“You're Not Doing Work, You're on Facebook!”: Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media

Abstract

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.

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。

En este artículo se arguye que en un tiempo cuando cada vez más entrevistados e investigadores pueden conectarse a través de las plataformas de los medios sociales, nuestro acceso al campo y los encuentros a través de los medios sociales requieren atención adicional, más allá 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 públicos o privados, y sobre quién es considerado vulnerable o no. Por eso este artículo ofrece una discusión oportuna y crítica de las diversas maneras como uno puede integrar los medios sociales en la investigación y, al hacerlo, propiciar un debate muy necesario sobre cómo entender mejor la dinámica y la ética que hay detrás del incluir dominios de internet como como un sitio, dentro de la investigación translocal y de múltiples sitios urgida por otros estudiosos.

Key Words:

• ethnography
• Facebook
• field work
• methodology
• social media

关键词:

• 民族志，脸书，田野工作，方法论，社群媒体。

Palabras clave:

• etnografía, Facebook, trabajo de campo, metodología, medios sociales

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

1 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 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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harng Luh Sin

HARNG LUH SIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the 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.