The centerpiece of this issue is the Forum on The Ethics of Fair Practices for Collection Social Science Data in Cyberspace that Jim Thomas kindly organized at my request. There is increasing attention to the social dynamics of groups on-line, diverse electronic forums, virtual communities, and so on. In the last two decades, social scientists have developed fundamental canons against deceptive data gathering, informed consent, and revelation of potentially harmful information. But the conditions of research and the tailoring of such guidelines vary from one field to another. For example, clinical psychologists often study people who can be manipulated by researchers, while political scientists who study elite national leaders face the complementary risk of being coopted by the subjects of their studies.
Research ethics are normally a specialty topic with relatively little public interest.
But the question of what kinds of consent are required for social research in Cyberspace suddenly became quite public in the Spring of 1995 when Carnegie- Mellon undergraduate Martin Rimm released a controversial study about the extent to which computer bulletin board systems and the Internet were used to exchange pornographic pictures. Rimm's study is a bit of a red herring because it methodologically flawed and not conducted as part of a serious research program. The exact date and times that sample notes were posted, as well as the name of the group, appear in the published results. I felt that King's provocative paper could be the seed of timely discussion amongst social researchers. I invited sociologist Jim Thomas to organize a special section of TIS that would examine the ethical issues of data collection in cyberspace.