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
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.
Mapping China’s international internet business
At Mobinode, Piet Walraven has published the results of some research into Chinese internet companies forming partnerships with overseas entities, and there’s a map.
Walraven describes the map:
It is a summary of all overseas operations organized in two categories: ‘partnerships, licensing, and co-production’ and ‘self operated or wholly owned overseas initiatives’. Through these two distinctions we can see that the dashed lines that each represent an action in the ‘self operated foreign initiatives’ category, have a relatively low representation which indicates that not many Chinese Internet companies are enrolled in true wholly-owned international operations yet.
The results represent a first round of work, and give an interesting view of a geography of business collaboration.
Admiring the Periodic Table of Typefaces
I’m not sure where I came across this, but as someone who loves type and can never remember the names of the ones I like, I’ve found this very helpful. Not to mention attractive. Check out the hi-res version. Now if only someone could do this with Chinese and Japanese faces, I would be ecstatic.
Published by Cam under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.
Proposing Association for Asian Studies ‘09 hashtag: #aas09
As a student of Asia and the Internet, it occurred to me I’ll want to see what others are experiencing during this year’s Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago this month. Having just booked my ticket, I propose #aas09 as a hashtag on Twitter, Flickr, and others for this event.
At first I was heading for just plain old AAS, but that seems to be populated by astronomers and users of other languages. I think #aas09 will work quite well. I know it’s early, but Google revealed no other tags that I could find. I’m sure AAS won’t be as twittery as political and technological events, but let’s see what social media can do.
I encourage people to repost this with plans for attending, etc.! I for one will be in Chicago from March 23–29.
Live Blog: L.A. Times Editor Russ Stanton and online booster Jeff Jarvis at Harvard Law
I’m just settling in to the beginning of this week’s meeting of the Internet: Issues at the Frontiers seminar I’m taking this semester in the law school. This week we have two guests—Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and the City University of New York, and Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times. I’m going to post some notes and thoughts as we continue over the next two hours.
Join us through live streaming here: http://www.mogulus.com/thefutureofnews
On Twitter, follow #iif hashtag. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23iif
—Graham, 5:10 p.m.
Stanton: LATimes.com launched in 1995. “We basically treaded water for the next 11 years.” “it wasn’t until january of 2007 that we finally hunkered down and got serious about the Internet.” —5:19
Stanton: Innovation department when first fully established was about 5 percent of editorial staff, mostly volunteers. Formed a copy desk then to handle production for the web. Photo editor started training people on video. Today over 50 percent of photo staff trained on video. Expanded web editorial staff, and launched training effort he says is “what we believe is the most comprehensive in the industry.” —5:22
Stanton is going through the story of the incredible efforts the Times went through to get their online operations up to par. No comments so far about what it means that the parent company declared backruptcy. Meanwhile, notes 40+ blogs account for more than 15 percent of web traffic. —5:27
Notes LATimes.com revenue now covers the newsroom, and that the convergence of web earnings and newsgathering costs has indeed been a result of reduction of newsroom staff as well. —5:32
Stanton mentions the fact that the industry has not yet taken full advantage of geotargeting for advertising. This is how a large operation can also deliver local advertising. —5:34
Stanton answering question on what type of model would be good, given that he doesn’t believe in micropayments/iTunes model. Short answer: He doesn’t know what’s good, just what’s wrong with what we’ve heard of so far. —5:39
Question for Stanton about people who might want to use BugMeNot.com to avoid being accurately followed for advertising purposes. “We make our living nosing around .. every place we can probably get away with.” And that they’ll need some sort of user data to make this work. —5:42
Jarvis Goes On
Jarvis: Journalists need to become aggregators, organizers, educators. And it’s based on the link economy. He’s talking about shaping and using citizen data. —5:45
Jarvis to those unhappy with losing revenue to web: “I’m sorry that the printing press is now an albatross of cost around your neck, but that’s what it is.” —5:50
Jarvis: Putting up half-baked news is like Google releasing a beta version of something they’re working on. He thinks this is what we should do with journalism. I think he’s trying to get everyone in journalism sued for libel: It’s dangerous to publish when you don’t know the story yet. —5:56
Jarvis says an important thing here is that The New York Times is enabling other people to create content. This is a model for the organization to develop stringer-type relationship, but in Jarvis’ telling this would not be stringers so much as part of the network in the “link economy.” —6:01
Zittrain asks Jarvis to address Stanton directly
Jarvis: He says the efforts so far are impressive and promising. The blogs are great. But to go further, go further into networks. So later they “sell ads on content that they only owe 20 percent of” etc.
Stanton: About 10 percent of content is stuff that is not created by their staff. So during wild fire season two years ago, they ran a photo from a reader on the homepage for a bit over an hour since that was the best one. The photo staff definitely noticed. —6:04
Stanton: Notes more efforts they’ve had, including L.A. Now, which links to news all over the state. To which Jarvis pushes him on how he can encourage more people to participate and contribute. The question from JJ’s side is how can they help them do this. Stanton mentions that they have people look at almost all content on the site for legal reasons. The Wikitorial exposed them legally. —6:08
Now we’re joining Josh Cohen, product manager of Google News
Cohen summarizes what Google News does. Zittrain takes first question. “How is Google News supposed to make money?” —6:14
Answer? Indirect benefit to Google because people will come for many things. Possibly advertising. Seems like another part of Google where the business model isn’t clear yet. —6:15
General discussion.
Jarvis: In the link economy it’s the endpoint that has to monetize it. —6:26
Q: Harvard Law Record publisher asks about people’s concerns about the permanence of contributing to publications. Does this scare away people? How can we get high quality free contributions of information when people are concerned about reputation? —6:28
A: Stanton: We’ve done a lousy job of educating the public on what’s important about them—about the value of trustworty media. —6:29
Q: “When will you turn off your presses?”
Stanton: “Well, I hope never.” Betting on another 30 years or so they can bank on the baby boomers. “You can’t beat the paper for portability and readability right now.” It’ll be smaller, and different, but he wants to keep print going.
Jarvis: “If we invented the newspaper today it wouldn’t be on paper.” Even if it’s not the LA Times, we’ll be seeing someone shut off the presses soon. Will they survive online? —6:35
Q: Who do I sue when your collaborative, process-based journalism libels me?
Jarvis: People now have the “means of response,” and the law should change. It needs to develop along with the industry. —6:37
Q: What about the bias of readers and issues that “drive clicks” toward sports, specific topics—not democracy’s meat and potatoes?
Jarvis: Indicates he doesn’t really have an answer for this other than continuing the cross-subsidy somehow. —6:42
Ending for now. —6:55
The straw man of Internet-fueled civil discourse
Just because people are online doesn’t mean they engage in civil public discourse. This simple idea has emerged as one thread of conventional wisdom in recent years, especially in the context of the People’s Republic of China. In an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama, Rebecca MacKinnon reinforces the idea:
Back in 2001 a U.S. spyplane made an emergency landing on Hainan island after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet which crashed into the sea. If people in the Chinese Internet chatrooms had gotten their way, the U.S. crew would be in a Chinese jail today. In a recent interview with The Atlantic’s James Fallows, the President of the China Investment Corporation Gao Xiqing pointed out that his P.R. department is inundated with public comments calling for him to sell U.S. dollar assets.
This sort of argument, parallel to the idea that the United States might not like what it sees if some states hold truly democratic elections, has become so common that I wonder whether MacKinnon can still reasonably say, as she does in the letter, “Americans tend to think of the Internet as the medium that will inevitably free the Chinese people of authoritarian rule.” Maybe my reading diet has become more isolated, but I don’t hear that argument anymore except as a foil. Is the narrative of a liberalizing Internet medium becoming a straw man?
Remembering the Year of the Rat (photos)
Life passed into the Year of the Ox yesterday with little fanfare at Transpacifica headquarters. There were memories, however, of an explosive night in Beijing a year ago as we rang in the Year of the Rat. As a commemoration, I offer these photographs—from a walk by the half-done CCTV tower to a midnight walk across the Caochangdi district of Beijing through a sea of spent explosives.
Happy New Year, everyone! (I’m not going there like everybody else.)
Republican curricula in the US and China
Gina Russo at Frog In A Well has an interesting post drawing a tentative parallel between US conservative groups that advocate “the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history” (in the Times‘ summation) and Republican era Chinese textbooks that included instruction on how to be a “good citizen” (好公民).
My sense is both phenomena are interesting, but as Gina points out they may not have much to do with each other. On the US side, I’m more concerned with a “triumphal interpretation” of US history (whose triumph is it?) than I am with the teaching of Greek philosophers and European political theorists. That’s mostly because you can teach these thinkers alongside more recent theorists without damaging anyone. However, if in the example of the history of the North American west courses had to preclude Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest in favor of Frederick Jackson Turner (in pursuit of triumphalism), then students would miss out.
Since I’m presently studying in various ways both the question of “civil society” in China and the formation of a sense of nation in early 20th century China, these textbooks are equally interesting. The behavioral aspects, such as lessons on proper posture and how to stand quietly in line, are especially interesting given the preponderance of civility-promoting (usually 文明 or “civilization” was the watchword) advertising campaigns in Beijing during the year leading up to the Olympics. While I heard little about the “no spitting” regulations that received so much attention in the US press, subway passages frequently featured signs encouraging people to stand, civilized, in line.
A key difference between these two examples might be this: US conservatives seem dissatisfied with changes in their country as articulated by changes in ideology among some academics, whereas some aspects of the Chinese campaigns seem directed against the state of affairs in China in favor of a perceived civilized other. I am not in a position to make that argument regarding the Republican era, but in the contemporary example at least part of the impetus for these campaigns was clearly the desire to make a good impression during the Olympics.
Life Magazine China Photos Now on Google
I’m just starting to look through what they’ve posted, but via Kottke I’ve learned that Life Magazine and Google have teamed up to release many of the magazine’s never-released images. Naturally I started fooling around with China and Beijing pictures, and I found this among many others: an image of the south side of Gulou, the Drum Tower, with what is presently Di’anmen Wai Dajie (地安门外大街) in the foreground. This particular image is irritatingly undated, but is listed as by Dmitri Kessel, many of whose black and white photos are dated 1946.
Below, a similar framing from Oldtasty on Flickr, dated 2004:
UPDATE: Austin at Time has also posted some China images from the collection.