Complexities of Online Data

Many of the complexities of collecting data stem from the challenges I faced in setting up my field site, but I want to highlight the issues I faced in collecting online data because of privacy settings and norms. As I collected data and observed

practices online, I had to ask myself two questions: (1) If content is publicly

accessible on MySpace, do I have a right to access it?; and (2) When I have access to

essence, I struggled to negotiate the convergence of public and private contexts, an issue that I mapped out in Chapter 1 as a core complexity of networked publics.

Even when teens’ content is “public,” they may not understand quite how public that content really is (Stern 2004). My interviews with teens suggested that while many teens on MySpace and Facebook do not restrict adults’ viewing of their profiles, they do not expect adults to view what they write. As one teen remarked,

“Why would an adult want to look at my profile?” Most of the teens I interviewed did not feel as though they had something to hide, but they were dumbfounded as to why adults would visit their profiles if they did not know them. Teens expected that random strangers might stumble on their pages but presumed that the strangers would keep moving.

Just because I could view their content did not necessarily mean teens wanted me to. This is not to say that all teens objected to my viewing their profiles. On the contrary, teens frequently gave me their MySpace addresses as a way to contact them, implicitly welcoming me to view their profiles. When I told teens that I was browsing profiles, they thought it was an odd use of my time, but they were not appalled. It was clear that they had not accounted for me in their mental model of potential visitors, but they did not see me as a harmful visitor either. What worried me is that most teens had no idea that I was viewing their profiles because of my invisibility.

Researchers have argued that, when it comes to data that is in a public/private continuum, it is important to take into consideration both content and context (Elm 2008). Most of the content that I viewed was harmless, filled with stories that were irrelevant to anyone who did not know the particular teen. Although the press tends to spin a teens-gone-wild narrative when addressing MySpace profiles, I visited more profiles with odes to Jesus than with disturbing photos. In other words, the content was simply mundane. At the same time, the context in which that content was created did not include me. Teens created their content to be consumed by their peers. Furthermore, the inequality in visibility worried me. Not only did I not fit into the context, but also my presence was nonexistent.

Given this combination of content and context, I decided to be tremendously cautious in the ways in which I captured and used public profile data. Even though the data was purportedly public, I treated it as sensitive material for the purposes of data capture and storage. I analyzed the profile content, but when using examples in my writing, I scrub all identifying information and, in some cases, alter the text so that the profile is not findable through search. To minimize potential harm, I use examples from this data set rarely and cautiously.

I decided to treat public content with such care because of the mediated nature of it. In ephemeral public situations, repeating direct quotes that are overheard is unlikely to put anyone at risk. Because of the persistent and searchable nature of networked publics, it is tremendously easy to trace a digital conversation back to its

source. Doing so shines a spotlight on individuals, their content, and their peers.

While teens’ content might be public, most of it is not meant to be read by all people across all time and all space. There are cases in which teens create content that is clearly intended for a wide audiences, such as the teens who produce podcasts for Youth Radio that are then aired on NPR. Yet these cases are rare. In drawing the line, I decided to directly reference content that was clearly meant for mass

consumption and to do everything possible to protect content that appeared to be intended for peers or small audiences. I decided that it was unethical to amplify content’s visibility when that does not appear to be the teen’s intention.

Private profiles were a different matter altogether. Although MySpace profiles were initially public-only, both MySpace and Facebook implemented privacy settings to allow users to restrict who could access their profiles. With MySpace, profiles are either public or Friends-only. Facebook’s approach is more complex;

teens can never make their profiles truly public, but they can make them available to everyone in their school or city. When these settings came into play, teenagers were encouraged to—and frequently did—limit access to their profiles (Lenhart and Madden 2007b). On one hand, I was glad to see teens restrict their profiles to the audience that they intended their content for. On the other, these restrictions hampered my ability to observe teen practices. Furthermore, I was concerned that if I considered only public profiles, I would get a skewed view of what was taking place.

As it turned out, I gained access to private content in two ways: through teens and through MySpace. In interviews and conversations, teens (and their parents) regularly showed me their private profiles. Because profiles are constructed

collectively, these profiles revealed just as much about those teens’ friends as they did the teens themselves. Additionally, teens often showed me the private profiles of their friends and classmates and these contained comments and connections to a wider set of teens. In other words, through one teen’s profile, I could see the private dynamics of a much broader swath of teens’ practices. MySpace also gave me limited access to some private profiles in exchange for advice on how to approach certain situations. The company also gave me limited access to content that teens and their parents had submitted to support and abuse teams, both for advice and during my deposition in a lawsuit.

Such access was tremendously informative, but it came with ethical baggage that I was forced to confront. In both cases, I viewed content that teens produced

without being its intended recipient. While public content is also not necessarily meant for me, teens had not made explicit moves to restrict who could access their profiles. Of course, private content is never truly private. Teens can copy and paste what peers write and broadcast it elsewhere on the web (a common form of

bullying). Company privacy policies allow companies to use content for internal purposes and to share it with third parties under specific circumstances, including police investigations and lawsuits. Company employees access private profiles for both support purposes and research.

Given that I believed that this material was highly sensitive and not meant for my research purposes, I decided not to document or store any information from private profiles. I observed this content and it shaped my understanding of the data that I did capture, but I did not directly analyze any of this material as part of my dissertation nor do I ever quote from such content. While access to private data required tremendous caution, I also believe that viewing both public and private content strengthened my analysis.