that respect, it would
have been more awkward to not “friend” them; I was
up front with them about my research status, and in
some cases, I was explicitly invited to gain access to my
respondents’ Facebook representations because that
would be useful for my research. “Friending” respondents was part and parcel of the performance of conviviality both as a researcher and as another volunteer
tourist at the Elephant Camp. I would not pretend
that it was unavoidable, but it was certainly something
that occurred more naturally than contrived. When I
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Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media
first “friended” my respondents, it was not my intention to collect data through doing this, and as such it
did not seem to be a breach of ethical protocols to do
so. If it was acceptable to enter into social relationships
and friendships (and we so often do) with our research
respondents, it did not seem like “friending” them on
Facebook was something so different and hence to be
flagged out as out of bounds or unethical.
Indeed, although Internet technologies present
extended possibilities for real-time interactions with
distant others and could downplay the need for bodily
copresence in friendships (Bowlby 2011), existing
research has shown that friendships on Facebook—
like the ones I had with my respondents—mostly
emerge from prior offline relationships (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007). In fact, friendships on social
media are perhaps a useful way of equalizing the power
relations between the researcher and researched. In
their work about virtual trust in online mental health
support forums, Parr and Davidson (2008) highlighted
that among forum users, “mutual exchange and disclosure is of enormous importance in such ideally equitable (and ungovernable) relationships; there is often a
strongly felt need to know that we are sharing a risk
with the other and are equally exposed to harm” (36).
The same could be said of relationships between the
researcher and researched on social media, where
mutuality and social and emotional proximities are
afforded because the researcher is now not only entering the homes of the researched and obtaining information but is also enmeshed in a reversal of the gaze:
The researched now has as much access into the
researcher’s life (or at least what is presented on social
media). This disclosure on the part of the researcher is
often maintained over time, as we rarely “unfriend”
people we do not have ongoing day-to-day communications with and, as a result, the researched continue
to survey the researcher long after the initial interview.
What Is Informed Consent on Social Media?
Choosing to “friend” my respondents on Facebook,
however, opened me to a wealth of information and a
can of worms. On one hand, it showed me vast aspects
and potentials of research that go well beyond the
bounded nature of doing fieldwork in one site in one
particular time period. In the past three years since my
days of being in the field, my access to various
respondents as friends on Facebook has brought me
further understanding in my research about elephant
conservation and volunteer tourism in Thailand.
These accounts, despite often being mundane and
trivial, informed my understanding and directed my
research writing. In the first instance, I thought that
because it was not originally my intention to use Facebook as a research methodology and that I had not
sought the relevant approvals through my department’s research ethics and fieldwork safety forms, I
should not be including what I learned from Facebook
5
in my research writing. As much as online and offline
worlds are impossible to delineate and separate for our
respondents, however, I would argue that the same
holds for us as researchers. I cannot possibly unsee or
unknow what I found out via Facebook, and whether I
write these facts explicitly or not in my research writing, they remain important in governing how I viewed
the situation and what my opinion and stand is. In
time to come, my revised strategy was to send personal
messages via Facebook to request permission to
include in my research writing the specific aspects of
what my respondents shared. This, I feel, was more a
coping strategy rather than an ideal one, and this article came about not because I felt like I had adequate
justifications in doing what I chose to do but because I
found a gap in discussions on the ethical implications
of the choices we make regarding fieldwork and social
media.
Indeed, even if researchers have sought consent
from respondents, when our research respondents
post updates on Facebook, it can hardly be imagined
that they are doing so with us researchers in mind.
Amidst the masses and scale of Facebook, our presence
as researchers can possibly become rendered invisible—as compared to a face-to-face interview or even
an e-mail correspondence, when our respondents
“speak” on Facebook, their imagined audience would
more likely be other people—their friends, family, and
other social networks, rather than us as researchers. A
perennial concern I thus had with seeing newsfeeds
from my respondents that were relevant to my
research was whether respondents realized that a
researcher was lurking behind their computer screen.
Could I or should I include this information in my
research? I have obtained consent from my respondents to participate in my research—but do my
respondents understand this consent to include what
they post on social media? Do my respondents realize
the level of detail and intimate accounts they are sharing with me on Facebook? At the same time, ethical
concerns abound about whether social media should
be considered a public or private space (see, e.g.,
Eysenbach and Till 2001; Ess and AoIR Ethics Working Committee 2002; Madge 2007; AoIR Ethics Committee 2012). In some instances, postings made on
social media can be considered as public or a form of
published material and hence included as “fair use”—
where researchers do not need to acquire permission
from authors to cite such material. In practice,
although users can alter privacy settings on Facebook
to allow their updates to be seen only by their friends
(or even only specific friends), the default setting in
Facebook is to allow users’ posts to be seen by a more
general public (i.e., any of the 1 billion active users on
Facebook). Postings on social media might then be
public not as a result of the author’s intent but rather
because of particular settings within the medium of
presentation (this also relates to ideas of vulnerability
discussed in the following section). Indeed, some
users, myself included, actively limit what is visible on
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our Facebook walls, but it cannot be assumed that our
respondents do the same. It is also difficult for the
researcher to ascertain what sorts of privacy settings
each respondent has without asking explicitly. These
encounters repeat long-held debates on what are considered public or private spaces in general (Livingstone 2005; Warner 2005) or on the Internet (Spinello
2001; Hewson et al. 2003; Chen, Hall, and Johns
2004; Madge and O’Connor 2005; AoIR Ethics Committee 2012) and whether it is considered ethical to
lurk in virtual environments on the pretext of research
(for a detailed discussion on this, see Kozinets 2010).
Facebook itself “is facing criticism after it emerged it
had conducted a psychology experiment on nearly
700,000 users without their knowledge” (BBC 2014).
The fact that the published report (Kramer, Guillory,
and Hancock 2014) makes no mention about the ethical concerns of using big data sourced from users without their knowledge and that Facebook insists that this
research is perfectly legal under its terms of service
suggests that there is certainly a gap in what is considered ethical use of data emerging from social media.
Rather than treat postings on social media as public
because the medium—Facebook—makes it publically
accessible, as researchers, we need to consider instead
the user’s expectations and understanding of their
posts. Bruckman (2002) suggested that rather than
seeing published and unpublished as a binary, it is
important to recognize it as a continuum, where most
work on the Internet is considered to be semipublished. This, therefore, echoes Nissenbaum’s (2004)
argument for contextual integrity, which “ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and
dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey
the governing norms of distribution within it” (119).
Specific to what is discussed here, then, Nissenbaum’s
third principle, “curtailing intrusions into spaces or
spheres deemed private or personal,” suggests that we
need to consider societal standards of intimacy, sensitivity, or confidentiality. Therefore, although, for
example, Facebook’s psychological experiment
remains entirely legal in its terms of service, as
researchers we need to think beyond legality and
incorporate users’ own imaginations of their privacy as
the governing guideline of whether something can be
included in research or not.
Beyond simply garnering information from
respondents’ actions in social media, another aspect
we need to think about is whether researchers’ representations in social media should be considered a form
of publication. At the start of this section, I queried
the ethics of researchers sharing interview data verbatim on Facebook. When challenged in this regard,
another graduate student stated that his respondent
had signed a consent form allowing him to present
information sourced from the interview in any academic publication—and this to him included journal
or book publications, conference presentations, his
personal blog where he posts work-in-process pieces
to reach a wider academic audience, and his Facebook
and Twitter accounts, which to him serve a similar
purpose as his blog. This significant blurring between
what was considered an academic publication and
what sounded a lot like a researcher talking about his
research in his private life brings about important ethical considerations. When respondents give us their
informed consent to participate in our research, would
they expect that what they say can also be presented in
such informal settings such as Facebook and Twitter?
Does social media fall within the categories of private
spaces where researchers’ personal lives play out? Or
is social media another forum for researchers to reach
the public and present their findings? If the latter is
deemed appropriate, then do we need to communicate
this specific detail to respondents when we ask for
informed consent?
Reimagining Vulnerability on Social Media
In the widely used methodological textbook, Practising
Human Geography, Cloke et al. (2004) remind us that
ethnographic methods are applied to different kinds of
people and that “it is now commonplace in research to
distinguish between powerless social groups—where
the need to protect the rights to privacy are extremely
important—and powerful social groups who are well
able to provide their own protection” (164; see Finch
1993). The ethical conduct of researchers is therefore
especially important when talking to those we deem
vulnerable—and these are often related to respondent
characteristics such as race, gender, age, class, or literacy. An appropriate response often quoted in methodological writing is therefore an up-front suggestion to
respondents that they are free to switch off the tape
recorder and terminate the interview at any point
should they feel uncomfortable with the issues raised
(England 1994). Such practices, however, are not quite
as easily translated to social media, and the ways we see
vulnerability in research need to be broadly reimagined. Not too long ago, a personal friend of mine
expressed shock when he realized that everything he
had posted on Facebook was publicly visible to anyone
else on Facebook. He had no idea that his posts were
not at all private and was uncertain how to change the
settings to monitor his privacy. My friend is thirtythree years old and university-educated. He is reasonably tech-savvy and uses the Internet on a daily basis.
As such, he would not fall into what we might traditionally imagine to be categories of vulnerable persons
with whom to do research. Yet, because of larger systemic issues on Facebook, it is difficult to identify who
can potentially be vulnerable to undesired or unintended access of information deemed private and not
to be shared with others and researchers. Indeed,
although ethical protocols have always deemed children or youths as vulnerable groups with whom to do
research, they might be better versed in the nuances of
social media and how to securitize social media spaces
through navigating the ever-changing settings, as
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Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media
compared, for example, to my friend—who would typically not be identified or assumed as “vulnerable” in
the traditional means. The Pew Research Internet
Project (2014), for example, highlights that although
the percentage of online adults using social networking sites remains largely similar across gender, education level, and income level, there is a significant
difference when age is considered. As of January 2014,
social networking sites are used by 65 percent of
online adults for those aged fifty to sixty-four years
old. This drops further to 49 percent for those aged
sixty-five and above, compared to 82 percent and
89 percent for those aged thirty to forty-nine and
eighteen to twenty-nine years old, respectively. Looking at teens’ use of social media paints an even more
intriguing picture: 81 percent of online teens aged
twelve to seventeen use some form of social media.
Although traditional fieldwork has often required
researchers to obtain written consent from parents
and guardians when interviewing those aged twentyone and younger—thereby suggesting their vulnerability—social networking usage statistics suggest that
competence and comfort levels with Internet and
social media use are perhaps higher among those
twenty-one and younger than is the case for those fifty
and older.
Furthermore, questions of confidentiality and privacy of respondents are also at added risk when we
include online domains in our research, as it is increasingly easy for readers of our research publications to
identify our respondents through a simple search on
platforms like Google or Yahoo!. Depending again on
the privacy settings of each respondent’s Facebook
account, there is a very real possibility that readers can
simply type in the quotations we put in our research
writings, run these through Internet search engines,
and arrive at our respondent’s Facebook profile pages
(Eysenbach and Till 2001; see Bruckman 2002; Convery and Cox 2012; Markham [2012], for in-depth discussions on this). Eysenbach and Till (2001), for
example, highlighted that “by quoting the exact words
of a newsgroup participant, a researcher may breach
the participant’s confidentiality even if the researcher
removes any personal information” and hence “participants should therefore always be approached to give
their explicit consent to be quoted verbatim” (1105).
Specific to social media portals like Facebook, however, even if we have the consent from respondents to
share the quotations cited in our research, respondents
are still unlikely to be ready to share their profiles,
which can include all sorts of photos, background
information, and private information, with researchers
and other readers (see boyd [2013, 10], on some ways
to reduce respondents’ identifiability online). Markham (2012) therefore posited the need to rethink
whether fabrication in research is unethical as presumed, when used to disguise parts of research findings to protect the anonymity of respondents. This
can be done on varying scales, including “practices
such as creating composite accounts of persons, events,
7
or interactions, building fictional narratives, and using
certain techniques associated with remix culture”
(Markham 2012, 342) or, as Bruckman (2002) suggested, replacing significant accounts with what is
deemed to reasonably have similar effects. Bruckman
further added that “if it is not possible to fully disguise
your subjects, you may need to omit sensitive information from published results, even if this diminishes the
quality of research” (221). Although it can be argued
that the onus is on Facebook users to manage their
own privacy settings and the lack of such management
is in no way the fault of a researcher, we need to keep
these issues in mind when spaces like Facebook enter
our research methodologies.
At the same time, as soon as researchers “friend” the
researched on social media, these relationships
become apparent and searchable. Although a large
number of research publications are written with pseudonyms to protect the anonymity and confidentiality
of the researched, it is not impossible for anyone to
attempt to establish who are the precise respondents
in our publications through trawling the researchers’
social media profiles. Interactions between me and my
respondents, for example, can be seen as feeds on a
third party’s Facebook page, and something as simple
as me commenting that “I miss the elephants” could
be an indicator that points out my supposedly anonymous respondent. To avoid such social interactions
would defeat the purpose and potentials of incorporating social media into our research methodologies, but
to do so without thought could compromise our
respondents’ positions. In my own experience, I have
tried to designate and limit visibility of my Facebook
activities according to different social groups—meaning that when I interact with respondents, I try to do
so in private messages rather than on Facebook walls,
or when a respondent writes a comment that is likely
to expose his or her identity on my Facebook wall, I
limit the visibility of that specific post. This is but an
ad hoc and effort-intensive response, and the larger
questions remain: How often does Facebook expose
those we claim that we afford anonymity to in our
research? How many researchers actually consider this
ethical aspect when “friending” their researched?
The Field 2.0: Possibilities and Potentials
In jest and response to this article’s title, a colleague
wrote on the whiteboard in my office (the original,
nonvirtual wall) “Facebook is NOT work.” That, to
me, highlights the precise relevance of this article—
platforms like Facebook are not traditionally or typically considered to be areas we should include in
research, nor are they easily considered as the field for
field work. Yet the inseparability between what happens online and offline suggests that we need to challenge our presumptions about where and what the
field is in qualitative methodologies, where online
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8
Volume 0, Number 0, XXX 2015
spaces can be potentially be considered to be a part of
the field for our research work.
This article argues that when available and accessible, research methodologies should actively include
and consider online spaces, especially social media, so
as to conduct research that recognizes the entangled
nature of how things work at multiple scales in the
globalized world we live in. It does not seek to advocate doing ethnographic research online as a replacement for more traditional methods that involve faceto-face interactions with respondents. It highlights the
practicalities and ethics of fieldwork involving social
media and is a timely intervention to open up discussions on how one can better understand the dynamics
and ethics behind including online domains as one site
among translocal, multisite research urged by other
scholars.
It’s not just Facebook. It’s digital ethnographic
research on introspection for public consumption. No, you can’t look.
—Shit Academics Say (2014) &
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the respondents who generously provided their time and opinions for this research, and for
taking the effort to maintain our relationships through
social media. I would also like to thank Tim Oakes,
Claudio Minca, Woon Chih Yuan, members of the
Social and Cultural Research Group in the National
University of Singapore, as well as the three anonymous referees, for their helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. The usual
disclaimers apply.
Notes
I conducted fieldwork in Thailand as part of my broader
PhD research on ethics and social responsibilities in tourism. I did participant observation and in-depth interviews at
an elephant camp where volunteer tourists learned how to
take care of domesticated elephants under the guidance of
Thai elephant caregivers (mahouts).
2
All respondents and elephants are cited in this article using
pseudonyms.
3
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking services, boasting a record of having more than 1 billon active
users as of October 2012 (Fowler 2012). Essentially a network of people, Facebook connects users (so-called friends)
already on the site, and allows individuals (or organizations)
to post photos, post web links, record a status update, or
play games. Whatever activity one makes on Facebook is
then published as a newsfeed to one’s list of friends. Facebook therefore allows and encourages each user to constantly provide updates on his or her life and, as such, is
deemed to be an important means by which friends keep in
contact with each other and stay abreast of happenings in
each other’s lives. Because the audience for one’s updates
can be moderated and controlled (to a certain degree of
accuracy; for example, users can limit their updates to be
1
seen only by preapproved friends), users typically share
details of their lives and few assume the anonymity associated with some other forms of Internet authorship. Works
have suggested that users on online portals such as Facebook
and Twitter, or online dating sites, actively perform and
present a self that is biased toward the positive and affirmative aspects of their lives and self-identity (see, e.g., Gibbs,
Ellison, and Lai 2011; Miller 2011; Ellison, Hancock, and
Toma 2012; Marwick and boyd 2012).
4
Popularized by O’Reily (2005), the term Web 2.0 is used to
describe a new generation of Internet—one that goes
beyond information retrieval and is instead user-interactive—exploiting user-generated content on platforms such
as social networking sites, blogs, Wikipedia, and media sharing sites.
5
Although it should be noted that Internet media is evolving
much faster than disciplinary ethics review systems are.
6
At least in the daily lives of my respondents for this particular research, and it is noted and highlighted that there are
certainly people whose day-to-day living involves little
Internet media.
7
Also, it is valuable to point out here that social media such as
Facebook is monitored and regulated by many states, such
as Egypt, and banned outright in China, although prevalent
alternative portals, such as renren.com, do exist. At the same
time, other research has reflected that Internet is still by and
large limited by differential accessibility across class,
income, infrastructural provision, and rural–urban divides.
As such, the ethics of incorporating social media as part of
the “field” also has to include structural considerations of
state censorship and control, urbanization, class and income
gaps, and so on.
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HARNG LUH SIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research
interests revolve around the mobilities of people—in the
broad spectrum from tourism to migration, as well as the
mobilities and fluidities of abstract ideas such as moral and
social responsibilities, ethics, and care (at a distance), and
how these translate through platforms of social media, as well
as into real practices on the ground.