[Air-l] Definitions

[Nancy Baym]

>
>If "research" is something done by humanists and artists, as well as
>scientists and practitioners, is there anyone who isn't a researcher? Is
>this, in essense, the Association of Internet Anythingers?


The #1 goal of AoIR from its outset has been, and I quote from our 
founding statement of goals:

"to provide an interdisciplinary and interprofessional organization 
for promotion of scholarly and critical research into the social, 
cultural, political, economic and aesthetic aspects of the Internet."

There are millions of people who use the internet but do not take it 
as a topic of scholarly or critical inquiry (i.e. "internet 
anythingers").

A look around most any university will reveal that there are many 
ways of conducting scholarly and critical inquiry other than science 
and social science, a small sampling of which would include time 
honored traditions such as philosophy, literary analysis, and 
artistic production and performance. Recasting these modes of inquiry 
as science or dismissing them as not research do not further our 
understandings of the internet and alienate those members of AoIR who 
use them as their epistimological strategies.

Nancy