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A primer on research in mediated environments: Reflections on cybermethodology

(Working paper series #14.2.m)

Mary Aiken,

RCSI CyberPsychology Research Centre, Dublin, Ireland.

Ciarán Mc Mahon,

RCSI CyberPsychology Research Centre, Dublin, Ireland.

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Abstract

Recent controversies surrounding the ethics of research on social networks have

come at a time when social science research itself is undergoing somewhat of a

transformation process. In this paper we consider how the changing technological

environment has produced difficulties for lawmakers, and consequently moral

decision-making. We attempt to differentiate between human and machine data,

and furthermore to situate the researcher in cyberspace, a context which is

necessarily both inter- and trans-disciplinary. Fundamentally, our purpose is to

encourage scholars of this context to reflect on their biases and prejudices, both in

terms of theory and method, prior to engaging in any research which has both a

human and technological component.

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“... for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built.”

(Kant, 1784, p. 20)

Introduction

Remarking upon technological developments of recent times has become something

of a rhetorical ritual in academia, so much so that this brief paper has chosen to mark a new

era by omitting anything of the kind. What follows is a preliminary attempt to establish a

platform for academic research involving human use of information communication

technology, as we approach an era of ubiquitous computing, 5G connectivity, cyber-physical

systems, wearable devices, internet of things, smart cities, driverless cars, 3D printing, virtual

reality gaming, commercial drones, robot caregivers and so on. Fundamentally, the question

of what it means to be human is being asked more repeatedly now than ever before and our

human research methodology must be reflected upon. All of these new technologies present

incredible potential for human society, but also significant risk to secure societies. The

purpose of this brief paper is not to review current and expected research methods in this

context – as such would be almost a much larger piece of work and almost immediately out

of date – but rather to deliver what might be termed prolegomena to any future study of

cyberbehaviour.

The Facebook/PNAS paper

In June 2014 a paper was published which serves as a useful exemplar for this discussion,

both because of the methodological issues it used and the public furore it raised (Kramer,

Guillory, & Hancock, 2014). The study itself, which has been subsequently deemed ‘socially

irresponsible’ by the British Psychological Society (Bullen & Oates, 2014), is simple enough

in its original idea but complicated in its execution. At its heart is conflict between two

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simple ideas: does being exposed to other people’s emotions make us more or less likely to

experience those same emotions? Notably, in the year preceding when the data was gathered

for this study (January 2012), there had been a certain amount of press ('Is Facebook making

us sad?', Copeland, 2011) and research (Jordan et al., 2011) suggesting that being exposed to

positive, happy expressions of emotion on Facebook could make users of the site experience

negative, sad emotions – a theory alluded to in the closing paragraphs (Kramer et al., 2014, p.

8790). Consequently, the aim of the study was to test for ‘emotional contagion’ – whether

being exposed to positive emotions make people more or less likely to express positive

emotions, and vice versa.

However, the scientific value of these questions are not under scrutiny: it is the

methodology which used to ask them which leaves something to be desired. Over 600,000

Facebook users had their Newsfeeds subtly altered over the period of a week, so that they

would see either less positive or less negative emotional content, with the dependent variable

being the amount of positive or negative emotional content users produced in response

(Kramer et al., 2014). The problems with this experiment are substantial: users were not

notified of this experiment, so there was no informed consent, long a hallmark of human

subjects research. It does not seem that minors were removed from the experiment, another

important aspect of research practice. Research has shown that many children under the age

of 13 have Facebook profiles (Holloway, Green, & Livingstone, 2013), despite the fact that

under US law the minimum age requirement is 13 (“Children’s Online Privacy Protection

Act,” 1998), and is stated as such under Facebook’s own terms (Facebook, 2014). Therefore

the following question must be asked: how many of the 600,000 subjects were minors, and

more importantly how many were under 13? In the context of cyber ethics this is an

important issue: we do not yet have credible age authentication procedures.

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While Facebook’s current Terms of Service includes reference to data being used for

research, this was not the case at the time of the data collection (Hill, 2014). Additionally, it

seems very much that this project was effectively not subject to normal institutional review

board practices in academia – when the study was presented to Cornell University’s panel,

the data had already been collected by Facebook, so it was not deemed to present a risk to a

human population (Carberry, 2014). In the wider context, while there has been much public

and academic outcry about ordinary people being experimented on, this does not seem to be

something that Facebook comprehend – being more concerned about how the experiment was

communicated, rather than what it connoted (Krishna, 2014).

While the publication of this paper raises a lot of important issues, such as the funding

of public research (Vertesi, 2014), its legality, both in the EU (O’Brien, 2014) and US

(Meyer, 2014) contexts, the more salient discussions have been regarding the concepts of

ethics and power in big data social science research methodology (Crawford, 2014;

Schroeder, 2014; Tufekci, 2014). As the traditional psychological experimental method itself

is a social relationship and historical development (Danziger, 1994), in this new cyber-

environment we are consequently on the brink of a new construction and should proceed

carefully.

Ethics, morality and law

At the outset, we should first consider our values and biases about how we approach this

problem space. While the vast majority of the nations of the world have signed the 1948

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, how those rights and responsibilities are interpreted

in a technologically-mediated 21st century is as of yet unclear, and differs according to

jurisdiction. We are now almost daily seeing consecutive and varying interpretations of what

the internet is supposed to be – from the United States Supreme Court (American

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Broadcasting Cos., Inc., et al. v. Aereo, 2014), to the Court of Justice of the European Union

(Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, 2014), to the

Turkish Constitutional Court (“Turkish high court lifts YouTube ban,” 2014). On the one

hand, due to the cross-cutting nature of the internet, we may see a decline in the very concept

of national jurisdictions, and on the other, in reaction, we could have an increasing retreat

into local, firewalled intranets: both possibilities representing certain moral perspectives

which need reflection upon. A recurrent trope in many public discussions is something along

the lines of the ‘free and open internet’, where exactly this exists, or has ever existed, remains

unclear, let alone what it actually means.

Additionally, we have continuing revelations from Mr Edward Snowden, sparking all

manner of discussions and developments, which seem far from resolved (Dale, 2013). There

is also ongoing international declarations in Brazil (“NETmundial Multistakeholder

Statement,” 2014) and Estonia (“Tallinn Agenda for Freedom Online,” 2014) on the political

future of the internet, including academics and researchers, such as the Association for

Computers and the Humanities (“Open Letter on Net Neutrality,” 2014). While certain

researchers can refer to the Association of Internet Researcher statements on ethics

(Markham & Buchanan, 2012), but how strong such positions are in the face of vacillating

legal frameworks and changing methodologies is hard to know. As such, we are in very

uncertain times as regards the legal, moral and ethical fundamentals of internet research, and

these questions are likely to remain unanswered for some time, presenting challenges for

security research in particular.

Human vs. machine data

An essential observation in this maelstrom is that we are essentially dealing with issues of

data, not necessarily knowledge, and that at least some of that data is personally identifiable

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data (Ohm, 2010) and as a result, the people involved will have both identity and territorial

claims on it (Mc Mahon & Aiken, 2014). Yet on the other hand, some of the data available in

cyberspace may not be personally identifiable at all – the question is where we can draw the

line between human and machine. For example, if a person is tweeting publicly, can we

legitimately assume that, as it is public, they no longer have any rights over that information,

and that we may analyse and parse it any way that we like, with our machine intelligence? Or

is there something barbaric about this, about what tragic figure Carmen Hermosillo (2004)

called the ‘commodification of human interaction’?

This in itself feeds into deeper cultural issues of what we are using information

communication technology to do at all: are we trying to make computers more like people, or

make people more like computers? In the former case, there are issues like forcing machines

to forget information after a certain time period (e.g. Snapchat; Shein, 2013) and in the latter,

there are ideas like the ‘quantified self’ (Wolf, 2010), where users attempt to structure and

organise their lives more logically and with digital feedback.

We can strive to make the real world more virtual, and yet also attempt to establish

real world constraints in cyberspace – the point is that cyber impacts on the real world, and

vice versa (Slane, 2007), and this is where ethics is essential. This dichotomy is the crux of

much debate and on which each researcher must reflect on individually, but reflect

nonetheless.

Location of the researcher

Moreover, there are issues around the very position of the investigator themselves. As

anthropologists and ethnographers know, to fully understand a context, researchers often

immerse themselves in the culture they are studying (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997). However, as

students of psychology will know from the famous ‘On being sane in insane places’ paper,

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our “perceptions and behaviour [are] controlled by the situation, rather than being motivated

by a malicious disposition” (Rosenhan, 1973, p. 257). Fundamentally, in a cyberspace

context, which is increasingly both ubiquitous (Resnick, 2013) yet personalised (Pariser,

2011), whether we want to either research at a remove, or at close quarters, we may

encounter problems. How can we research objectively a context which we now find it

difficult to escape? On the other hand, particularly with regard to issues of cyber security and

law enforcement how do we effectively research less accessible reaches of the internet? And

how do we maintain objectivity therein?

At any rate, when we consider the cyber-environment, we may like to reflect on the

observation that traditional research methodology (e.g. Robson, 2002) is beginning to look

quaint. Consider, for example, that notion of researcher distance – that one should attempt to

be objective, take a representative sample of the population in question and observe it

solemnly. Such an ancient and cautious scientific practice is becoming rapidly disrupted by

big data collection, exemplified by a move away from desktop level datasets towards what is

being dubbed ‘N=(all)’ (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). It is not, for example, beyond

the realms of possibility that a researcher would be examining such data set within which

their own personally identifiable information would be present – the map-maker within the

map. How are such complications dealt with? This is Hacking’s (1995) ‘looping effects’ of

human categorisations taken to a new degree: not merely categorising others and thereby

affecting them, but categorising ourselves also, and affecting ourselves in the process.

More to the point, what is concomitant on the perspective of big data as a disruptive

force on the established methodology of the human sciences, is its apparent espousal of an

atheoretical perspective (C. Anderson, 2008; Williamson, 2014). Such an outcome, which

would be similar to outcomes observed when the internet has disrupted other industries, like

music and journalism (Raven, 2012), would have interesting consequences, to say the least.

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The critical concept in such a context is a temporal one – where a big data mechanism, not

simply taking large volumes of data, but high velocities of data (Kitchin, 2013), and where

analysis is post-hoc and without hypotheses, not to mention where publication may not be

subject to peer-review. Such a process is much faster than standard academic research

protocols, and as such, we may find ourselves querying the utility of the hypothetico-

deductive method. This is not least because, with organisational and political pressures on

researchers to produce insight into current techno-social problems, there may simply not be

the time to engage in leisurely multi-year research projects. As such, we may need to

appreciate not only more applied research methodologies, but also action research (Lewin,

1946), grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and artistic experiences (Benson, 2013).

How else can we study cyberspace? Like Heraclitus, we should recognise that we can never

enter the same internet twice. That cyberspace is in a constant state of flux, being changed by

human ingenuity, does give hope for its improvement, but should also question the

epistemological status of research findings therein.

Interdisciplinarity & transdisciplinarity

It has long been a contention of interdisciplinary studies that we should not assume that

nature fits into neat disciplinary boundaries, less so with a fast-evolving psycho-technical

environment. Consequently, any successful future academic endeavour in this context will

require both interdisciplinary efforts in a practical sense, but also transdisciplinary theoretical

perspectives (Suler, 2013). Cyberpsychology is an exemplification of how combination this

can, and indeed must, be achieved, requiring input from psychology and computer science,

but also similarly recent enterprises such as network science, data visualisation and digital

humanities. Vishik (cited in “Belfast 2014: 4th World Cyber Security Technology Research

Summit,” 2014, p. 8) notes “the multi-disciplinary nature of cyber security attacks is

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important, attacks happen for different reasons, only some of which are technical, other

reasons include, for example, socioeconomic issues.” We need to understand all of these

reasons to develop cyber security strategies’. Therefore does investigation regarding

cybersecurity require a multi-disciplinary approach to avoid conceptualisation of cyberspace

as a ‘disciplinary land grab’ in a new research frontier. Rather, each participating discipline

should question relevance of its traditional theoretical constructs and research methodologies

and question their suitability to cyber domains.

Normal academic practice is also under review from changes in the publication

process, as we now have a variety of different possibilities for dissemination from paywalled

peer reviewed journals to open access (Jeffery, 2006). Choices in this regard have significant

ethical consequences as it effectively connotes a decision around secrecy (Schöpfel & Prost,

2013). This is a particularly salient point of reflection in all areas of cyber research, given the

much lauded ‘free and open’ hyperbole around the internet, but particularly in cyber security

studies where it may not always be wise, for law enforcement or national security reasons for

example, to allow public access to research. More to the point, in this fast changing

environment, we need to realise that findings may become obsolete much faster than in other

areas of science, and choose our publication strategy accordingly – for example, does what

has been written on cyberbullying prior to the advent of the smartphone still hold true?

State of the cyberpsychology paradigm

We recognise that pace of technological developments has fast outstripped the pace of human

psychological development (McGuckin, C. cited in O’Keeffe, 2014), no matter however

either may be conceptualised. The critical task for cyberpsychology as a discipline is to build

up a body of established findings of how human beings experience technology. For example,

cyber-specific concepts such as online disinhibition (2004), hyperpersonal communication

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(Walther, 1996), self disclosure (Joinson, 2001), and multitasking (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner,

2009) are becoming well recognised. While recognising that such findings, may not endure

(Walther, 2009), they are with us at present.

As a general rule, we should appreciate the possibility that people act differently in

cyberspace than they do ‘in real life’ and is of significance. This is something which

mainstream psychology, and society in general, has resisted for some time - that what

happens online isn’t ‘real’. Such a minimisation was tragically realised in the 2014 Isla Vista

shootings, where a brief, polite, face-to-face interview was forensically valued ahead of a

‘vast digital trail’ of murderous intent (Davis, 2014). We must move away from ‘digital

dualism’ and start thinking more in terms of ‘augmented reality’ (Jurgenson, 2011), and

recognise that “the virtual complicates the physical, and vice versa” (Slane, 2007, p. 97).

Critically, this necessitates the abandonment of the idea of ‘computer mediated

communication’ in favour of a paradigm that sees cyber-space as an environmental construct,

a layer of psychological enhancements to our normal experience. While the concept of the

digital native has been overegged somewhat (Bennett & Maton, 2010; Selwyn, 2009), we still

need to consider our own digital literacy: exactly how fluent are we in the language of

cyberspace? And how does this colour our perceptions of what we research?

Equalisation and evangelism

The problem is that we have several years of ‘technology evangelism’ (Lucas-Conwell, 2006)

which has not exactly produced a great deal of critical commentary (Ungerleider, 2013). This

should also be viewed alongside the corporate and political varieties of ‘cyber-libertarianism’

(Denegri-Knott, 2006). In fact, for several years research laboured under the illusion that

increasing technology would be a social liberator, levelling the playing field for all genders,

social groups and identities. The equalisation hypothesis, however, has not proven to be well-

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supported – with anonymous online environments not proving to produce less gender

stereotyping than face-to-face contexts (Postmes & Spears, 2002), and environments with no

obvious gender preferences being observed as extremely gender biased (Vasilescu, Capiluppi,

& Serebrenik, 2012). These should also be viewed alongside issues such as cyberbullying

(Tokunaga, 2010), the manifestation of sadism online as trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, &

Paulhus, 2014) and the deliberate construction of false online product reviews (E. Anderson,

2013). In sum, the use of the online environment to find entertainment in conflict, without

risk or accountability (Hardaker, 2010). Again, the purpose of this paper is not to provide a

literature review of any kind, but to make the point that we need to be mindful of the

possibility that the introduction of technology to any human context may not solve all of our

problems, and it may well make it worse. As such, our research methodology needs to be

aware of the very real demographic fault lines which still run through cyberspace and the

potential that our work could exacerbate them further.

Reflections

As such, bearing the preceding vistas in mind, the following questions will serve as our

reflection tools principle prior to engaging in research. They are by no means exhaustive and

will continue to be edited going forward. Adopting a framework from Robson (2002), viz.

1. Developing ideas

a. Are we working from standard hypothetico-deductive inquiry or some

other practice – grounded theory or action research?

b. Or do we think we can dispense with theory entirely? On what grounds?

c. Should a researcher of cyber domains have a basic level of cyber-literacy?

How do we conceptualise and measure this?

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d. From where do we, as researchers draw our ethical guidance? And what

are the particular problems associated with ethics in cyberspace?

2. Designing the enquiry

a. Are we critically and fairly dealing with the evangelism around

technology’s message of equalisation and liberty?

b. Are we treating cyberspace as a real and valid environment, or are we

minimising it? Alternatively, should we be minimising it?

c. Will the results of our methodology be generalisable beyond the context of

cyberspace?

d. Where is the role for real world methodologies such as the ‘face to face

interview’ regarding investigation of cyber behaviour? Should virtual

research methodologies be employed exclusively in this context?

3. Tactics: the methods of data collection

a. Are we too close or not close enough to the lived experience of whoever

created the data we are examining?

b. Have we adequately dealt with notions such as informed consent,

participant protection, age authentication and vulnerable populations?

c. Of the behaviour we are observing, how much is structured by the

technology in which it occurs?

d. Can we assume that psychometric scales and measures that have been

validated offline be valid online?

4. Dealing with the data

a. Is our data human or machine produced? Why are we drawing the line,

where we are drawing it, and how can we confirm that distinction?

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b. Does anyone own data we are examining, and how would they feel about

what we are doing with it?

c. How are analytical methods selected?

d. Have we considered consent with regard to personally identifiable

information, adequately dealt with anonymity and how data is stored?

Does such a thing as absolute anonymity online even exist?

e. How are findings presented? How do authors decide on the open access

issue? What could be the unintended consequences of publicising this

research?

It is next to impossible to produce formal methodological guidelines for research in

cyberspace at present, but what is useful is to reflect on traditional, current and developing

research practices. By producing these questions, we hope to begin a meaningful analytic

discourse on cybermethodology and enrich knowledge production as a result. Such a

conversation is essential to the continued production of useful knowledge for the success of

secure societies.

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