Negotiating Privacy in Posting from Mediatised Events (and Researching Them)

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Esther Hammelburg, who uses ethnographic as well as digital methods to study mediatised events. For such events, this work might include online and on-the-ground observations; screenshots of Instagram stories; Instagram posts themselves, as gathered via the API when it was still available; media diaries; and interviews with participants.

People engaging in these events post online partly simply in order to show the world that they are there – here, the aim is to create posts that are as permanent and public as possible, especially in the context of public events such as Pride Parades where participants also feel like ambassadors for their communities. Such activity is also designed to boost the visibility of the events and their associated hashtags, too.

In other contexts, participants want to demonstrate their presence in a more fun yet ephemeral way only to their close connections. This involves sharing only in semi-private groups, although even for such groups it may be unknowable to them exactly how far their messages could travel.

Being at such events sometimes enforces a more ethical stance for researchers – it means the researchers now face the participants they study face-to-face, and this may create social tensions and a general feeling of unease. But such participation also generates much greater insight into these communities and their everyday practices.