For those of you not on Twitter at 10:00 pm on a Saturday night (what, you have a life?) you might have missed the latest gossip. Turns out some woman at SFU wrote a masters thesis about called “Works in Progress: An Analysis of Canadian Mommyblogs.” In it, she examines in minute detail the writings of eight Canadian bloggers, and uses that fodder to make egregious assumptions and inferences about their income, their marriages, and their children, among other things.
Mine was one of them.
In fact, it was me who stumbled on the thesis yesterday afternoon. I was googling my own name of all things, for an upcoming post that I’ll get around to finishing once all this settles down. I was bemused at first: “Oh look, someone referenced my blog in an academic paper.” But the more I read, the more it creeped me out. This woman spent what must have been days poking around in my archives, copying and eventually analyzing several months’ worth of writing. Analyzing several month of my life. And then she starts making assumptions, and that’s where I’m no longer impressed. She makes inferences and assumptions about my marriage, the division of labour in our house, my income, my job aspirations — about my life.
By the time I’d finished reading, I felt — violated. It’s a strong word, used intentionally. I felt that someone had taken what I put out into the Internet and used it for a purpose I neither intended nor approved. It’s not even the real me, it’s an unauthorized repackaging of the avatar of me that I slip into whenever I sit down at the keyboard.
Now, I have never been shy about sharing the most intimate details of my life online. Back in 2007, Chatelaine magazine (who has a much larger readership than this thesis ever will) wrote a feature piece about Beloved and me that looked at our reproductive history — infertility, miscarriages and all — in intimate detail. We’ve been on CBC TV discussing infertility twice. Neither one of those bothered me in the least, because there’s two key differences here. The first is that the MSM took the time to contact me and ask my permission first. The second is that the MSM seem to understand the fact that what’s on the screen is only part of the story, and doesn’t assume otherwise. They ask questions to get to the real truth, not the one that gets packaged for Internet consumption.
For the first time ever, I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself and the blog when I finished reading this woman’s thesis. I thought, “Is that what I’m putting out there? Is that how people really see me?” And then I realized that that’s exactly my problem with what she did — she stripped my words and thoughts and ideas of their context and used them for her own purposes. (For example, she seems fixated on posts where I comment about potty training and take out, cross-referencing them extensively.) She treats my writing as a factual rendering of my daily life and completely ignores the fact that I am writing to entertain, so of course I am exaggerating some details and omitting others.
As I mentioned, there was a good little twitterstorm going last night, and most people seemed to agree that not contacting the bloggers in question was a significant ethical violation. (You can scan the conversation by clicking on the #creepythesis hash tag.) If she had, I think she would have had a much more interesting and well-rounded thesis. And she would have had my permission to quote me, something that she didn’t bother to acquire. By the way, the other blogs in question are Cheaty Monkey (Haley-O and I discussed this issue at length yesterday), The Writing Mother, Cheaper than Therapy, Adventures in Motherhood, Hypergraffiti, Chaos Theory, and Momcast. There’s also quotes from a lot of the other players in the Canadian momosphere, from Mad Hatter and Veronica Mitchell to Her Bad Mother. Go ahead, use the search feature and see if she quoted you without permission, too!
Now, I haven’t totally lost my perspective on this. I do realize that there are inherent risks in putting so much of my personal life out onto the Interwebs, and I realize that the “wrong” that has been done here is relatively minor. But I am offended by this, and I do intend to follow up with both the writer and SFU. In fact, my first impulse was to include her name along with a long list of accusations of ethical wrong-doings, because while I may soon forget how violated I felt in this moment, Google never will. (Figures. Now is a hell of a time to develop a sense of discretion!)
So, bloggy peeps, I’m willing to bet you have thoughts on this. Am I being overly sensitive, feeling as I do like a bug on a microscope slide? Or should I be flattered that anyone paid that much attention to my writing? Would you be creeped out? Would you act on it?
Me, I gotta go to church. *sigh*
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Natasha, academia is a process of professional training in writing. It’s a comms program, for goodness sake, and a master’s thesis to boot! I think excellent writing would be a minimum standard. Goodness, all first years at my University were required to purchase a minimum of three different style books that outlined various writing style standards and types of essays. I still have them
As Bea pointed out, this essay would have got barely a passing grade in an undergrad class and I agree, but I also agree the initial part of the thesis is much better than the blog analysis sections.
Now that I’ve let all my initial reactions out on twitter. I feel better! I don’t think I’ll ever look at the thesis again, even when I write my blog post about it later tonight. Because it gives me that creepy feeling — since another person’s often-misread perception of “Haley-O” is written all over it.
As I’ve said on twitter I’m more disappointed in the students’ professors than the student herself. And I know others disagree with me. Others think she needs to take responsibility. But, I was a student once before and know what it’s like to write a Master’s Thesis. Not an easy feat.
I was very upset by the misreadings of me and my blog. I was very upset that I was never contacted, even simply after the fact.
When I opened the thesis, I was looking forward to reading a paper resembling the fascinating abstract. A little Bakhtin and ME! COOL! But, there wasn’t any analysis of the genre, really. At least not when individual bloggers were assessed. There was, instead, analysis of lives. Whether we do or do not send our kids to preschool, for example, or how “affluent” we are (breathe in breathe out).
The part that bothered me the most is where she said that I may have lied about something. I’ll get into it on my blog. But her conclusion contradicted even the quotes — as few as there were — that she used to introduce her conclusion.
Also, does my blog look like a business to you?
Whole paragraphs on these assumptions…. It’s just hard to stomach, whether or not it’s ethical or not, whether or not we’re dead or alive authors. It’s just hard to stomach.
Re the bullying. The last thing I’d want to be is a bully. I can only say my tweets were a product of my effort to STOMACH. Twitter was very helpful. The nature of blogs is that they are, indeed, dialogical. A Master’s thesis is is not dialogical — all you can do is publish an article or thesis in retort (or hopefully, a blog post). The nature of twitter is that it’s easily reactive…the ultimate in dialogical. We’re dealing with different genres, different boundaries, etc., etc., the ethics of which will always be blurry…..
I will say that this was a published piece of work that was being “attacked,” not a person. All of us left her name out — intentionally. We wanted to figure out how we felt about this phenomenon (and, in AureliaCotta’s case, what the facts are on the ethics), and not to hurt the author.
AND OMG my Captcha words below are WRONGED IN. I sh*t you not! (i.e., this is not contrived. Must take screenshot!)
I will admit firstly that I did not read the entire thesis (100 pages?) but I did go and look for the parts where she references you. Nor have I read all these comments.
Dani, I can understand that it would be creepy and weird to have someone pick apart blog posts and to take things out of context, make assumptions about your family, kids, and income. That would bother me too. It also shows that the thesis writer doesn’t quite understand blogs or our passion for them. They don’t understand the whole “taking on a persona” thing that you mentioned. We edit our lives-what we are willing to share, what would be entertaining, etc for the masses. For anyone to think that we are the sum of our blog posts is incredibly naive. The blog is a snapshot-a painting, of sorts, of the parts of us and our lives that we’re willing to share. There is still lots burbling underneath that might be beautiful, but is OURS.
Now that being said, again-what we put on line is, in essence, there for the masses to do with what they will, whether we like it or not. I guess it goes with the territory. Look at Julie and Julia-Julia Child didn’t like AT ALL that Julie Powell wrote about her. Some of it was purely based on Julia Child, but wasn’t REAL. I agree that it might have been nice if the writer had contacted you. But she really didn’t have to-your blog (and mine) are both out there for the masses to read, dissect, enjoy, hate, whatever.
What I find disturbing is how “viscous” (good word, Susan!) some people have been in return. Ouch. Now THAT might be a good study.
Interesting conversation.
(lol…captcha is “boundaries potomac”
I don’t want to argue what is legally right, what’s ethically right, etc. Because I’m sure that she is indeed allowed to do it.
What bothers me about being so heavily featured in this thesis are these two points:
1. She took so many things out of context. I realize that could happen any time someone happens upon my blog for the first time but the difference is that this person is then packaging me in an out-of-context way. Many bloggers use humor/sarcasm/hyperbole but she stripped that away. At one point she references that I felt like I was a failure as a mother because my oldest learned of Rapunzel from a TV show instead of through me, reading her the story. The problem there is that she removed all the humor that was involved – I did say that, but it was in jest, a fact that no one missed in the original post. I have often felt like I’m flying by the seat of my pants without a manual, but I’ve never felt like an actual failure. However, based on her thesis, she packages me as someone who does.
2. She did lazy research. If she had *actually* invested time to read through my blog properly she would have a better presentation of the portion of me and my life that I put online. For instance, she mentions that my father-in-law took me to several pre-natal appointments and said that indicates that either I don’t drive or we don’t have a vehicle. Meanwhile, any proper reading of my blog makes it clear that yes, we do have a vehicle, but no I don’t drive, and my FIL was taking me to the doctor because it was really far away and my husband was working. Proper research would make her better able to address my first point – she’d be able to better put things into context.
Initially I was very creeped out and nearly pulled my blog down last night when I read what she wrote about me, but I don’t want to take away something that I truly enjoy because of someone who clearly doesn’t really understand how blogging works. In the meantime, I kind of hope her professor(s) see her lack of research too.
I’m late to the party as Chris/Mombie just alerted me to the existence of this thesis (can’t imagine how I missed it as there can’t be a more relentless self-googler than I). It doesn’t creep me out as much, but that may be because a) as Chris pointed out, she’s pretty non-judgmental of me, and b) I was forewarned that this was out there and there was much debate about it, so it wasn’t quite the same shock as finding it by accident.
While it’s sort of a weird feeling, I don’t really see any grounds for outrage. Putting something up on the web is publishing. If I’d written and published a memoir about my family life, an academic writer wouldn’t need my permission to quote it. Even though we know that what we put on the web is public and we’ve probably all agonized about issues of privacy with our blogs, I don’t think we are used to thinking of it as published work the same way a book or article it is. But within the academic world it’s perfectly acceptable to treat it that way.
I wish there had been more context given, and more discussion of the degree to which the blogging persona is a construct of the writer. What I reveal about myself and my family on my blog is exactly what I choose to reveal, and I create the portrait of myself I want out there — just as the writer of a memoir does. Without some discussion of this element, the thesis seemed a little thin to me.
Bubandpie, I went through it looking for a part where she talked about why she didn’t contact the bloggers — I expected it would be in her methodology section — but didn’t find it, so I’ll have to reread to look for that. I think it might have been a courtesy, though by no means required, but I also think that we bloggers have to toughen up about the reality that we are, in fact, publishing our lives, and what’s published is fair game for quoting, analysis, and even misunderstanding and abuse.
Oh, and I totally agree with Sherry’s point about the research being lazy. She picked random posts and described what we were writing about in those, rather than trying to get a “big picture” sense of how a writer followed through with a particular issue or theme in her life (which wouldn’t have been so hard to do).
Part of the problem with the methodology of the thesis was that I don’t think the writer ever figured out whether she was doing a sociology of bloggers or a literary analysis of their texts. To the extent that it was the latter, I’m on fairly sure ground when I say that it isn’t standard ethical practice for literary critics to warn/contact/interview authors. I don’t know as much about ethics in the social sciences, but my impression is that sociologists and psychologists are allowed to do purely observational studies without attaining the permission of their “subjects” – i.e. if people are out there doing something in public, you’re allowed to observe them and analyse those observations, and for those studies to have validity, you have to interact as little as possible with those you’re observing. If, on the other hand, you ask people to do something as part of a study, you have to inform your participants that they are in a study and there are various ethical guidelines for what has to be disclosed. Either way, it doesn’t seem at all likely that this thesis violated ethical guidelines on scholarly research.
I see a PhD thesis in the blog reaction to the MA.
And Dani, I am sorry if I breached your blog rules. I refrained from twittering and came here for the civil discourse so the last thing I want to do is turn it into a scream fest.
My point was that this is especially ironic given that so many of the participants blog about their children without their permission.
If you abide by the standards they’re proposing, they should take it offline until the children reach the age of majority and grant permission and offer their perspectives on everything.
Anyway, fascinating thread.
I’m new to blogging and am a daddy, not a mommy. However i am the one who alerted Andrea to the uncomplimentary post about her article. Just in case there were any crinkled noses out there about my comment to Andrea…..it was a reference to something that was said about her in the critical blog. She is not dating a misogynist….LOL
I won’t go into the underlying issues as I couldn’t possibly add anything more intelligent than the various things that have already been said. I just wanted to say that this is a great discussion (heated though it may be at times) and i’ve really enjoyed it.
The discussion of her decision not to contact the bloggers is on p. 27-28 of the thesis, and she cites V. Serfati as back-up for the claim that bloggers are not participants but rather authors. Nothing she says here would prevent her from contacting you guys after the project was complete, but that may have been a matter of not thinking anyone would ever read it or care.
Know what I love best about “mommybloggers”? Stuff like this … there are so many brilliant bloggers and readers and everyone adding in their two cents is creating such a more complex and interesting discussion!
And Dani, you made me laugh when you said, “See, I don’t even need outsiders to point out my own inconsistencies.” – That’s why we keep coming back — your honesty and humour.
I’m finding this whole discussion really interesting. My first reaction was “how dare she” but that is really just my own emotional bias.
Its hard not to have an emotional reaction when you see your words and thoughts analyzed and/or judged. But does that mean it doesn’t happen everyday? Your readers regularly make judgments about you – they don’t always write about it but they’re constantly doing it. Have you ever stopped reading a blog because you didn’t like something about that blog or the writer? We deal in the written word and because of that it can be easy for things to be misconstrued. I remember once commenting on someone’s blog that I was sorry that a trip they were taking was so horrible and she hated being in (the particular) country so much, only to be emailed back by the writer asking what I was talking about – although she was struggling with a few things she was loving her travels. I took her words and tone very differently. If the thesis autor had lauded you as an amazing mother would you feel differently?
She doesn’t have to contact you because she’s not writing about you as a person – she’s writing about the “you” character on your blog – the character you write. She has interpreted you from your own words, just because you disagree with her interpretation doesn’t mean that isn’t how she (and possibly others) saw it.
That said from a personal point of view I get it. I’ve had my words publicly misconstrued and it hurts. It also made me think hard about what I’m putting out there. I don’t have an answer yet but this just further illustrates some of the good and bad things about blogging.
(I haven’t read all 61 comments – so I am sorry if what say is redundant).
As personnal as a blog can be, it is never the whole picture. there’s two things bugging me here, but then maybe it’s just one :
She didn’t mention to the authors that she was going to do so – although if it was only an exercise on writing genre, it would be OK – and then she determines who the bloggers ‘are’, not taking in consideration the personna that comes with public wirting – the it happens to me but may be not quite like this. Plus it would be pretty boring if this was really a daily journal on everything that happened today. Hence, showing the whole world how she does not understand what are the filters in public commmunication. A major flaw that seems to have go through her evaluation by all those advisors.The analysis of genre and the extention onto personnal lifes are two seperate things. She should have stick to the first part.
If she really wanted to make personnal conclusions on the bloggers, she should have done interview with them. A sometime long and fastidious exercise, but who said writing a master was a piece of cake?
Okay, seriously, can y’all stop being so interesting? Cuz I cannot get anything done over here for refreshing and reading your comments.
If you’re still as engaged in this as I am, don’t miss Julie’s post with the spectacular title of “Dani is Feeling Indignant.” http://www.julieharrison.ca/living/dani-is-feeling-indignant/
Guess what a blog used to be? A diary. And people kept their diaries to themselves. If you’re putting it all out there, you cannot control how people intrepret the info, what they do with it, or the security of your family. You are also choosing to surrender your privacy in many respects.
While I have not (and have no plans to) read the thesis, and while I thoroughly enjoy and rely on your blog (and many others) as a source of entertainment, I would never, ever in my life be able to expose my family in the way that you do. Some things are sacred.
I have also wondered (often) where you find the hours upon hours to create and maintain all of these projects? If I am wasting 20-30 minutes every couple of days to skim these blogs, how much time are your taking away from your children, your work, and your physical health to do all of this?
Did you ever realize that, by blogging about the thesis, you have just drawn a ridiculous amount of attention to it? Or maybe that’s the point. The blog is all about you, all the time. But, unlike the old-fashion diary, you are sharing it with the world and are quite addicted to the “feedback” and interest of others.
Just my two cents. I have been reading you for about two years, check your blog 3-4 times a week, and find it incredibly entertaining. I think I am also just fascinated by how willing you are to open your life up to complete strangers. I guess I am part of the “problem” because I keep tuning in…this really deserves a broader social discussion, don’t ya think?
Hi Molly who doesn’t leave any contact info. For what it’s worth, a blog never “used to be” a diary. My diary never talked back, never corrected my misconceptions and expanded my horizons, never made me feel a part of a larger community, and NEVER made me feel awkward and embarrassed about something that’s usually a lot of fun for me.
What do you care what choices I make about how I prioritize things in my life? I’m gracious enough to put everything out there, the least you can do is be nice about it. I wouldn’t say you’re a part of the “problem” because for one, there is no “problem” and for another, until today I’d never heard of you so I’m certainly not doing this for you.
Can we please get back to the respectfulness that we were all so proud of a few minutes ago?
/snarky defensive response
I may be in a bit of minority position here, as I”m reading about this issue here (and on twitter) both as a blogger and an academic who sometimes supervises MA theses. I’ve not read the thesis yet, but it sounds like there are places where the student’s analysis is weak–not enough contextualization, not careful enough reading, errors in presentation–and that the student has reached conclusions that seem to the bloggers involved to be wrong.
Despite Phantom’s praise of an academic who contacted her to see if it was OK to use the comments there as part of a study, I don’t think that the student had any obligation to contact any of the bloggers in advance. (Sure, she could have, and she could have framed a project that asked for the writers’ comments as another data source–that sort of method would have needed review by an ethics board. But the use of text that’s already published and openly available doesn’t require any ethics review by a board.) I supervised a thesis a couple of years ago where a student analyzed 4 blogs by college-age gay male writers, looking at how they represented their queer identities in their blogs. It never occurred to me to suggest that my student contact the authors. And frankly, as a thesis supervisor I didn’t read all the blog posts, either. I read some, but not all, of my student’s background source material; I did look at each of the blogs and often asked questions as my student drafted that pointed him back into the blogs and secondary literature to explore his analysis more. I hope my own commetns pushed his analysis in right and smart directions (and I can say that his analysis all stuck closer to the text of the blogs–I don’t think there were big leaps into generalizations about the writer’s lives outside the blog!) As I read this discussion, I’m wondering whether those bloggers would consider themselves fairly represented (which is a whole ‘nother area of writing ethics–and one that is not really regulated by universities, although one that should be addressed by writers).
I’m curious, Dani, what you want SFSU to take responsibility for. My take on it, from what I’ve read so far, is that this thesis might not have been very good. And I’ve supervised some student work that’s not always very good; there are lots of reasons for that, and sometimes, it’s hard to guide particular students to develop particular projects better.
Let me be clear: I completely understand why you, Dani, and the other bloggers would feel wrongly portrayed, misunderstood, and trivialized; I don’t mean to trivialize your reactions, and were I in Ottawa I’d be offering to bring over a big pot of coffee or jug of wine and talk about all the problems here. Sounds like this student could have realized her project with much, much better quality. But strictly speaking, I don’t see that she did anything she shouldn’t have been permitted to do.
Just because you’re not doing this for me or because you haven’t heard from me before is irrelevant. I’ve been here for years. If that doesn’t freak you out (particularly as a parent), I feel sorry for you.
I will remove you from my favourites and will not bother you again. I was just being 100% honest, but it would appear (once again) that you are not open to negative comments. If it’s not praise or some sort of freebie, you’re just not into it.
Not much to add here. I guess, I keep coming back to the right thing to do, (and perhaps more rigourous academically) would have been to contact the bloggers in questions and see how right she was.
I’m not sure about the ethics of the thing. But I think it is different to look at a literary work, or a research paper and study the findings, than to look at a blog and draw (erroneous) conclusions. It seems to me that this is really lazy. She’s missing one of the key elements of blogging. The feedback and interaction.
Maybe contat SFU and ask them about it. See what they say… more out of curiosity’s sake.
It’s a big Internet, Molly. There are lots of great bloggers out there and I’m sure you’ll find something more to your tastes elsewhere.
(Ha: captcha = director treaties. Guess this reply won’t get me that diplomatic posting I’ve been coveting.)
Susan, you know what, I’m really not sure what I would have expected from SFU. As this conversation has evolved, and through the perspective of my friends in the academic community, I can’t really see where any ethical wrong has been done worthy of complaint to the University. I might find it distasteful and unfortunate, but I don’t now think that it was inherently wrong.
And heck, it has given me a great conversation here!
I was just reading Trudy’s post about this at http://www.hypergraffiti.com and asked her if she thought that perhaps her perspective was different because she is a published author. Her blog might be (to her) a part of her larger body of work, and hence she would be expecting review and analysis where bloggers like you, Dani, would not.
I think that is part of what keeps twigging me about this subject. When you review or analyze literature you are examining a work that was created as a whole, with the author editing and shaping her arguments/stories to suit a theme, argument or idea. When the work is done the author expects people to examine it. A blogger (at least one who is not an author otherwise) is creating the narrative entry by entry and is not expecting their work to be examined in that way. I think part of the ‘creepy’ feeling that result is from having an informal (although published) work, treated as a formal work, as though it had been crafted with a specific purpose (other than recording a life) in mind.
Sure, some blogs are created with specific stories in mind, but they aren’t put together in the same way as an autobiography and it was suprising when they were judged on those criteria.
Ironically, the criticisms in Molly’s post are exactly those from which the thesis attempts to defend bloggers. The writer talks extensively about the double standard applied to bloggers on privacy issues: even Kathie Lee Gifford, who talked about her children ad nauseum every morning on television for decades, seem to feel that bloggers were exposing their children to a problematic level of public scrutiny. The best parts of the thesis are those that scrutinize the public discourse about blogging and point out that writers have always mined their lives for material and no one seems to raise these concerns about writers who include their children in memoirs published in book form.
As for the time issue, again, having read the thesis this morning, the obvious answer is fresh in my mind: those who criticize mom bloggers for taking time away from their work and/or children seem to believe that moms should devote all their temporal and emotional resources to others, taking nothing for themselves. Most moms – even those who don’t blog – have time to spend on hobbies like gardening, scrapbooking, etc. And that’s the way it should be.
Dani, I’m so sorry that you are upset by this. I would be upset too if my writing were taken out of context, and if lazy assumptions were made about me or my family life. I have to admit, though, that I don’t fully understand your position. I have written a thesis before and I used information that was in the public domain, and I never would have thought to contact the authors. I’m afraid I’m just a bit confused…
Best to you.
Bea, amen. Thanks for that!
Finola, I’m not upset. It’s not the fact that she used my blog entries, but the way she inferred things about me as a person and my life and my family based on those entries, and then wrapped up all that in a thin but detectable judgmentalism. That’s what bugs me, exactly what you said – things were taken out of context, stripped of nuance or humour or sarcasm, and used to make what I think are vaguely unpleasant assumptions about my life. But I’m not wailing and gnashing my teeth over it — I’m just a little creeped out by it.
(But I’m thrilled for the blog fodder! Seems a reasonable exchange to me!)
whoa. i have to go think about this some more before i can come up with something intelligent to say.
(i do think it’s contingent on how a blog is defined. if it’s considered as a literary text, then what the student did was fair game, if rather uninteresting and uninspired.)
So, although I only used one tweeted hashtag to ask journalists a question about what their policy is….now I’m a bully? Interesting. Any of my other tweets on this subject were in reply to friends of mine who were in obvious distress and I sent them links to resources. Since they were my friends I wanted to help them, and to defend them. They did not know where to turn. Journalism for example, has different standards than literature review and that has different standards than sociological studies and no it wasn’t clear what this was, nor what others are perceiving it to be.
For example, journalists who emailed and DMed me after I asked said that they always ask for a response to an article, and would not be allowed that much excerpting, ever. The general rule is 27 words in a row, though it isn’t hard and fast. As much as she had? Nope.
Intellectual property exists, and it must be respected. A scraper site cannot simply lift the entire text of my posts, and neither can anyone else. Small quotes are not vast stretches of text or paraphrasing entire sections that suit the lifter.
I asked a prof friend last night and another one this am and they had mixed responses, though both agreed it was poorly written and lazy. My friend last night is a history prof, in the current era, and he said that any thesis in which the living person was not contacted and interviewed, especially in biographical writing was an automatic fail in his class. Blogs, books, public figures, anything, you try to get a comment or an interview if not with them, then with people near them. Context is everything. The prof this morning disagreed and said that it would depend on whether or not the writer was reviewing a work of literature or analyzing the group phenomenon in a sociological manner. As a literature review, she would not mind if the person had not contacted the writer, but the context had to be clear, since she is one prof who checks sources. As a sociological study? We both agreed that the thesis writer had violated the norms of the group. Ethical? Depends on how SFU defines the communications department and the course advisors. She thought it was rude, but not against university policy.
And as an e-patient, yes this is all relevant because there is a very large debate going on about everything from electronic health records to how doctors and patients and medical personnel interact online. I know friends who have posted to message boards for support during an illness and been found by nurses lurking there and denied health care. The nurses said they were studying the issues, except they weren’t. They were spying, and snooping on their own patients. Professional colleges are now seeing complaints like this and so are medical schools and EHR providers.
Public areas exist, but there are always degrees. Observing someone from a physical distance in a public park is very different than walking up to a small group sitting together in a park and sticking your head in the middle of everyone and listening. Public for Britney Spears is not the same as public for me. There are degrees and Dani isn’t Dooce, and I’m not Dani.
This is a legitimate public debate whether the thesis author wants it to be or not. Academic institutions are having it, but apparently not in this department of this university. And they should. At what point is it violating the social norms of a group? At what point are they harming their subjects by engaging in this analysis without any discussion.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/323/7321/1103
I linked to this last night quickly, but there are many many more scholarly articles discussing the issue. This isn’t new. A critical point in this? That sometimes by merely observing without delurking, if the participants find out later, the community is destroyed.
If destroying the subject of your research when you engage in the act of research isn’t worthy of academic ethical scrutiny, I’m really not sure what else is. I cannot imagine a more important debate for a university to have.
And yes, I want universities to do that, SFU included.
As for the personal attacks on me, Susan? My husband laughed when I read it aloud. He doesn’t care, what business is it of yours. Interesting that you mention my in-laws though. The only place I’ve written about them recently was to a journalist who would not say this, and on a political blog, Red Tory.
Susan, I do also associate with large numbers of political bloggers and tweeters that cross communities and yes, there are lots of instances of hate speech and lawsuits and things that fly back and forth with that crowd. I debate with them. I enjoy it, and they enjoy it. And yes when the disabled are attacked, as recently happened, I have said, gee, “that TV program should be prosecuted for hate speech if they are holding up a person with a stutter to ridicule.” Then I asked “if they were being attacked or just discussed?” I’ll stand by defending disabled people til the day I die.
If people don’t want to see political debate, they can unfollow me. Their choice.
I act very differently towards mombloggers and infertility bloggers and other personal bloggers. I defend them, I help them, I get help and support and love from them, they are my people, and if they need help, I will do whatever I can to help them.
The thesis writer may not want to be criticized or have her research questioned. In which case I suggest she stay off the internet. Because I hear that happens. In fact, I’m told I should expect it.
Been reading through all the interesting discussions that have gone on since I last posted. Love that there have been so many thoughtful responses and that (barring a few odd comments here and there) the tone has been wonderfully civil. This is what I love about blogs as opposed to Twitter, where it’s hard to explain the complexities of how you really feel in a mere 140 characters.
Wow. What I love about people like Molly is all of this:
1. She’s one of those people who believes that bloggers LITERALLY put everything in our lives online, therefore “exposing” ourselves and our families. People like this will never understand that most blogs are only a sliver of the full picture.
2. I always love the people who gasp about how we’re taking so much time away from our kids by blogging. A blog post takes me 20 minutes at the most. If my children can’t survive for 20 minutes without my undivided attention, I don’t know what to say. Besides, I tend to do my posts on my blog in the evenings more often than not, which is when my children are asleep. How is that taking away time from my children? (Unless I’m perhaps expected to watch my kids sleep all night too.)
3. Continuing on with that train of thought it also plays along with that ridiculous idea that mothers should not have any interests outside of their family members. God forbid we have hobbies or passions that don’t start and end with our kids. My parents continued to hone their own interests after I was born and I’m glad they did; it helped me to learn that they were people, not robots who took care of me every second of the day.
Then again, if Molly doesn’t blog herself, perhaps she’s just delusional and thinks that it takes 3 hours to put together a blog post.
(BTW, the highlight of this thesis is that in reading it I discovered this blog. Why I didn’t know about it before I could not say, but I’m glad to have found it and will read from here on out!)
Actually, the more I think about this controversy — and I’ve been thinking about it a lot today, along with “creepily” and obsessively refreshing this comment thread — the more I think my initial reaction was too weak.
I’ve noticed that often people who claim to be quoted out of context really aren’t, they just want a story told exactly as they would tell it. We’ve seen precious few concrete examples of what the thesis writer actually got wrong. Rather, there’s been a lot of generalization about how she missed nuance, humour etc. Uncharitably, that could be interpreted as “she didn’t find me as witty as I really am.”
Ultimately, a lot of this has been calls to shut down someone with a perspective not one’s own, calling her names (which she, I might add, did not do to her subjects) and attempting to bully and intimidate with questionable appeals to authority and a creepy hashtag.
And in response to Aurelia Cotta who writes, “The thesis writer may not want to be criticized or have her research questioned. In which case I suggest she stay off the internet. Because I hear that happens. In fact, I’m told I should expect it,” you’re 100% right. The thesis writer will be judged on her thesis while the twitter mob will be judged on their #creepythesis hashtag and their bullying behaviour.
Since tomorrow is another day and a working one at that, I will not comment on this any further other than to say there is NOTHING, ZERO, NADA in any fair use/ fair dealing law or ruling that in any way disallows what the thesis writer did. And that’s a good thing that as a citizen of a democracy I’m very happy about.
Goodnight and thanks for the space to have my say.
Yes, I hear what you’re saying for sure. And you are right about starting a great debate too – look at you, 80 or so comments
Out of curiosity, I sought out and read the thesis.
The one thing that stood out to me is precisely what Trudy has already spoken of so eloquently on her blog. (http://trudymorgancole.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/creepy-thesis/)
I’d be hard pressed to go back over my own blog posts to find one that didn’t have at least a bit of exaggeration, hyperbole or even an outright lie in it. Although I use my blog mainly as a type of scrapbook – as stated in my “profile” – I also write to entertain (myself and anyone who happens to read it). I found it a bit odd that the author of the thesis appeared to assume that everything she read on a blog was the God’s honest unvarnished truth.
Knowing that I write the way I do, I’m really the opposite. I pretty much assume that anything I read online, whether in a blog or elsewhere, is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Well, well, well…I go offline for the weekend, and look what happens! Goodness…I do not have time to read said “thesis” (or most of the 80 comments posted here) tonight, but I did take a quick scan. Dani…how are you holding up? I agree that you should feel violated. Whether the author had a requirement to contact you or not (and I guess she didn’t), no one can tell you how to feel about this whole situation. It was very kind of you to host the debate that followed, even the dissenters. Very kind indeed. Thinking of you.
I read the thesis and what upset me the most was how poorly written it was.
But I also said on Haley-O’s blog that I think the author missed the point. Our blogs our not “us,” the are one part of us. And I think she totally missed that.
I would be flattered, then completely freaked out. You all should have been notified (after publishing) as she used your real names and not aliases.
I find it interesting how people like Molly seem to think that we moms do nothing but raise kids. At one time, I cross stitched in front of the TV. Then I tried crochet. I scrap booked for awhile, and sometimes went out for dinner with friends.
Now I blog. It does take time…but then the kids might be in bed, or they could be at a friend’s house. I don’t watch TV.
Are our blogs about us, all the time? No. Many bloggers use our writing to bring attention to important issues (like Nestle!), raise awareness (March of Dimes, Friends of Maddie, Redneck Mommy on adoption and disabled kids, Her Bad Mother re: her nephew Tanner, YOU re: infertility, ME re: dyspraxia, and so many more!), support each other (Anissa Mayhew, Stephanie Neilson, Heather and Mike Spohr). It’s unfair to lump bloggers into a box and assume we’re neglecting our kids to get attention and monetary gain online. Maybe some do, but I don’t know any.
Blogging is about community. Our blogs are our creative space. We talk about ourselves and our families like we would over coffee; revealing some, but never all. Some is ramped up for entertainment sake, some is never said.
I ALWAYS have my 14 yo’s and my husband’s permission. If I didn’t blog, I’d write the old fashioned way, and I’m sure you would too. Don’t let someone who doesn’t understand the art (yes, it’s an ART) take that away from you, Dani. Molly just doesn’t get it; and I kinda feel sorry for her.
(captcha: the sunbeam) *grin*
The more I thought about her thesis and reread the methodology – I thought, ok, the literary criticism angle is fair game. However; I think the conclusions that she drew say more about the author than the bloggers themselves.
Now, perhaps Dani, you “main narrative” back in 2007? (I haven’t gone back through your archives) – maybe potty training did factor in heavily to your online “character”. Is there anything wrong with that? No. However, you narrative, (like many others) changes as your kids grow up, you return to work, and make other life choices. So, I feel like she’s drawn conclusions based on an unfinished work. Of course, here I am judging her based on only reading snippets of her work!
Now, isn’t that really what blogs are all about? We all draw our own conclusions about an author based on one post, one week etc. and what keeps us all coming back is to keep getting more clues as to who the “real” blogger is. I do think she missed some key elements of how people “read” blogs.
And I admit, I only read her analysis of your blog and I do feel that it came off rather “I’m in my ivory tower and you are ‘in the home’ working on #1 and #2″. When in reality, what is so unfeminist-y about teaching someone a life skill to empower them towards greater independence. Being a mom is about empowering a new little person and that narrative shouldn’t be so rudely dismissed.
Just sayin’
Oops, I should grammar check before posting comments at 6am. Mom fail.
I was sitting right beside Haley when she got the email from you about this. And she was visibly upset before she even knew what was written in it.
In the end, I think it would be good to let SFU’s research ethics people know that if you are going to write about the lives of bloggers, to do analysis without letting them know, they’re going to potentially get upset.
I think if I was a member of an ethics commitee, I’d like to know that. Something to consider for the future.
PS – I really do disagree with the characterization of the discussion on twitter (esp. #creepythesis) as bullying. It was an emotional but also tongue-in-cheek and fun discussion. I guess people find it hard to see the humour in our writing, huh?
The thesis creeped me out, too. I imagine if I was one of the bloggers she was referring to at length, it would bother me – especially because no permission was granted first to use your blog as an example. I’m sure, if she had the decency to email you – not hard to do, as your email address is on your blog – you might have agreed to her using your blog in her thesis. I think your work – your blog – is your published work, and permissions should be granted before using at length your ‘life’ in her paper. Ick. And i don’t like her conclusions, either, or how she made ‘mommybloggers’ sounds. We are all SO different, and we all write for different reasons. I didn’t like her thesis at all. And I do hope she reads this post and the comments.
I guess I’m a bit late to the party but I found the thesis kind of interesting reading that deteriorated quickly into a collection of almost randomly tied together quotes. I don’t think she crossed any ethical lines, but at first she’s walking a very fine line between fair-use quoting and plagarism. But then I got to the controversial chapter 4. It seems out of place to me and it’s definitely the part of the thesis where the author’s biases show most clearly. Part of it is vocabulary issue – characterizing things as “smug”, “probably related to her eating disorder” and “just a day job” isn’t the sort of comment that smacks of rigorous academic thought to me. I don’t follow most of the blogs “reviewed” but I wouldn’t personally assume that a blogger who has season’s passes to an amusement park has above average income. Said passes could have been obtained as a perk for blogging, could have been a gift or simply a reflection of putting money towards something that is highly valued and considered a priority for that family. If you read the small snippets of life I post on my blog you’d probably conclude we were rich, but our lifestyle is more a reflection of deliberate financial choices and sacrifices in other areas. (Eg Our annual household clothes budget is less than what some people will spend on a single sweater.)
There are also odd random thoughts that pop up: she’d like people to discuss “why the mother always takes the full parental leave”. If she’s really interested in that question, I bet Stats Can has actual statistics (and it’s not mothers 100%, fathers 0%). Certainly mothers take the parental leave more often in part because employers are better about allowing it, in part for cultural reasons and in part because of the breastfeeding thing at the beginning.
Finally: “Why do mommybloggers blog?” Apparently to “subvert dominant ideologies concerning motherhood”. Oookay then. Here I thought I was doing it primarily because my family and friends refuse to all live in the same city and it’s a more modern version of the newsletters we used to pass around when I was a kid and living overseas (away from most of my family).
Thanks again for everyone who has contributed to this conversation! Reading your reactions has been very insightful for me, and my perspective has been evolving with each new comment.
I’m still on the fence as to whether any ethical breaches have been made, in no small part because mine is a lowly undergraduate degree so I’ve been relying on my friends in higher ed for context.
However, and getting back to my realm of expertise, I think this is another great example of the fact that the pace of social media adoption has far outstripped our ability to quantify and qualify our “rules” around it. Wonder how this would have played out if someone did the same sort of content analysis on someone’s FB status updates?
One other point I meant to mention in my original post is that I love the irony of the fact that she stated one of her thesis points was to discern who the “real” mommybloggers are — and in fact this whole conversation proves that the blogs themselves are a woefully inadequate tool for answering that particular question.
Ya got to give her credit, though — any topic that inspires in excess of 100 comments and tweets across a handful of blogs is definitely worth discussing!
I don’t think she crossed any ethical lines. However, as a courtesy she should have contacted you the bloggers since it’s very easy to do. When I skimmed through the thesis on Saturday night I quickly realized that it was poorly written. Odd considering she’s in communications. That aside, it’s strange to make conclusions based on what the bloggers have written. Of course bloggers don’t include everything in their posts. They typically write about the funny, most happy, interesting and sometimes sad events in their lives. A lot of editing is done. A blog post is just a glimpse. Without talking to the blog writers I don’t think she got a really good glimpse into your lives.
I’m the Anonymous comment. I realize I have some grammatical boo-boos; blame it on being Monday.
So, this is my thesis. I’ve been talking with Dani and I just wanted to say hello and thank you all for the very interesting discussion.
Well, I was away all weekend, and was mightily surprised to return to find such a brouhaha here! I certainly like you Dani, and can see where you’re coming from and everything I read from you is tempered by your dimples, in my mind’s eye.
After enjoying a leisurely lunchtime reading through your post and the comments and links and working my way through the thesis, I’ve only come up with this:
The problem, as I see it, is not in any ethical misconduct, invasion of privacy, ignorance of blogging, narrow vision, poor use of grammar or in anything other than that she’s made many value judgments and has leapt to occasionally wrong conclusions and didn’t stick strictly to critical analysis. For just one example, see p. 104/105:
“Here we see a shift in Cook’s perspective; however, it seems unfortunate that when she realizes that she cannot do it all (something some of the other mommybloggers never bought into; see for example, Dani’s blog), she thinks about dropping one of the things that is most important to her (her writing), instead of dropping something less important (breadmaking) or asking her husband to help out more.”
And I’d like to get all up in arms too, as a mother and feminist and as someone who blogged and has defended blogging as a folk art and who loves to write. And, as someone who’s never had secondary education I’d think that someone bucking for a degree suggesting however obliquely that a subject ask her husband to help out more within the course a thesis is totally out of place. I just think, well, simply – it sucks. But it’s not our job to correct her thesis, and that sucks too. We’re intelligent people and know she should have done better. We’re mothers, for the most part, and feminists and nice people and bloggers and want other women to do their best and succeed – and she somehow failed us all with this, and some specifically.
But then too, I also think – what does this do, in the end, other than generate lots of discussion that ultimately goes nowhere much and changes very little? The thesis has been around for some time now, and never impacted you until you read it. You can’t un-read it, and un-feel your agitation, I get that; and now that you’re aware of these slight injustices I can imagine that you’re forecasting a time when someone might call up your permanent record and this will be on it right next to the time you put bubble gum under the seat in fourth grade – but so far, it’s only ego.
The author of the thesis clearly stated too “… I did not read the blogs extensively prior to selecting them.” So, I’d be curious to see if she’s still reading. THAT, I think, would be the most interesting outcome, and would actually have some value – the opportunity for a proper defense to comments made; and perhaps an education on the politics, mores and other conventions of blogging for herself in the process of that. And while she doesn’t have to care about the subjects for the purposes of her thesis, you don’t easily get to say things like “So give up breadmaking or ask your husband to help.” and not get called on it somehow, sometime, in this world. And for those who think of blogging as a conversation amongst friends, your child’s diarrhea is never TMI.
As you’ve said twice – it’s fodder. But my dictionary says of fodder:
fod·der (fdr)
n.
1. Feed for livestock, especially coarsely chopped hay or straw.
2. Raw material, as for artistic creation.
3. A consumable, often inferior item or resource that is in demand and usually abundant supply
After almost two hours of trying to sift through the bullshit to see what the bull ate, I haven’t found anything of substance. She had a thesis that wasn’t brilliant enough to prevent criticism. It isn’t artistic enough to be truly controversial, it’s just annoying. And her thesis and what it generated is perfect for those of us who consume blogs; and comments (like mine) are in abundant supply.
So yes it’s fodder, but it’s not food for thought. Those who were mentioned within it and who are reading all this now aren’t livestock – they are smart, interesting women and at some point we all need to stop feeding frenzies like this and I, for one, won’t get these two hours back and have the same kind of hangovery feeling that I get on December 26, January 2, February 15 and other random dates when it all seemed like a great idea at the time but I should have left the party while I was still having fun.
That, and I personally believe Mommyblogging is a proper noun, and it and its derivations and ought to have been capitalized throughout.
Hey there. Checking back in… don’t have time to read comments, but wanted to let you know that I asked my research colleagues here at the office about this and here was their take.
First, in their opinion, that her not contacting you was completely appropriate, because to do so in the beginning could slant her analysis. As in, any of you could go back and change posts, alter things etc. And they also felt it was appropriate to cull the blogs, because it would be like looking through a newspaper – because they were published publicly.
However, IF she were to publish the work in a journal or any publication and she was quoting you AND your work was copyrighted (which I see in at least Dani’s case it is), THEN she should contact you at that point for permission. Before that, nope.
As for the part where you felt she was making gross assumptions, they didn’t want to weigh in without reading it themselves, but they felt it sounded like she was doing qualitative not quantitative analysis. When we do this, we have a software program that goes through and matches occurrences of phrases and words and subject matter and helps the researcher put together strings of ideas, and she may have used that. Or she may have not. It sounded like you felt like her assumptions were way off base, so I have no idea.
Anyway, some more 2 cents.
This whole incident has been fascinating for me. Thank you Dani, for giving us this space, and to you all for the discussion, particularly Bea and others for the academic insight.
As a nascent blogger, whose professional interest is in privacy, you can kinda see where my excitement was aroused by this whole brouhaha. I was first very intrigued (forgive me!) about what was actually said about the bloggers in the thesis and what impact the commentary and publicity would have on the studied bloggers. Big questions in the privacy world centre on what the expectations are in this new age of user generated content – what is the new reasonable person test going to be in terms of what is private, public, etc for web-published material? From the sounds of the discussion, I think you all managed pretty well, and, with a little help from friends, have (more or less) come to terms with what clearly initially felt like a violation of your rights.
But then, as someone who is just plain intrigued by blogging and the phenomenon it is, I became very interested in the purported thesis of the paper. (So in my excitement about this topic, please forgive me if I continue to reiterate what many have already said!) I say purported, because, as has been pointed out, it wasn’t borne out particularly well. I would have loved to see her draw some viable conclusions from what she did read. Her proposed thesis about whether Mommyblogs are dialogic spaces was well started but petered right out. (Of course, you don’t need 100 pages to answer it; we can all do it in one word – YES). A better question might have been what kind of dialogic space is this, how is it different/ the same from the way the term has been used in theoretic works before… etc. (Academics – would I have got a better mark if I could have followed through with that approach?)
I’m imagining the author became sidetracked and bemused by the content she found, and, unable to tidily wrap it up, included way too much summary of the material and conjecture about the writers. Very unfortunate.
I have some real sympathy for the writer, who has wandered into a huge body of work. I really wanted to think about how she could have made any kind of intelligent comment whatsoever. Unfortunate as many of her judgments about the writers were, they were all doomed to suffer from the simple fact that she didn’t read the whole work. Can you imagine doing a literary criticism on selected chapters of a very long book? That doesn’t seem right to me! To make meaningful criticism about (for instance) how division of labour is not included, she really needed to read every post – because how can her sampling process create a decent view of the blogs? If she were to read every word, how could she possibly create any kind of summary of the narrative in the work, or draw sufficiently few central themes to make a readable argument?
But I digress. I really wanted to share a story. I’ll save that for my blog, not as a teaser, but because I’ve used enough space here!
Oh, and Dani, at least 2 of the commenters have used the thesis author’s last name in their comments. From the discussion, there seemed to be a pretty strong desire not to identify the author here, but I don’t know if you wanted to leave it up to individual commenters, ensure that didn’t happen in your space, or mention it to them… or whatever.
@Moosilaneous, Fleming freely uses my name. I feel within my rights, since it is from a publicly available published work under her own name, to use hers. I am, after all, all about authenticity and have no problem standing behind my words and I’m sure Fleming is comfortable standing behind her own words.
I have to agree with Scattered Mom’s comment above. I haven’t read the thesis, and I haven’t read through all these comments, but I have to say that I can’t agree that analyzing your blog without your permission is an ethical violation. Literary analysis does not require us to contact the authors of the novels we discuss, regardless of the quality of our analysis. A blog is a self-published work of literature; it is open to interpretation just as a novel is. I too would be creeped out in your position, but it sounds like it’s the thesis author’s misinterpretations, not her ethics, that are the issue here.
Oh, I firmly agree, Leanne, its just that earlier, there seemed to be some discussion on whether or not the author would find the discussion since her name wasn’t used – although in fact she had already found it!!
Please ignore my comments – I was offline writing while events unfolded…
Always a little behind the curve, I am!
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