Toward Ethical Cyberspace Audience Research: Strategies for Using the Internet for Television Audience Studies (original) (raw)

This article examines the possibilities for qualitative audience study afforded by the Internet, carefully detailing both the benefits and dangers of such research. In answer to methodological issues resulting from online communication with subjects, the essay calls for the application of various feminist and anthropological methodological practices, and considers methodological dilemmas related to perceived privacy, natural data and lurking, informed consent procedures, balancing anonymity, and data accessibility. In the course of outlining methodological considerations especially salient when finding audiences through internet spaces, we reflect on our own dilemmas in designing studies that meet the ethical standards of feminist methodology. The increasing dissemination of Internet technologies may provide the greatest revolution in the study of media audiences since critical media scholars began turning their attention to audiences in the early 1980s. As is often the case with new technologies and applications, computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides a previously unimaginable tool, but also forces a revision of the standards and practices that governed qualitative audience study prior to its introduction. Researchers in a variety of fields have begun adapting traditional methodological practices and ethics to the new research tool of CMC and the "field space" provided by the Internet, but using the Web to research audiences of television series poses specific challenges that this research has not addressed. This particular article and the type of research it envisions require slightly revised concepts of field and audience. The changing nature of "going into the field" depends largely upon how researchers use the Internet and the new virtual spaces it offers. Throughout most of this article, we primarily focus on the Internet as a tool for research rather than as a space to research. In this approach, the Internet facilitates communication by helping to find audience members (who become respondents)