Doing research and collecting data online is not the same as offline. This chapter discusses the wide range of possible ethical conflicts we are confronted with when we do Internet research, as well as how and in which cases existing ethical guidelines may be difficult to apply when our research field is online. It is also discusses how research ethics may be reconsidered: how we may think about, reason and make decisions when doing ethnographic Internet research. Above all, it illustrates the importance of reflecting and being conscious of our role as researchers and about the consequences that our research may have.
Western democracies have seen a decreased participation in activities traditionally associated with political participation. One aspect of participating politically is to keep up-to-date with what happens in society, for example, by following the news. Here, youth have been found to be less active than older generations. The decline in young people’s consumption of news media does not necessarily mean that they are disinterested in news or politics; they may get their information from other sources, for example, social media. Using a qualitative multi-method approach, this article investigates how young people who are interested in civic and political issues, and who regularly access news from various sources, experience and understand, specifically, Facebook and Twitter as sources of news about public affairs. The participants appreciated the immediateness of social media news, and felt that it could provide insights into new perspectives and make news stories feel more relevant. However, it was also experienced as one-sided, fragmented, and subjective, giving a biased, or even false, image of what happens in society. The consumption of news was strongly related to the idea of being a “good” citizen. However, since the participants did not regard social media news as “real news,” their image of themselves as citizens suffered. If young people in general resemble our participants in this respect, research that asks about their news consumption runs a risk of getting answers that underestimate it, thus reinforcing the idea that young people are less interested and informed about public affairs than is actually the case.
In 2015, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) released a new youth series, Skam, which was acclaimed for its accurate portrayal of Norwegian teenagers but, above all, for its distribution as a transmedia narrative spreading content across several platforms. Through focus-group interviews, this article investigates how Swedish Skam viewers took part in the content and perceived the role and relation between the platforms. While the interviewees followed Skam in different ways, they nevertheless accepted and appreciated the transmedia format. While they argued that the core content needed to be video based, other content was also seen as a natural part of the series and essential in building the narrative. Furthermore, the idea of contemporary media consumption as being less constrained by time and space was partly contradicted. Especially real-time content and discussions with peers motivated the participants to abide by a new kind of TV schedule, reminiscent of TV viewing practices of the past.
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