Marcela's Musing

Another frustrating day where I want to contribute to class, but the same people keep on monopolizing the discussion. Both classes obsessing about IRB approval with Amy's focusing more on ethics. You basically can't do anything involving observing or interviewing people without going through this arduous approval process. Beki's class project is turning into a joke since it's only observation in public spaces because of IRB. Even then, we had a big deal about getting consent forms or not. Amy brought up journalism ethics but people said it was different because it involved public figures. I write more human interest/features and interview a lot of people as part of my pieces,so took issue with that but didn't say anything. Amy wrote a very interesting paper comparing online observations to dealings with amateur artists--should they be given credit for their contributions or treated as human subjects and completely anonymized? It's considered bad form in journalism to be too dependent on anonymous sources, though I guess that differs from using pseudonyms. But with the whole emphasis in science on reproducibility, it'd be pretty easy to make up stuff with all this changing. Academics seem to have less freedom than journalists--I'm definitely in the wrong field. I feel kind of cheated that I'm prevented from practicing in my field because of the IRB. I wonder if Jason has to go through this with history research--guess it's OK to say things about dead people.