Theres an interesting report over at Second Life Herald about the conditions that Linden is placing on both academic use of Second Life and press reports about it. In particular, theres this condition:
Members of the press can write gener…

I’m not understanding yet what the double standards are that I’m supposed to be protesting, and where.

In fact, I think it’s generally a reporter’s responsibility to actively subvert authority which impedes freedom of the press.

That said, I don’t think LL has any intention of censoring the press, I think the clause sited is legalese intended to cover their collective Linden ass.

This is a really, really ghastly and bad idea. And if this “one person” you imagine screaming is me, I hardly think I’ll be alone. How dare *you* raise the straw man of “unregulated research” anyway? People doing academic research in academe work within accredited institutions that have their own peer review and their own review boards. A software company in California should not be overreaching into that domain and claiming they have relevance or expertise. They are a common carrier. They aspire to be “the Internet.”

To be sure, many discussions have emerged about Internet-based social research with anonymous people, you can read about various ethics guidelines in the links on this Linden document at the end, but these are all *peer-based* in academe itself — not with a commercial entity selling server space in a virtual world.

I’m going to clear my throat here and ask just what the academic credentials of Linden Lab *are* anyway. As we discussed in another post on my blog about the Lindens’ annoying use of the term “emergent behaviour” (by marketing department execs or liaisons who have no social science higher degrees), the Lindens, if they have some PhDs among them, have PhDs in stuff like computer sciences or rocketry or physics, not psychology, sociology, or anthropoly.

I’ve heard Pathfinder Linden describe himself as having “an academic appointment” — if you read his website carefully, what he had was a position as research associate related to doing tekkie stuff. He was information technology director and worked with physicians; he doesn’t have a doctorate himself. He has a B.S.
http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/john_lester_cv.html

Having computer and Internet expertise is enabling lots and lots of people to integrate with other fields and have even those with degrees higher than them become dependent on them due to their technical knowledge and gatekeeping of the servers.

I am not a person who hammers on credential issues whatsoever. I’m a big believer in non-credentialed people taking on the havens of the credentialed. Isn’t that what Second Life is supposed to be about?

But I would think that in something involving academic research, you’d want more than the level of a Torley to write the document about it for the knowledge base, and you might want someone with more degrees in the kind of research actually wanting to be done in SL than what Pathfinder has. Just sayin’.

For example, one of my close friends was doing research into liver cancer. She needed approval from the university’s ethics board AND the hospital’s ethics board, because the hospital wasn’t a teaching hospital attached to the university. I see the double test as normal on that sort of basis – it applied to most of the people I knew doing research on people.

Now… raising the standards of market research through the same screening process, that I’d LOVE to see. As for why they permit Destroy TV, apart from distracting Pix and mellowing her, who knows? Why isn’t Prok screaming about the double standards, because you’ve got to say it looks that way even to me? (Although I hope Pix and DTV are happy rubbing pixels together:) )

What is especially infuriating about this to me is the fact that they do NOT place similar restraints on corporations conducting market research in SL, quite probably using the very same research techniques. So what is the message here: if you are doing research for profit go ahead, we don’t mind, but if you are doing it to advance knowledge and you aren’t going to make money on it then we have the right to review it even though we are utterly unqualified to do so.

On the press business and asking permission to interview people and not using chat logs without permission…if that’s how they feel then why the fuck do they bless Destroy TV, which logs EVERYTHING that everyone in earshot says with their names and archives it forever.

I love Destroy TV, I really do (not as much as Pix does) but what really pisses me off are the double standards in their policies. They have had YEARS to come up with a coherent and consistent policy about this stuff and they simply refuse to do so.

I won’t do a Prok and repeat the discussions verbatim, but most of the people on the lists accept that there are limits that LL imposes to research in SL. In fact the most famous of them (as reported in Nature) seems to ignore the ToS and describes that it does… it captures names without consent. The biggest issue that most of them have is the time it takes. By the time you’ve done your institutional ethics board then the SL agreement many projects can be passed, and the researcher moved on.

There is a move from within SL’s academics to have a group of researchers appointed as an SL research ethics board, mimicking the system that is used in real life, with a Linden or two contributing as well. I can imagine at least one person screaming special interest here – but would you like totally unregulated research within SL? Is there actually something wrong with the people doing the research being regulated by others that do similar work? (Criticism of the system should also address why it’s used in every country I can find out about IRL if it’s so fundamentally flawed. I accept it is far from perfect, but we need a better system if you have suggestions.)

Giving this as a route to allowed research within SL means that the Lindens are less clearly aware of the research, even though they will be told about it, but addresses that issue of scalability rather quickly.

I actually did some research within SL in April/May 2005. Second Life was relatively tiny and it took about 6 weeks to get a reply to the “I’d like to do some research, what’s the process” email, and a further 6 weeks to get a reply confirming my research was OK. For interviewing 6 people from a standard notecard format which included a full disclosure statement and about 10 open ended questions, targetted at people that I knew it was slow to the point of almost breaking the research because of the deadlines for the work to which I was working. I managed though, but the system hasn’t changed, and the demands on the person you have to talk to have increased a little…