links for 2009-04-15

• RConversation: My chat with Anti-CNN.com
  Rebecca MacKinnon, formerly of CNN Beijing, visits Anti-CNN.com and answers netizen posts.
  (tags: china RebeccaMacKinnon CNN Anti-CNN.com)

Research ethics, journalism, and paid participation

I am new to academia’s conventions on research involving human subjects—so new, in fact, that I’m just now completing my basic certification. The standards are not without resonance for me, however, given the emphasis placed by journalism educators on the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.

Principles of “beneficience” seem to run parallel to the journalists’ narrower exhortation to “seek truth and report it.” SPJ’s “minimize harm” section is similar in many ways to the Belmont Report‘s “respect for persons” and “justice.”

One short passage from the training I’m undergoing, however, would seem to raise serious questions about some of the research advertised on and near many campuses. Describing the “voluntariness” element of informed consent, my training states:

“Compensation and ‘inducements’ (financial, material, or otherwise) should not be so compelling that they play a major factor in a prospective subject’s decision about participation.”

I am certainly not the first person to notice that many people participate in studies only because of financial inducements. I’m thinking specifically about people I’ve talked to who said they participate in psychological studies and other medical trials exclusively for cash. I wonder what the practical consequence of language like “a major factor in a prospective subject’s decision” turns out to be. Without some inducements, subjects are unlikely to give their time, but when inducements are larger than what a prospective subject’s time would have yielded otherwise, the effect is different. Perhaps the risk of harm is sufficiently small that the problem of inducements is ethically irrelevant. (The consequences for the data may be more significant.)

A student at my level of understanding is in no position to criticize, but it’s interesting that the SPJ code has something to say about this too: “Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.” My instructors in journalism school and editors at most publications would go further: “Never pay sources.” I’ll be interested to learn more about how these fine lines are walked.

How do you say mobile phone in Chinese?

Why is a mobile phone in China known as a shouji (手机, roughly, “handset”)? At least in the 1990s, some people knew the rare machine as a dageda (大哥大). I’ve been reading Jack Linchuan Qiu’s new book, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (MIT Press, 2009), and he offers some background:

The term shouji was popularized by a blockbuster movie a few years ago about how the mobile phone influences upper-class Chinese families, especially in extramarital affairs (53–54).

Qiu’s aim is to understand the ways working-class people use information and communication technologies, but first he remembers his first encounter with a mobile phone in 1996. He and his friends called it dageda.

Gangster movies from Hong Kong played a major role in popularizing the device as dageda, meaning literally “Big-Brother-Big,” which was the default nickname for a mobile phone in the 1990s. Socially, dageda was very different from shouji, although the underlying technology was roughly the same. One has to be a Big Brother (dage, i.e., a powerful man) to enjoy dageda connectivity. The assumption is gendered, excluding gang outsiders, and very much about power hierarchy. In movies, dageda is usually used by the Big Brother of some group to negotiate drug deals or send out fateful commands such as assassination orders or the release of a hostage. Sometimes it is also an assault weapon because it is thick and heavy (54).

There you have it. The next time I have something very important or illegal to do, I’ll call my phone something else. Qiu writes that the move to the more widespread distribution of mobile phone use and the attending massive price drop makes the shouji concept more current and less exclusive, but I hope that doesn’t make us all prone to extramarital affairs.