Wherin I become the agent of Big Brother, temporarily
September 16, 2008
Perhaps I could use archives of all the e-mail sent within an organization to reveal the power relationships within an org. Big Brother would be watching you.
Wherin I become the agent of Big Brother, temporarily
Big Brother is efficient enough without my help, but for a while, I was helping him be double plus good.
I said in Power networks and empowerment that I’m looking to reveal knowledge about who holds various kinds of power in an organization, over whom they exert that power, and in what way. I want to do this to empower disadvantaged workers by giving them the knowledge to exploit these networks more effectively, and to make unwanted power imbalances visible to the organization so that they can possibly be corrected.
My first thought was to use e-mail archives: people in organizations send increasingly huge amounts of e-mail to each other, and perhaps I could use archives of all the e-mail sent within an organization throughout a period of time (which would look like the Enron dataset in the end, but for any typical org). I could probably identify people with expertise; find gatekeepers and information brokers, and I could incorporate data from the org itself (org charts and personnel records) to add in hierarchical power relationships.
But upon reading the literature on e-mail archive analysis, I felt uneasy. First, I found that almost all published work in e-mail visualization and analysis had to do with helping people analyze their own personal e-mail archives, not organizational archives. Second, none of that work had been published as journal articles, but instead as conference papers. Third, I found that researchers tend not to study e-mail for very long — five years seemed to be about the maximum — and afterwards those researchers would change topics to some other form of computer mediated communication, or to another kind of work entirely. Finally, whenever I explained what I was doing to friends, they would get a queer look in their eyes and say: “Hmm. Sounds like Big Brother to me.”
I’ve since decided that all of the above is due to one thing: there are some severe and fairly insurmountable ethical issues related to informed consent and privacy that arise when you are considering working with the organizational e-mail archives, because people have a reasonable expectation that their e-mail — even work email — as private, even when companies have policies that say otherwise. People certainly expect that, yes, in certain cases my e-mail may be read by others in the company. But that’s considerably different than “my e-mail will be regularly analyzed, and things about me will be revealed by that analysis and made public, possibly against my wishes.”
Once I realized this, I realized I need to alter my research to avoid those ethical issues somehow. Big Brother is efficient enough without my help.
