regarded me a friend and an exciting person they enjoyed spending time with, but most would
not include me in their inner circle, something which is perfectly understandable. They were,
however, extremely helpful and eager to discuss anything that would help me with my work.
This often happened without me explicitly asking them to do this, and so, these encounters
were always enjoyable and informative.
Ethical considerations
All of my informants are anonymized throughout the thesis through different pseudonyms.
The given descriptions of their characters and personalities are correct but are at the same
time general characteristics so that you cannot recognize a person. Work, offices, and
residential areas are anonymized for protection of my informants. Hla, which is described in
chapter 3., is the only exception for this way of protecting my informants. Hla is a character
that is used as a literary instrument and is a combination of both the informant as a person, her
descriptions, and my personal experiences. Therefore, the character Hla only appears in this
particular contextualizing chapter.
As an additional measure, I created a Facebook-profile used as a researcher-profile. On this
profile, I made sure to have a picture where people that knew me would recognize me, but it
is still taken from a distance and not detailed. My friend-list was hidden in both my private
and research-profile. The profile-description informed my “Facebook-friends” that I was an
anthropologist working on social media; additionally, people connected to this profile were
informed ahead of time. This research-profile were used to follow what people wrote in status
updates, which picture they shared, what kind of things they liked and interfere with, and so
on. I intentionally followed different groups to see what kind of information was written,
shared, and discussed.
Since knowledge and communication was something I was interested in early on, especially
consideration education, I followed different health-informative groups as well as technology,
newspapers, and so on. NESH guidelines state that: “The rules of the forum may provide
some indication of the user’s reasonable expectations of publicity, i.e., the extent to which the
users expect that the information published in the forum will be public or only shared between
members.”(NESH, 2019, pp. 15-16). During my fieldwork and in the time back in Norway I
saved some screenshots of different interesting posts, pages or comments. All screenshots are
by people or posts that were aware of my work and have given their consent, or they are from
public groups and public discussions. All names are anonymized in these pictures and cannot
32