Privacy in the 'Blogging Sphere'

Privacy in the 'Blogging Sphere'

As all of us college and university students, past and present, know that referencing in essays and assignments can be a real pain sometimes. Especially when using Harvard referencing, making sure that the brackets are in the right place; is the book title in italics; remembering to include the page numbers etc, just when you thought the essay was finished you then have to go through the ordeal of gathering up your references...But I suppose it’s better that paying the price for plagiarism!

When we finally get the hang of Harvard referencing (and you feel like you have conquered the world) we become confident in using endless sources; books, journals, websites, the list is endless. However in more recent times, as online blogging is on the increase, more academics and sociologists are using blogs as a source for their research (Hookway 2008).

As times are moving on and technologies are developing rapidly, the dominance of the internet is recognised by everyone and online blogging can be seen beneficial to sociologists, ‘cyberspace can expand the social researcher’s toolkit’ and open new windows of opportunity for social researchers (Hookway 2008:92).

For researchers, using blogs makes it possible for them to attain the most relevant, up-to-date secondary research, considering that blogs tend to be updated constantly, as well as expanding on the available literature that is in a diary format and/or the literature that holds personal accounts of information. Other advantages include how easily blogs can be accessed online and that they require minimal costs and resources to use blogs in their research.

With this being said, as is the case when using many research methods, there are difficulties around ethical and legal issues when extracting research from online outlets in particular, blogs.

Although bloggers may expect there to be some limits on how widely available their blogs are they tend to underestimate the power of the internet. Once blogs are uploaded online they enter the public domain and automatically become subject to everyone, everywhere, for any type of use.
in regards to using blogs for sociological studies and social research some researchers argue that because blogs are in the public domain then there is no need to ask for content from the blogger (Moreno, Fost, & Christakis 2008 cited in Nagy Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2011). 
According to Waskul and Douglas (1996), “cyberspace is simultaneously ‘publicly-private and privately-public’” (in Hookway 2008: 105) and bloggers can only be warned to a certain extent that the information that they share is limitless once it is shared online, therefore consent is not needed as they have been pre-warned.

In addition to this, some claim that unless blogs that have been published online are limited to who can read them, for example on some sites privacy settings include restrictions to who can access your personal information, i.e 'friends only'/'family only', then the content is public and open to public use, therefore consent and referencing of the information is not necessary (Hookway 2008).
  

On the other hand others believe that there should be some policing over the consent of bloggers when using their work and that they should be entitled to some level of anonymity (Elgesem 2002; King 1996; Scharf 1999 cited in Hookway 2008) as it is an ethical issue that should be considered when conducting social research. For example, the use of direct quotes from blogs that are available online can be easily traceable back to the blogger by simply querying them in a search engine (i.e. Google). This makes it difficult to quote from a blog without referencing the author. Therefore to prevent this from becoming an issue, it is advised that the blogger is asked for consent before using their material for social research un-knowingly. 

This dispute over whether bloggers should give consent for the use of their work and/or the amount of anonimity that they should be entitled to will be of continuous debate as it depends on how the individual views blogs; either as public or private documents (Hookway 2008).