Dialogical ethics and reflections on unfinalizability: An analysis of dissenting voices in a film contest study

In this chapter I explore questions of research ethics from the perspective of dialogue theory through an analysis of a study I carried out in 2009-2010. The analysis focuses on dissenting voices among research participants. Voices, in a Bakhtinian sense, include the situated interplay of differences in language as well as discourse, ideology, themes (see Phillips 2011: 160). The dissenting voices arose in relation to an event, which was organized as part of the wider, collective research project to which my study belonged. This event took the form of a film contest in which participants submitted machinima films – that is, animated films produced in virtual spaces such as Second Life or online games such as World of Warcraft – and distributed via the Internet. The aim of my study was to gain insight into three areas of digital audiovisual media production, namely, the sorts of authorship practices emerging online, the semiosis (meaning-making) of these new kinds of texts (such as machinima films), and the communication and collaboration in online spaces (such as online communities where filmmakers create and share these new kinds of digital audiovisual texts). The production of machinima film in virtual worlds may sound like a strange activity set in a foreign, exotic space to some readers. Yet within the frames of these sorts of online spaces, communication unfolds in many ways: people meet each other, create textual practices, and constitute social networks of, and for, meaning-making, or discourse.