Confidentiality Issues, Back to the Future, & A. Bloom's brief

[Amy L Sheldon]

Thanks to 20th C. technology, when Allison Bloom sent her message to this
list, I experienced a major perspective shift.

Technology enabled me to read a document from someone whose words
heretofore were the object of investigation, who never spoke directly "to"
us, and who I never heard string together such long utterances (what
happened to the two word stage?). This forced me to rethink the timeless
toddler person we "knew" as "Allison". Time moves on. Accessibility to
people shifts.  Now Allison speaks to us in long, eloquent, saavy
paragraphs about our own research practices and is well-qualified to do
so.

Her post is a persuasive document which confirms the power and intimacy of
the internet medium, and its capability of playing asynchronously with
time, and with our expectations of how things "are" and who the people we
study "are". Thinking through the subject's position is important in
making policy about data in this technological environment.

Amy Sheldon