“It’s Public, and also Private”: An Analysis of Flaming Fan Studies

Online services make users’ communication activities and content public. This online information has contributed to accelerating the creation cycle of user-generated content. Moreover, these services also allow researchers to utilize these online texts as a public source for easily analyzing human activities, also referred to as social sensing studies. However, we need to realize that there exists a controversial problem of privacy especially in the sensitive areas of creation, even though the content is public. This study tries to create new guidelines for online study using the case of the flaming of a study of female fan-fiction, which attempted to extract and filter sexual expressions using online fan-fiction novels as source. Researchers from the fields of both engineering and humanities, including law and ethics, discussed the violations in this case, and extracted ethical, legal, and social issues according to their specific areas of expertise. Internet technologies allow human communication to become much more tractable and observable. SNS and other networking services attract users to upload their activities online, eliciting social rewards. Maker Movements like Fablab, and the user generated content (UGC) movement also appreciate this form of shared information for enhancing the creation cycle of users supported by upload and feedback [1]. These online content platforms are a good research source, or hidden treasure, for evaluating and analyzing society’s activities. Several researchers define online records of human activity as “social sensors” and have proposed utilizing them [2][3], while HCI studies have also started to use these online activities as data [4][5][6]. However, we also need to be careful that these public texts are not just open information for the research. The boundaries of public and private information are ambiguous, because users are not always aware of or have agreed to the fact that their content is to be openly used. Several researchers have voiced the criticism that the binarized notion of public and private is not appropriate in today’s Internet environment [7][8]. In 2008, a group of researchers released profile data collected from Facebook accounts of US university students, leading to controversial discussion [9]. This mismatch between user and researcher requires new ethical guidelines for online studies [10]. Regarding the handling of information on the Internet, the Association of Internet Research Ethics Working Committee provides guidelines on human online activities [11] Our viewpoint on the study by the abovementioned researchers is that not only user attribution, but also user content causes this kind of discussion on the border between public and private. These situations become critical in studies on UGC. Usually, every piece of published fiction is required to be separately accepted and criticized from the author’s private attribution in a literature context. The author’s privacy is protected by their name is anonymized by a pen name. However, these published contents may be regarded as private content, especially in sensitive fiction by minorities. Guidelines are starting to be created in the area of fan studies [12]. How The 32nd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2018