Steve, It is the netiquette of this organization that creates private vs public conversations. I am merely following that norm so as to not put myself in harms way. I am acutely aware of these norms since I have studied both the implicit and explicit norms and how they have been applied. This is a subject decided by the executive board of our sponsors. Sam "Dr. Steve Eskow" <drseskow@cox.net> wrote: << The problem that started this discussion was a definition of the word "Internet".>> Why this need to find precise boundaries for a word that encompasses many realms of meaning, that includes technology and the people that use it and the uses they make of it--and much more? <that, any time a new metaphor enters the language there is the possibility of it being reified and turned into a trope. The term "cyberspace" is such a term and it started as fiction has become a trope in popular usage and is now used in scholarly writing without objectification.>> The danger of the yearning for fencing in a concept such as "cyberspace" is that turns a complex world into an object: it reifies, it says, now we know what cyberspace is and isn't. That is: it "objectifies," turns complexity into a simple object that one can hold up and point to and say: This is cyberspace, and that isn't. <case. I could be wrong, but I believe that as scholars it is our role to objectify the language of Internet research and subvert this process.>> It is our role, I believe, to resist the premature drawing of boundaries. There are the physical sciences, and their methods that rest on the mystique of "objectivity"; and there are the human sciences which begin by acknowledging the limits, perhaps the impossibility, of "objectivity," since the observer inevitably sees the phenomena under study through the lenses of a particular language and the assumptions it imposes. <interested in what we are doing. I have had conversations with some of them and they have concerns about the work being less than "objective.">> What work that "we" are doing is less than "objective"? Who are these leaders, and what is the nature of their objections? Why are they anonymous? <group. I have reason to believe that lack of objectification has created a situation in which incomplete and imperfect understanding of the many of these tropes and definitions has created the manufacturing of trolls when none exist.>> What are the reasons you have for this belief? Are they secret? <be impossible for empirically grounded scholars to cite anything associated with AOIR. I know that I am crying the "sky is falling" but I have had this conversation offline with several people not the least of which are two of the people who have been labeled trolls.>> Can you give us one or two examples of poor scholarship associated with AOIR--scholarship that is not "empirically grounded"? The issues raised here are important, but this atmosphere of secret backstage discussions is most offputting. Steve Eskow Nancy Baym wrote:
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?
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